Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (62 page)

Mummy called Dr Jatoi. ‘Come back or I’ll get in a taxi and follow you,’ Mummy bluffed back at me. ‘Come then,’ I replied. I wasn’t turning back. They were afraid I was going to take down the posters, cause a scene, get people into trouble. But I wasn’t going to do that. I just wanted to see what Larkana had been looking at, what people had been watching and allowing to happen in their fear and obsequious obedience to power. Jia was passing me tissues; she had given up trying to blow my nose for me, I kept swatting her hand away. I couldn’t talk, I was gasping for air in between my howls. She patted my hands and tried to comfort me. When we got to the graveyard we were stopped by a roadblock. There had never been a roadblock at Garhi before, this was a sign of the new Zardari management. Two men, in plain clothes, came up to our window to ask who we were. ‘I’m the
Shaheed’s
daughter,’ I replied, through my window. He recognized us and let us through. In front of the
mazaar
, there were metal detectors, for Asif’s security. A ramp had been built so he could drive the car into the graveyard. It was too dangerous for him to alight from his car and walk. He was going to park at the graves and pray. I went to my father’s grave. By now I had stopped crying. Everywhere around the dead were posters of Asif Zardari, his children and his sister, Benazir’s
siasi waris
according to her ‘will’, her political heir. She has a pug nose and a headscarf, trying as much as possible to resemble Benazir. I asked for the doors to the
mazaar
to be closed. I removed the posters of the Zardaris that surrounded my father and uncle’s graves. I apologised to Papa. I left. As I got back into my car, three police vans pulled up around us. A daughter of the Bhuttos, only one of two left, a child of the dead, had frightened them into
arriving to assess the threat. Now, several months shy of the second anniversary of Benazir’s death, the government of Asif Zardari, while begging international donors and rich nations for billions of dollars to aid Pakistan, has allocated some 400 million rupees to the Zardarification of Garhi Khuda Bux. Metal detectors, four at least, are operated solely for the President’s security, rules for visitors written in bad English have been nailed to the front entrance, and two hotels are reportedly being built nearby to handle all the devotees – both foreign and local – of the Bhutto cult that power is now based on.

This is the legacy Benazir has left behind for Pakistan. This is the saprophytic culture she created and thrived in. Bloodlines, genetics, a who’s who of dynastic politics – this is all her. It is this corrupted and dangerously simple system that allows her husband to rule a country of 180 million people by virtue of having a close enough tie to the dead, to the corpses that demand – and receive – sympathy votes.

One of the four murder cases pending against Zardari in the buildup to his bid for the nation’s presidency was the case of Justice Nizam’s killing. He had been president of the High Court Bar Association at the time of his death and was killed outside his home three months before Papa.

Justice Nizam had opened a case against a property deal that was being carried out in Zardari’s name. A valuable plot of land was being sold through Zardari’s frontmen, without auction. In the public interest, Justice Nizam got a stay order against the sale and readied himself for a fight in court; he was, his brother Noor Ahmed told me, ready to take the case against Zardari to the Supreme Court.
¹

On 10 June 1996, at around two in the afternoon, Justice Nizam was on his way home for lunch. His son, Nadeem, had picked him up from the office as he often did when the family’s driver was unavailable and they drove home together. Nadeem had only recently returned home to Karachi after graduating from college abroad. As they drove towards the gates of their home, two men on a scooter drew up
alongside their car. One of the men gestured to Justice Nizam and his son. Nadeem, who was driving, stopped the car and wound down his window. The men fired into the car, killing both Justice Nizam and his young son.

The gunfire startled their family, who had been inside waiting for them before starting lunch. The justice’s brother-in-law ran out of the house as soon as he heard the shots. By the time he reached the car, the scooter had driven off. Both men were dead. Nadeem was in his mid-twenties; he had got engaged to be married a month earlier.

When I meet Noor Ahmed, Justice Nizam’s brother, the ball had already started rolling – Zardari had been magically acquitted in two of the four murder cases against him. The third, Justice Nizam’s case, had just been thrown out of the courts and Zardari declared innocent. Our case, Papa’s murder case, was next. Noor Ahmed is an elderly man. We met after Friday prayers and he wore the customary white
shalwar kameez
and white prayer cap. His wife brought us tea and cakes while we spoke. A photograph of Justice Nizam sat by his brother’s armchair. The two brothers resembled each other, both with serious, heavy-set eyes and white hair. I asked Noor Ahmed if he thought he would ever get justice. Softly, he replied, ‘I doubt it.’ He had been very brave to meet me and speak so openly about his brother’s case. I thanked Noor Ahmed for seeing me and in response he told me that he had met my father once, at the Karachi Boat Club, after Justice Nizam had been killed. ‘Murtaza came to my table and shook my hand. He offered his condolences and said, “The same people are after me.” Was he certain, I asked, that it was Zardari who was behind his brother’s murder? ‘I came to know only after his death,’ Noor Ahmed responded, switching between English and Urdu, ‘that every judge and every advocate knew that this had been done and planned by Asif Zardari.’ When he said his name, Zardari, Noor Ahmed’s body shook. ‘Even housewives know Zardari was behind this,’ he said, raising his voice. I couldn’t help but worry for him. Worry what the consequences of his outspokenness would be in such a dangerous climate. But he wasn’t afraid to speak, not now and certainly not then. ‘The only
thing I did, on the second day after the murder,’ Noor Ahmed says, his voice still calm, ‘was this – Hakim Zardari, Asif ’s father, came to condole with me. He asked me, “How did this happen?” In my heart, which was hurting, I said everyone knows it’s your
larka,
your boy, who did this. I said it to him. Did he answer? No. He just kept quiet. What could he say?’ Noor Ahmed’s wife, who is sitting quietly next to me, breaks the tension in the room. Both of us are getting emotional now, so she interjects. ‘You look like Benazir,’ she says to me. I laugh, not knowing what else to do. Sensing my discomfort, she adds, as if to console me, ‘It’s in God’s hands.’ Noor Ahmed, who had been sitting quietly with his hands folded in his lap, threw out a palm and swatted the air. ‘What’s all this
God-shod
business?’ he says, almost to himself. ‘Her whole family has been killed!’ Before I leave, as I am thanking him for his time and for seeing me and talking to me at a time when most might find it sensible not to, Noor Ahmed smiles at me and asks, ‘What’s the
faida
,
beti
, of writing this book of yours?’ What’s the benefit, he asks, and calls me daughter. Memory, I tell him.

The day Zardari was acquitted of my father’s murder, I was halfway around the world. I was on assignment in Cuba to cover the past and present of the revolution in the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary of Castro’s takeover. I knew it was coming. Even when he had been incarcerated for the murders and myriad cases against him, Zardari hardly spent time in jail – a serious, mortally ill heart patient at the time, he had himself transferred to a luxury suite at his friend’s private hospital in Karachi. That doctor friend was rewarded with the cabinet post of Minister of Oil and Petroleum after his chum miraculously rid himself of his heart problems and ascended to the highest post in the land.

I had been visiting hospitals and schools, meeting officials and travelling the country. I was away from email. I had disconnected myself from Pakistan intentionally. I got a phone call one afternoon in Havana. It was April and the weather was tropical and humid. I was sitting on my hotel bed in front of a balcony overlooking Calle Obispo trying to cool down from an afternoon spent walking between
ministries on the Malecon. It was Hameed, calling from home. ‘I’m sorry,
baba
,’ he said. He didn’t have to explain why. Zardari had bypassed the courts’ standard procedures to have himself absolved of my father’s murder. There was no point in appealing, he was going to be President legally or illegally. It was typical of the way he oper-ated; justice was always the first casualty.

On 20 September 2008, on the twelfth anniversary of Papa’s death, Asif Zardari took his oath as President of Pakistan. The ceremony had been scheduled for the day before, the 19th, but had been moved on the orders of the new President, who rescheduled his big day for Saturday, Papa’s
barsi
. As he stood in front of parliament, which had voted him into the post almost unanimously (in the same highly democratic way that General Musharraf was ‘elected’ President), he paused in his speech and asked for a moment of silence to mark the occasion of his brother-in-law’s death. My blood froze. It was as if he was taunting us. But that would be nothing compared to what would follow. On Zardari’s first Pakistan Day as President he would honour Shoaib Suddle, one of the most senior police officers present at the scene when my father was killed. Suddle was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz, a national medal in recognition of his services to the people of Pakistan. Shoaib Suddle was then made the head of the Federal Investigation Bureau.

The MQM has forgotten Operation Clean-Up and is now an enthusiastic coalition partner in Zardari’s government. Aftaf Hussain, still living in London, and Zardari have become firm friends and often pose menacingly for photographs holding hands and embracing each other for the cameras.

The Sindh Assembly, chaired by Nisar Khuro, in the middle of the state’s war against Swat and the northern territories that had made close to 3 million Pakistanis homeless, marked the death of the pop star Michael Jackson in the summer of 2009 with a minute of silence. Nothing was said (or not said with a moment of silence) for the many
killed by American drones and the Pakistan Army’s bombarment of the NWFP.

The National Assembly, meanwhile, used the summer to quietly pass the Cyber Crime bill which makes ‘spoofing’, ‘satirizing’ or ‘character assassinating’ the President a crime punishable by imprisonment – anywhere from six months to fourteen years (for the very funny spoofer, I suppose).

It has been a trial writing this book about my family. Through letters and notebooks, photographs and interviews, it has opened them up to me and made them, all my ghosts, whole. But by virtue of what I now know about them, I must close them off. I must take my leave and remove myself from their shadows, their glories, their mistakes and their violent, extraordinary lives. There is just one member I cannot leave behind, Papa. I started this book with the intention of making my peace with my father, of finally honouring my last promise to him – to tell his story – and then, to finally say goodbye. But I can’t. He especially became whole to me, flawed and ordinarily human, unlike the immortal being I revered as a child growing up. His choices, remarkable and dangerous, honourable and foolish, are not mine but I lived them. I have also lived, since his death, with an incomplete picture of my father as a murdered man – holding vigil for him daily in my thoughts, in my steps and travels, in my public moments and in my eyes blinking him in every morning and closing him off to sleep every night. I had forgotten, in these fourteen years, that he was once alive and, for a brief while, only mine. He seems very alive to me now. It is too sweet a thought to push aside, so I delay the thought of farewells, if only for a little while longer.