Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (61 page)

We went through the application process for boarding schools
abroad. We dealt with new administrations, new fees and new time-tables. We would send him after the twelfth anniversary of our father’s death. It was not going to be easy. Zulfi, eight years younger than me, had always been the glue that held our small family together. Mir Ali, our little brother whom Mummy adopted when he was one month old, was the boisterous one. A year after adopting Mir Ali from the Edhi Orphanage in Karachi, Mummy said that little Miroo was her idea of justice. Revenge was never how she saw it. After pure blood is spilt, Mummy said, you can’t restore the balance by spilling dirty blood, that of the killers. You can only restore the balance of loss and justice by saving another pure life. Mir Ali is a hurricane; you get caught up in his movement. I am loud and opinionated. But Zulfi, he isn’t as obvious as we are. Far more unassuming, he speaks in a gentle voice and carries a big stick. My mother and I spoke quietly about our relief that he would soon be away from Karachi, that he would be safe somewhere far away.

But we didn’t imagine how devastated we’d be by the silence when that gentle voice left the house. We feel it every day when Mummy and I are having lunch and there’s no one sitting across the table from us who finishes all the cucumbers and tomatoes before anyone else has got to the salad. We notice it when a friend comes over and asks where Zulfi is. ‘Gone,’ answers Mir Ali, tilting his head as he says the word. We didn’t realize that a gulf caused by Zulfi’s absence would grow between each one of us, that we would seek him in our conversations and, not finding him nearby, retreat.

The closest we came to each other, Zardari and I, was at Benazir’s funeral in December 2007.

It was election season, once again. I had been canvassing door-to-door in Larkana, where Mummy was running against the might of the PPP, trying to get women out to vote. At some point in the evening, Mummy called me. ‘Benazir’s been hurt. They’re saying something happened at a rally,’ she said. I felt my breath slow down. Not
again. I asked if she was alive. I think so, Mummy replied. I carried on working. It was maybe forty minutes later when one of the men with me, one of Papa’s old political workers, Qadir, entered the house I was visiting and whispered to me, ‘I think we should go home.’ No, I answered loudly, in a bit. Qadir tried again, ‘
Bibi
, I think it might be good if we went home.’

I got into the car and as soon as the doors shut, Qadir turned to me and said, ‘Wadi has been killed.’ I felt a portion of my brain register what he had said,
Wadi?
I hadn’t heard anyone call her Wadi in a long time; it had been years since I used the name myself. Qadir made me sit in the middle of the car, with two other people on either side of me, next to the windows. I didn’t realize initially what he was doing. I was stuck on Wadi. When I understood, I got up and squeezed over to return to my seat by the left-hand window. This was ridiculous, I told Qadir, they can’t kill another Bhutto tonight.

But my words rang in my ears. I had heard my father say a variation of the same thought:
they
couldn’t kill another Bhutto, they wouldn’t dare. I tried calling Zulfi and Mummy, who were also on the road, their phones weren’t responding. I called Sabeen, who was with us in Larkana, working around the clock as Mummy’s election agent – a major domo on the day and something of a campaign manager until then. No line to her either. It hit me then, they could. They could kill more of us. Every decade someone in this family, in this immediate family of Zulfikar and Nusrat’s children, is killed.

I was the last one to reach Al Murtaza. Mummy and Zulfi and Mir Ali and Sabeen were already there. Once I saw them I leapt out of the car and ran to hug them. It seemed strange. I was sad for my family. I was sad for my country. I was sad for Zulfikar. But the news of my aunt’s death didn’t fully hit me till two hours later. I was walking down the corridors of the house, cleaning up. A strange reaction for me in normal circumstances. I had tidied up my room, checked on Zulfi’s and rearranged the clutter in the hallways. I could see Sabeen through the open door of the drawing room. She looked at me and furrowed her brow. What are you doing? I smiled and waved to her. I was cleaning up, for Papa. Then Zulfi, tall and sombre,
walked towards me. ‘What are you doing, Fati?’ I hugged him and patted his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ I replied madly, ‘everything is going to be OK now. Papa’s coming back.’ Once the words left my mouth and I saw my brother’s face, I heard what I had said. He wasn’t coming back. Nothing was ever going to bring my father back. I broke down. I cried for the next five days. By the time I had drained myself of tears I had cried for everyone. For Papa, for my grandfather, for Shah, for Joonam, for my Wadi whom I had lost long before that winter.

I saw Zardari the night Benazir’s body was brought from Rawalpindi, where she was killed, to Garhi Khuda Bux. Mummy, Zulfi and I made the forty-minute drive from our house in Larkana to Naudero. The house had once belonged to Shahnawaz but Benazir took it over after his murder and used it as a base to build her political platform. I wondered if Asif would be there; if he’d have the courage to show his face at the funeral of another Bhutto. I reminded myself that he was her husband, he was sure to be present. I didn’t think he’d be able to face us, and I didn’t know how I would react to him. I felt as if my heart would explode in grief and anger – that I would break inside.

In the end, it was only a moment. We stood by the door, waiting for the coffin to arrive, and he walked in, agitated. Zardari was shorter than I remembered. Barely taller than me and I’m not tall. And he was shaking. Someone, it could have been anyone, there were so many people pushing in through the doors, brushed past him and he jerked, his whole body quivering. He’s scared, I thought. He can’t wait to get out of here. It gave me no solace.

Zulfi decided he would be present at Benazir’s burial. He was a family member, the only male alive. Someone from the family should be there to bury her, he said. The other men around the funeral were all political assistants, enablers, criminals, petty distributors and thieves. She can’t be buried by them, he reasoned. I cried and tried to threaten my brother. I didn’t want him near her, I didn’t want him standing in the six-foot-deep pit with Zardari, with the man many believe was responsible for my father’s murder. People were saying the same sort
of thing now, about this death. ‘It’s too dangerous, are you crazy?’ I exploded. It would be insane, I whimpered.

In the end, Zulfi was more dignified, more gracious than I could ever have been. He placed Benazir’s body in the ground, said the
fateha
prayers and walked to our father’s grave. He bent down and kissed the cloth and old rose petals that covered Papa’s grave. And then he left. Zulfi was alone that day. He was only seventeen then.

Two months later I had another encounter with Asif Zardari. It was after the February 2008 elections had been rigged and won, after he had given a press conference on the third day after his wife’s death, the most important day in Muslim mourning, after he had farcically changed his children’s last names from Zardari to Bhutto and announced his hostile takeover of Benazir’s PPP and his intention to be the last ‘Bhutto’ left standing. It was longer than the first encounter and it burnt me; every fibre of my being and feeling was scorched by it.

A French film crew had come to Karachi to do a story on the family dynasty and in my new role as black sheep and naysayer to hereditary politics, I was to give them the opposing viewpoint. The crew, two women and their Pakistani fixer, asked me to take them to the spot where Papa had been killed. It’s a ten-second walk from our front door and I’d done it in the past for journalists. I stood by the spot, directly in front of the police station, where my father was shot and as I spoke to the cameras I noticed a white Pajero jeep standing a few feet away from me. There were three men inside and Benazir stickers on the windows. I stopped talking. I was shaken. I went to Hameed, one of the men who guard Zulfi and me and asked him to go and find out who the car belonged to and why it was there. I asked the French women to give me a moment. I was upset. I didn’t want to lose my composure, not with two journalists around, not with cameras and story-making potential present. Hameed spoke to the men and they got out of the car; that surprised me. Why hadn’t they just left? They held their hands up, in some sort of placatory gesture, but stood their ground. It was taking more heat, this moment, than I had expected. After a few minutes the men drove away. ‘What happened?
Who were they?’ I asked Hameed in Urdu, hoping the journalists would not notice my voice shaking. ‘It’s Zardari,’ came the reply. ‘He’s at the British consulate next door. They’re his security.’ They told Hameed that they weren’t there to make trouble, hence the hands, but that they had to patrol the area for Zardari’s safety. Hameed asked them to patrol elsewhere and they left. It was a Kafkaesque irony.

Here I was, standing where my father was murdered, and the man who I believe was in part responsible for the execution was across the road from me, being received diplomatically. I felt my knees buckle. I sat down on the kerb. ‘What’s wrong?’ one of the French women asked me. ‘Nothing,’ I mumbled. I carried on from where I had left off, talking about my father’s murder, taking them through it step by step. Then I noticed another car, a different one this time, but also white, across the street. Hameed stepped closer to me and bent down. ‘Shahid Hayat is in the car. He’s providing the police security for Asif’s Karachi visit,’ he whispered. Shahid Hayat was one of the policemen present that night, the one who shot himself in the thigh, another police officer we accused and who protested his innocence. And there they were, reunited. In broad daylight, driving up and down Clifton road in front of me. All of a sudden, those distant threats became very clear and very close. We were in danger. I stood up and continued talking. I spoke slowly, so we would have to stand there longer. I told the French filmmakers what was happening. I wasn’t going to leave. Minutes passed, a quarter of an hour, then half an hour. I had nothing left to say. I walked back the few feet to my house, shaken.

The fear, the palpable, obvious fear remained with me. I thought of it when I returned to my room to write at night. I thought about it when my phone rang, when people emailed me. The feeling of being watched eventually settled down and I became used to the idea that things had changed. That we were on the defensive, that we had enemies in the highest places, once again.

In April, two months after that day, I was in Larkana to attend the twenty-ninth anniversary of my grandfather’s death. Asif and Benazir’s PPP had taken to marking the occasion not on the 4th,
the correct date, but the night before. They would erect tents and bus people in. Their public meeting started shortly before midnight and they ensured their numbers, made up of strangers, not locals, were visible even in the dark. It was the night of the 2nd and we were at the dinner table: my family, our family friend and lawyer Omar, and Dr Jatoi, an old friend of Papa’s and a loyal party worker. I made an off-the-cuff comment about not wanting to go to the
mazaar
at Garhi Khuda Bux. I hadn’t been since Benazir’s funeral and the cult of personality worship that had started then could only have spiralled. I wasn’t prepared to see my father’s graveyard turned into a fairground. Mummy nodded as I spoke and said, ‘I think maybe you shouldn’t come.’ I stopped mid-rant. ‘Why?’ I asked, has it got worse, more kitschy? More hawkers selling food and snacks outside? ‘No,’ Mummy shook her head. Were there more posters of her put up? I had always taken them down; it was a graveyard not a shrine and some things, some places, are not campaign grounds. Mummy spoke. ‘Yes, there are posters, but they’re not of Benazir.’ ‘Who?’ I asked, putting down my fork. ‘They’ve put his posters up,’ Mummy said, leaning towards me, taking my hand to soften the blow. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. His posters? Zardari’s? ‘Are they near my father’s grave?’ I asked, my voice trembling and tears running down my face. Mummy didn’t answer. Omar got out of his chair and came over to mine. I didn’t want to be steadied, didn’t want to be hugged. I leapt out of my chair and went outside. ‘Get the car,’ I said, I don’t remember to whom. I was crying, hard. Mummy and Omar were trying to convince me to go back inside the house. I was upset, they said, come back and we’ll talk it about it. I didn’t. I got into the car. Dr Jatoi and his twenty-year-old daughter Jia jumped in with me, unsure of what I was going to do. The
mazaar
was being prepared for the next day’s PPP jamboree. Prime Minister Gilani was coming. Zardari was going to put in a rare public appearance; he saved most of his energy for foreign trips. A local pundit estimated, a year into Zardari’s presidency, that Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to what is now lugubriously called ‘Af-Pak’, had spent more days in Pakistan than the President himself.
Thousands of security forces, policemen and Rangers had been brought into the city to protect the VIPs.

The driver drove towards Garhi. ‘
Bibi
,’ he said to me, trying to be heard over my tears, ‘why don’t we go tomorrow, it’s not a good idea to go now.’ I was crying so hard I could barely speak. ‘Take me or I’ll walk,’ I threatened. It works every time. I can’t walk, the
mazaar
is too far, the roads unlit, and I have a useless sense of direction. But I was angry and my bluff held.