Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (59 page)

‘Murtaza had another cardiac arrest in the operating theatre,’ Dr Ghaffar Jatoi remembers. ‘We had to open the chest to try and resuscitate him by massaging his heart, but we couldn’t bring him back this time.’

Pitu came into the room; it was close to midnight. I don’t know if he told Mummy first or if he told us together. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was crying. ‘Your father will make history,’ he said to me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I didn’t want to understand what he was saying. ‘He’s going to be fine,’ I said, not veering from my mantra. Pitu shook his head. ‘He’s going to survive, you said he was responding,’ I continued. For a moment all the anger in my my heart, reaching breaking point, was directed at Pitu, he lied to me I remember thinking. I wanted to be distracted, I wanted to scream and shout and fight
with Pitu, anything but receive the news he was trying to give me. No, he said. I’m sorry, Fati, he’s gone.

I don’t know how we made it from the waiting room to the operating theatre. I think I was being supported and held. I think Mummy was holding me. Papa lay in the middle of the room, a thin white sheet pulled up to his collarbone. His face had been bandaged with white gauze, holding his jaw shut. His eyes were closed. There was dried blood congealing on his face and flecks of blood in his hair. Papa’s hair was always perfectly combed, the only time it ever looked that messy was when he woke up in the mornings. I kneeled on the floor next to his body. He wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be. There had to be some mistake. I kissed my father’s face, his cheeks, his lips, his nose, his chin, over and over again. I didn’t kiss his eyes; a Lebanese superstition says you will be separated from anyone whose eyelids your lips brush. I didn’t want to be separated from Papa. I cried from the very rawest part of me, with my lungs and my soul fighting for air. I wanted to black out, to fall and awake when this was all over. I couldn’t say goodbye to my father, I couldn’t accept that he had left me. My throat burnt and my body shook. His face was cold. Why was his face already cold? The doctors and Mummy lifted me up from the floor and walked me out of the room. They couldn’t say anything. Everyone around me was crying. There were no words of comfort that came easily to anyone, it was too large a shock.

Mummy was going to stay behind while the autopsy was being carried out. She would return home with Papa’s body. She asked Pitu’s wife to take me home.

As we left the hospital there were cameras everywhere; flashes went off in my face. I was wailing with pain, my eyes were sealed shut and my face wet with tears. My whole body ached as I cried. The cameras surrounded the car as we drove off and the cameramen got their pictures of me. Mir Murtaza Bhutto was dead. I left the hospital as walking proof of his passing.

There were still police everywhere. I saw officers lined along Clifton road as we reached home. Sofi had put Zulfi to sleep and had waited up for us in the lobby downstairs. She rushed to me as I entered the
house, assuming that I had returned because everything was fine. How was Papa? Where was Papa? It took me a moment to understand that Sofi thought he was alive. They killed him. ‘He’s dead, they killed him Sofi,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’ I felt like I had blood in my mouth.

I should have been with Papa. Why hadn’t I gone with him to Surjani Town? Why did I listen when he told me I couldn’t join him? I climbed the heavy wooden staircase and walked into Zulfi’s bedroom. The lights were on but he was fast asleep in bed, he had no idea what had happened in the night as he slept. I lay down next to him, wanting to protect him. I knew I couldn’t live without Papa. I finally understood all those bedtime whispers, finally knew what he meant when he said he’d die if anything happened to me. I had to die too. I felt that my soul had been ripped apart, like someone had taken my heart out of my body and emptied everything living inside me. I cried silently, not wanting to wake Zulfi, until I thought my throat would close. I got up and went into the living room and picked up the phone. I started to call those we knew around the world to tell them what had happened.

Sabeen left Mideast after midnight when the news that Papa had died filtered out. ‘We were afraid there would be mayhem,’ she remembers. ‘And so we returned home to gather our strength as the search for my father continued.’

Aneed was on the road when the news broke. ‘After your father died,’ he told me, ‘and we still had no news about my father, everyone became more worried. The anxiety heightened. Uncle Ghaffar was asking us, “Where’s Ashiq? Why can’t we find him?” We just didn’t know.’

At Jinnah hospital Zahid and Aneed saw Asghar, our bearer, who had been shot in the arm. ‘He was crying and he said to me in Sindhi, “They killed my father and they’ve killed yours too.” Aneed remembers clenching his teeth. ‘I told him not to say things like that but Asghar said it again and told me he’d seen it all with his own eyes.
I raised my voice and told Asghar more strongly not to say that, but after Asghar and I spoke I knew my father was dead. As they were leaving Jinnah, without any new information on Ashiq’s whereabouts, Aneed lashed out at some police officers stationed at the hospital. He grabbed one of them. ‘You’re murderers!’ he screamed, close to tears, until his uncle Zahid pulled him away and calmed him down.

At the Jatoi home, family members were taking up positions in the living room, kitchen and garden comforting each other and trying to gather as much information as they could. Sabeen took out her father’s diary in which he had written – on that very day – ‘What happens to me doesn’t matter, what matters is how I behave when it is happening to me. Cool mind, clean hands, warm heart.’

Sabeen paused after reading her father’s ominous words and assured herself, like I had earlier, that everything was going to be OK. After finding the phone numbers of various friends and contacts, Sabeen started calling people in Ashiq’s diary and asking them if they had any information about her father. ‘One family friend called me back and told me he had heard through reliable sources that Ashiq Jatoi was alive but under arrest.’ Sabeen put down the phone, joyously relieved, and ran to tell the family the good news. But the friend had been mistaken. He had been told that Asif Jatoi, the family driver, was alive and under arrest, and assuming that there had to have been only one Jatoi with Murtaza Bhutto that night reported the incorrect news to Sabeen. It was a cruel mistake. Sabeen’s relief was short-lived.

Aneed and Zahid had returned to Mideast to make sure that their family had left and to make some phone calls before continuing with their search. Finding no new answers at Mideast, they were preparing to go back to Jinnah hospital one more time and sweep the emergency wing to see if Ashiq had been brought in. ‘I sat in the back seat of the car,’ Aneed says slowly. ‘I don’t even remember whose car it was.
Chacha
Zahid was next to me and a cousin of mine was in front. As the car pulled out of Mideast, my cousin turned to my uncle and me and said, “I’m sorry, he’s gone.”’ The call that directed the Jatois back to Jinnah hospital had been taken by Aneed’s cousin. They were going to search for Ashiq, but in the morgue, not the emergency
room. After many hours of not knowing, the dreaded call had come. Ashiq was dead.

Aneed and Zahid reached Jinnah and found the hospital in pitch darkness. Karachi’s Electrical Supply Company had shut off the electricity across parts of the city. They identified Ashiq’s body in the darkness and waited as his post-mortem was carried out by candlelight. ‘No one knew where Ashiq’s body was until it reached the mortuary,’
¹⁰
Zahid tells me thirteen years later. It was two in the morning, six hours after Ashiq had been shot in the back of the head.

Zahid stayed back to take care of the arrangements necessary for Ashiq’s body to be released and Aneed drove home alone. They reached the Jatoi house minutes short of each other and Sabeen heard the sound of the gate opening and cars entering the driveway. ‘I was so happy – I ran to Aneed and
chacha
Zahid to tell them the good news. “He’s alive! He’s alive!” I said to them. “We got a call – he’s only been arrested!” And then I saw
chacha
Zahid put his hands to his face. He was crying and shaking and he said, “I’ve just seen his body, he’s dead
beta.
He’s gone.” Somebody held me. Everything afterwards is a blur.’

Somewhere around three in the morning, while Mummy was still at the hospital waiting for the autopsy to be completed and for Papa’s body to be released so she could bring him home, the Prime Minister came to Mideast. Benazir flew from the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad to Karachi. She stopped at her home and then came to the hospital barefeet – a sign, people assumed, of her grief. She was accompanied by Wajid Durrani, one of the shooters that night who is seen saluting her in many of photographs taken of her arrival, and by Shoaib Suddle, another of the men who participated in her brother’s assassination. Abdullah Shah, the Chief Minister of Sindh, and another accused in the murder, would also be by Benazir’s side at Mideast.

Benazir, my Wadi, would say, years later in an interview broadcast days before her own death, that it was Murtaza’s own fault that he was killed. She changed the facts about his injuries, rambling incoherently, claiming he was shot in the back by his own guards, that his guards opened fire on the police, that Murtaza had a death wish. I did not see Benazir until after Papa’s burial. Every time she tried to
drive to Al Murtaza house where Papa’s funeral was held her car was attacked by Larkana locals, who pelted her car with stones and shoes. In the days after we laid Papa to rest in Garhi Khuda Bux, Benazir brought a case against Mummy in the courts. Mummy had refused to go into
iddat,
an obscure Islamic prescription for widows, who must remain cloistered in their homes for forty days and forty nights, not meeting any outsiders or leaving the confines of their rooms. Mummy, who was only thirty-four then, was wasting away with her grief and loss. She lost a lot of weight and drove herself ragged making sure our police complaints and court cases were filed. ‘You know why your aunt wants me to do
iddat
?’ Mummy, in a rare livid moment, cried. ‘So there’s no one there to file the cases against the men who killed your father. So he disappears and his murderers disappear with him.’ The
iddat
case against Mummy, accusing her of violating Islam, was filed by a Larkana ally of Benazir’s. Many years later, some five at least, the man who filed the case – which was summarily thrown out by the courts – left Benazir’s PPP and came to Mummy and apologized. But Benazir’s war against my mother and my father’s memory raged on. Towards the start of the New Year, after Mummy had joined Papa’s fledgling party and began to consider the party pleas for her to run as chairperson of the party so that they might contest their first national election, we watched Benazir, since deposed from power and soon to be rejected by the 1997 electorate which brought in her then enemies the PML with a big majority, give an interview to the famous and respected Lebanese journalist Giselle Khoury. Wadi called Mummy a ‘bellydancer’ who came from the ‘backwoods of Lebanon’ and repeated the vulgar claims she had made in the first Sindh Council meeting after Papa’s murder, wildly insisting that Murtaza hadn’t been sleeping with his wife and had only married her as a maid to run his house and rear his children. Mummy, so similar to Papa in style and wit, kept her cool and responded, privately of course, ‘If Benazir knew what was happening in Mir’s bedroom, how come she claims not to know what was happening outside his house on the night of 20 September?’ After Papa was killed, I never saw that old Wadi again. She was gone.