Benazir Bhutto's last meeting with her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

They killed my father in the early morning hours of April 4, 1979, inside Rawalpindi Central Jail. Imprisoned with my mother a few miles away in a deserted police training camp at Sihala, I felt the moment of my father’s death. Despite the Valiums my mother had given me to try and get through

the agonising night, I suddenly sat bolt-upright in bed at 2.00 am. ‘No!’ the scream burst through the knots in my throat. ‘No!’ I couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to breathe. Papa! Papa! I felt cold, so cold, in spite of the heat, and couldn’t stop shaking. There was nothing my mother and I could say to

console each other. Somehow the hours passed as we huddled together in the bare police quarters. We were ready at dawn to accompany my father’s body to our ancestral family graveyard.

‘I am in Iddat and can’t receive outsiders. You talk to him,’ my mother said dully when the jailer arrived. She was beginning a widow’s four months and ten days of seclusion from strangers.

I walked into the cracked cement-floored front room that was supposed to serve as our sitting room. It stank of mildew and rot.

‘We are ready to leave with the Prime Minister,’ I told the junior jailer

standing nervously before me.

‘They have already taken him to be buried,’ he said.

I felt as if he had struck me. ‘Without his family?’ I asked bitterly. ‘Even

the criminals in the military regime know that it is our family’s religious

obligation to accompany his body, to recite the prayers for the dead, to see

his face before burial. We applied to the jail superintendent…’

‘They have taken him,’ he interrupted.

‘Taken him where?’

The jailer was silent.

‘It was very peaceful,’ he finally replied. ‘I have brought what was left.’

He handed me one by one the pitiful items from my father’s death cell:

my father’s shalwar khameez, the long shirt and loose trousers he’d worn to

the end, refusing as a political prisoner to wear the uniform of a condemned

criminal; the tiffin box for food that he had refused for the last ten days;

the roll of bedding they had allowed him only after the broken wires of his

cot had lacerated his back; his drinking cup…

‘Where is his ring?’ I managed to ask the jailer.

‘Did he have a ring?’

I watched him make a great show of fishing through his bag, through

his pockets. Finally he handed me my father’s ring, which towards the end

had regularly slipped off his emaciated fingers.

‘Peaceful. It was very peaceful,’ he kept muttering.

How could a hanging be peaceful?

Basheer and Ibrahim, our family bearers who had come to prison with

us because the authorities did not provide us with food, came into the

room. Basheer’s face went white when he recognised my father’s clothes.

‘Ya Allah! Ya Allah! They’ve killed Sahib! They’ve killed him!’ he

screamed. Before we could stop him, Basheer grabbed a can of petrol and

doused himself with it, preparing to set himself aflame. My mother had to

rush out to prevent his self-immolation.

I stood in a daze, not believing what had happened to my father, not

wanting to. It was just not possible that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the first Prime

Minister of Pakistan to be elected directly by the people, was dead. Where

there had been repression under the Generals who had ruled Pakistan since

its birth in 1947, my father had been the first to bring democracy. Where

the people had lived as they had for centuries at the mercy of their tribal

chiefs and landlords, he had installed Pakistan’s first constitution to guarantee

legal protection and civil rights. Where the people had had to resort

to violence and bloodshed to unseat the Generals, he had guaranteed a

Parliamentary system of civilian government and elections every five years.

No. It was not possible. ‘Jiye Bhutto! Long live Bhutto!’ millions had

cheered when he became the first politician ever to visit the most forlorn

and remote villages of Pakistan. When his Pakistan People’s Party was

voted into office, my father had started his modernisation programmes,

redistributing the land held for generations by the feudal few among the

many poor, educating the millions held down by ignorance, nationalising

the country’s major industries, guaranteeing minimum wages, job security, and forbidding discrimination against women and minorities. The sixyears of his government had brought light to a country steeped in stagnant

darkness–until the dawn of July 5, 1977.Zia ul-Haq. My father’s supposedly loyal army Chief-of-Staff. The General

who had sent his soldiers in the middle of the night to overthrow my

father and take over the country by force. Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator

who had subsequently failed to crush my father’s following in spite of all

his guns and tear gas and Martial Law regulations, who had failed to break

my father’s spirit despite his isolation in a death cell. Zia ul-Haq, the desperate

General who had just sent my father to his death. Zia ul-Haq. The

General who would ruthlessly rule Pakistan for the next nine years.

I stood numbly in front of the junior jailer, holding the small bundle that

was all that was left of my father. The scent of his cologne was still on his

clothes, the scent of Shalimar. I hugged his shalwar to me, suddenly remembering

Kathleen Kennedy who had worn her father’s parka at Radcliffe

long after the Senator had been killed. Our two families had always been

compared in terms of politics. Now, we had a new and dreadful bond. That

night, and for many other nights, I too tried to keep my father near me by

sleeping with his shirt under my pillow.

I felt completely empty, that my life had shattered. For almost two years,

I had done nothing but fight the trumped-up charges brought against my

father by Zia’s military regime. I had worked with the Pakistan People’s

Party towards the elections Zia had promised at the time of the coup, then

cancelled in the face of our impending victory. I had been arrested six times

by the military regime and repeatedly forbidden by the Martial Law authorities

to set foot in Karachi and Lahore. So had my mother. As acting chairperson

of the PPP during my father’s imprisonment, she had been detained

eight times. We had spent the last six weeks under detention in Sihala, the

six months before that under detention in Rawalpindi. Yet not until yesterday

had I allowed myself to believe that General Zia would actually assassinate

my father.

Who would break the news to my younger brothers who were fighting

my father’s death sentence from political exile in London? And who would

tell my sister Sanam who was just finishing her final year at Harvard? I

was especially worried about Sanam. She had never been political. Yet she

had been dragged into the tragedy with all of us. Was she alone now? I

prayed she wouldn’t do anything foolish.

I felt as if my body was literally being torn apart. How could I go on? In

spite of our efforts, we had failed to keep my father alive. I felt so alone. I

just felt so alone. ‘What will I do without you to help me?’ I had asked him

in his death cell. I needed his political advice. For all that I held degrees in

government from Harvard and Oxford, I was not a politician. But what

could he say? He had shrugged helplessly.

I had seen my father for the last time the day before. The pain of that

meeting was close to unbearable. No one had told him he was to be executed

early the next morning. No one had told the world leaders who had officially

asked the military regime for clemency, among them Jimmy Carter,

Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev, Pope John Paul II, Indira Gandhi,

and many others from the entire Muslim spectrum, Saudi Arabia, the

Emirates, Syria. Certainly none of the cowards in Zia’s regime had announced

the date of my father’s execution to the country, for they feared

the people’s reaction to their Prime Minister’s murder. Only my mother

and I knew. And that, by accident and deduction.

I had been lying on my army cot in the early morning of April 2 when

my mother suddenly came into the room. ‘Pinkie,’ she said, calling me by

my family nickname, but in a tone that immediately made my body go rigid.

‘There are army officers outside saying that both of us should go to see your

father today. What does that mean?’

I knew exactly what it meant. So did she. But neither of us could bear to

admit it. This was my mother’s visiting day, allowed her once a week. Mine

was scheduled for later in the week. That they wanted both of us to go

could only mean that this was to be the last visit. Zia was about to kill my

father.

My mind raced. We had to get the word out, to send a last call to the international

community and to the people. Time had run out. ‘Tell them I’m

not well,’ I said to my mother hastily. ‘Say that if it is the last meeting then,

of course, I will come, but if it is not, we will go tomorrow.’ While my

mother went to speak to the guards, I quickly broke open a message I had

already wrapped. I wrote a new one. ‘I think they are calling us for our last

meeting,’ I scribbled furiously to a friend on the outside, hoping she would

alert the party’s leaders, who in turn would inform the diplomatic corps

and mobilise the people. The people were our last hope.

‘Take this immediately to Yasmin,’ I told Ibrahim, our loyal servant,

knowing we were taking a great risk. There wasn’t time for him to wait

for a sympathetic or lackadaisical guard to come on duty. He could be

searched and followed. He wouldn’t be able to take the normal precautions.

The danger was enormous, but so were the stakes. ‘Go, Ibrahim, go!’ I

urged him. ‘Tell the guards you’re fetching medicine for me!’ And off he

ran.

I looked out of the window to see the Martial Law contingent consulting

with each other, then transmitting the message that I was ill on their wireless

set and waiting to receive information back. In the confusion, Ibrahim

reached the gate. ‘I have to get medicine for Benazir Sahiba quickly.

Quickly!’ he said to the guards who had overheard the talk of my bad

health. Miraculously, they let Ibrahim through, barely five minutes after

my mother had first come to me in the bedroom. My hands would not stop

trembling. I had no idea if the message would be safely delivered.

Outside the window, the wireless sets crackled. ‘Because your daughter

is not feeling well, you can make the visit tomorrow,’ the authorities finally

told my mother. We had gained another twenty-four hours of life for my

father. But when the compound gates were sealed immediately after Ibrahim

had fled, we knew something terribly ominous was about to occur.

Fight. We had to fight. But how? I felt so powerless, locked inside the

stockade while the moments towards my father’s death ticked by. Would

the message get through? Would the people rise up in spite of the guns

and bayonets they had faced since the coup? And who would lead them?

Many of the leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party were in jail. So were

thousands of our supporters, including, for the first time in Pakistan’s history,

women. Countless others had been tear-gassed and flogged just for

mentioning my father’s name, the numbers of lashes to be administered

painted on their half-naked bodies. Would the people heed this last desperate

call? Would they even hear it?

At 8.15 pm my mother and I tuned in to the BBC Asia report on our radio.

Every muscle in my body was rigid. I sat expectantly forward as the BBC

reported that I had sent a message from prison that tomorrow, April 3, was

to be the last meeting with my father. The message had got through! I

waited for the BBC announcement of our call to the people to rise in protest.

There was none. Instead, the BBC went on to report that

there was no confirmation of the news from the jail superintendent. ‘She’s

panicked,’ it quoted one of my father’s former ministers as saying. My

mother and I couldn’t even look at each other. Our last hope had died.

A speeding jeep. Crowds frozen in fear behind security forces, not knowing

the fate of their Prime Minister. Prison gates hastily opened and closed.

My mother and I being searched again by jail matrons, first leaving our

own prison in Sihala, then again when we arrived at the jail in Rawalpindi.

‘Why are you both here?’ my father says from inside the inferno of his

cell.

My mother doesn’t answer.

‘Is this the last meeting?’ he asks.

My mother cannot bear to answer.

‘I think so,’ I say.

He calls for the jail superintendent who is standing by. They never leave

us alone with Papa.

‘Is this the last meeting?’ my father asks him.

‘Yes,’ comes the reply. The jail superintendent seems ashamed to be the

bearer of the regime’s plans.

‘Has the date been fixed?’

‘Tomorrow morning,’ the superintendent says.

‘At what time?’

‘At five o’clock, according to jail regulations.’

‘When did you receive this information?’

‘Last night,’ he says reluctantly.

My father looks at him.

‘How much time do I have with my family?’

‘Half an hour.’

‘Under jail regulations, we are entitled to an hour,’ he says.

‘Half an hour,’ the superintendent repeats. ‘Those are my orders.’

‘Make arrangements for me to have a bath and a shave,’ my father tells

him. ‘The world is beautiful and I want to leave it clean.’

Half an hour. Half an hour to say good-bye to the person I love more

than any other in my life. The pain in my chest tightens into a vice. I must

not cry. I must not break down and make my father’s ordeal any more

difficult.

He is sitting on the floor on a mattress, the only furniture left in his cell.

They have taken away his table and his chair. They have taken away his

bed.

‘Take these,’ he says, handing me the magazines and books I had brought

him before. ‘I don’t want them touching my things.’

He hands me the few cigars his lawyers have brought him. ‘I’ll keep one

for tonight,’ he says. He also keeps his bottle of Shalimar cologne.

He starts to hand me his ring, but my mother tells him to keep it on. ‘I’ll

keep it for now, but afterwards I want it to go to Benazir,’ he tells her.

‘I have managed to send out a message,’ I whisper to him as the jail authorities

strain to hear. I outline the details and he looks satisfied. ‘She’s

almost learned the ropes of politics,’ his expression reads.

The light inside the death cell is dim. I cannot see him clearly. Every

other visit they have allowed us to sit together inside his cell. But not today.

My mother and I squeeze together at the bars of his cell door, talking to

him in whispers.

‘Give my love to the other children,’ he says to Mummy. ‘Tell Mir and

Sunny and Shah that I have tried to be a good father and wish I could have

said good-bye to them.’ She nods, but cannot speak.

‘You have both suffered a lot,’ he says. ‘Now that they are going to kill

me tonight, I want to free you as well. If you want to, you can leave Pakistan

while the Constitution is suspended and Martial Law imposed. If you want

peace of mind and to pick up your lives again, then you might want to go

to Europe. I give you my permission. You can go.’

Our hearts are breaking. ‘No, no,’ Mummy says. ‘We can’t go. We’ll

never go. The Generals must not think they have won. Zia has scheduled

elections again, though who knows if he will dare to hold them? If we leave,

there will be no one to lead the party, the party you built.’

‘And you, Pinkie?’ my father asks.

‘I could never go,’ I say.

He smiles. ‘I’m so glad. You don’t know how much I love you, how much

I’ve always loved you. You are my jewel. You always have been.’

‘Time is up,’ the superintendent says. ‘Time is up.’

I grip the bars.

‘Please open up the cell,’ I ask him. ‘I want to say good-bye to my father.’

The superintendent refuses.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘My father is the elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. I am

his daughter. This is our last meeting. I want to hold him.’

The superintendent refuses.

I try to reach my father through the bars. He is so thin, almost wasted

away from malaria, dysentery, starvation. But he pulls himself erect, and

touches my hand.

‘Tonight I will be free,’ he says, a glow suffusing his face. ‘I will be joining

my mother, my father. I am going back to the land of my ancestors in

Larkana to become part of its soil, its scent, its air. There will be songs about

me. I will become part of its legend.’ He smiles. ‘But it is very hot in

Larkana.’

‘I’ll build a shade,’ I manage to say.

The prison authorities move in.

‘Good-bye, Papa,’ I call to my father as Mummy reaches through the

bars to touch him. We both move down the dusty courtyard. I want to look

back, but I can’t. I know I can’t control myself.

‘Until we meet again,’ I hear him call.

Somehow my legs move. I cannot feel them. I have turned to stone. But

still I move. The jail authorities lead us back through the jail ward, the

courtyard filled with army tents. I move in a trance, conscious only of my

head. High. I must keep it high. They are all watching.

The car is waiting inside the locked gates so the crowds outside won’t

see us. My body is so heavy I have difficulty getting in. The car speeds

forward through the gate. At its sight the crowds surge towards us but are

shoved back roughly by the security forces. I suddenly glimpse my friend

Yasmin at the edge of the crowd, waiting to deliver my father’s food.

‘Yasmin! They are going to kill him tonight!’ I try and shout from the window.

Did she hear me? Did I make any sound at all?

5.00 came and went. 6.00. Each breath I took reminded me of the last breaths

of my father. ‘God, let there be a miracle,’ my mother and I prayed together.

‘Let something happen.’ Even my little cat Chun-Chun whom I had

smuggled into detention with me felt the tension. She had abandoned her

kittens. We couldn’t find them anywhere.

Yet we clung to hope. The Supreme Court had unanimously recommended

that my father’s death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.

Moreover, under Pakistani law, the date of any execution must be

announced at least a week before its implementation. There had been no

such announcement.

PPP leaders on the outside had also sent word that Zia had promised

Saudia Arabia, the Emirates, and others in confidence that he would commute

my father’s death sentence. But Zia’s record was filled with broken

promises and disregard for the law. In the face of our persistent fears, the

Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia and the Prime Minister of Libya had

promised to fly in should a date for execution be announced. Had they

heard my message on the BBC? Was there time for them to fly in now?

A Chinese delegation was in Islamabad. My father had pioneered

Pakistan’s friendship with China. Would they sway Zia on his behalf?

My mother and I sat motionless in the white heat at Sihala, unable to

speak. Zia had also let it be known that he would entertain a plea for

clemency only from my father, or from us, his immediate family. My father

had forbidden it.

How do such moments pass in the countdown towards death? My

mother and I just sat. Sometimes we cried. When we lost the strength to

sit up, we fell onto the pillows on the bed. They’ll snuff out his life, I kept

thinking. They’ll just snuff out his life. How alone he must be feeling in

that cell, with no one near him. He didn’t keep any books. He didn’t keep

anything. He has just that one cigar. My throat tightened until I wanted to

rip it open. But I didn’t want the guards who were always laughing and

talking right outside our window to have the pleasure of hearing me scream.

‘I can’t bear it, Mummy, I can’t,’ I finally broke down at 1.30. She brought

me some Valium. ‘Try to sleep,’ she said.

Half an hour later I shot up in bed, feeling my father’s noose around my

neck.The skies rained tears of ice that night, pelting our family lands in Larkana

with hail. At our family graveyard in the nearby ancestral Bhutto village

of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, the people were awakened by the commotion of

a military convoy. While my mother and I were passing the agonising night

in prison, my father’s body was being secretly flown to Garhi for burial.

The advance party of Martial Law administrators made their grim arrangements

with Nazar Mohammed, a villager who oversees our lands and

whose family has worked with ours for generations.

Nazar Mohammed:

I was sleeping in my house at about 3.00 am on April 4 when I woke to

notice strong lights of fifty to sixty military vehicles on the outskirts of

the village. At first I thought they were rehearsing again for the actions

they were to take after Mr Bhutto was to be hanged as they had two days

earlier, claiming they were normal military exercises. The people were

quite terrorised then, especially after the police entered the Bhutto

graveyard to take a careful look around. When the police summoned me

out of my house at such an early hour, all the village folk–old, young,

men and women–came out of their houses. All feared that Mr Bhutto had

either already been hanged or was soon to be. There was wailing and

crying and desperation in their faces.

‘We must arrange for the burial of Mr Bhutto,’ the large number of

army and police personnel said to me at their temporary headquarters.

‘Show us where the grave is to be.’ I was weeping. ‘Why should we point

out the place of burial to you?’ I asked them. ‘We will perform the final

rites by ourselves. Mr Bhutto belongs to us.’

I asked that I be allowed to bring our people to dig the grave, fetch the

unbaked bricks to line it, cut the wooden planks to put on top of it, and

perform our religious recitations. They permitted me only eight men to

help.While we got busy with this sad task, military and police vehicles not

only surrounded the entire village but blockaded every small street. No

one from the village could go out and no one from outside the village

could enter. We were completely cut off.

At 8.00 am two helicopters landed close to the village on the road where

an ambulance was waiting. I watched the coffin being transferred to the

ambulance and followed it to the graveyard. ‘Evacuate this house,’ the

Army Colonel said to me, pointing to the small dwelling place in the

south corner of the graveyard where the prayer leader who tends the

graves lives with his wife and small children. I protested at the cruelty

and inconvenience this would be to the Pesh Imam and his family, but

the Colonel insisted. Twenty armed uniformed men then took up positions

on the roof with their rifles pointed into the graveyard.

Near relatives must have a last look at the face of the departed. There

were Bhutto cousins living in Garhi right next to the graveyard. Mr

Bhutto’s first wife also lived in the nearby village of Naudero, and after

great argument the authorities allowed me to fetch her. When she arrived

we opened the coffin and transferred the body onto a rope cot I had

brought from my house before carrying it into the walled home. The

family lived in purdah and kept their women protected from the eyes of

strangers. No males outside the family were allowed in. But the army

people forced their way into the house against all norms of decency.

When the body was brought out half an hour later, I asked the Colonel,

on oath, if the bath in accordance with religious rules and the traditional

burial ceremony had been given. He swore that it had. I checked to see

if the kaffan, the unstitched cotton shroud, had been put on the body. It

was there.

We were too perturbed and grief-stricken to look at the rest of the body.

I’m not sure they would have allowed it as their doings would have been

exposed. But his face was the face of a pearl. It shone like a pearl. He

looked the way he had at sixteen. His skin was not of several colours,

nor did his eyes or tongue bulge out like the pictures I’d seen of the men

that Zia had hanged in public. As ritual demands, I turned Bhutto Sahib’s

face to the West, towards Mecca. His head did not fall to the side. His

neck was not broken. There were strange red and black dots on his throat,

however, like an official stamp.

The Colonel became very angry. 1,400 to 1,500 people from the village

were forcing their way near the coffin and looking at the glow from the

martyr’s face. Their wailing was heart-rending. The Colonel threatened

to baton-charge the people if they didn’t leave.

‘The burial must take place at once,’ he said. ‘If we have to, we will do

it with the help of the rod.’

‘They are mourning and heart-broken,’ I told him.

At gunpoint, we hurried through the last prayers for the dead and

then, with ceremony befitting the departed soul, we lowered the body

into the grave. The recitation of the Holy Book mingled with the wailing

of the women rising from the houses.

For days at Sihala, after my father’s death, I couldn’t eat or drink. I would

take sips of water, but then I’d have to spit it out. I couldn’t swallow at all.

Nor could I sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I had the same dream. I was

standing in front of the district jail. The gates were open. I saw a figure

walking towards me. Papa! I rushed to him. ‘You’ve come out!

You’ve come out! I thought they had killed you! But you’re alive!’ Just before

I reached him, I would wake up and have to realise once again that

he was gone.

‘You must eat, Pinkie, you must,’ my mother said, bringing me some

soup. ‘You will need all your strength when we get out of here to prepare

for the elections. If you want to keep fighting for your father’s principles,

to fight the way he fought, then eat. You must.’ And I ate a little.

I forced myself to read the messages of condolence that were slipped in

to us. ‘My dear Auntie and Benazir,’ wrote a family friend from Lahore on

April 5. ‘I have no words to describe my sorrow and grief. The whole nation

is responsible to you for what has happened. We are all culprits…Every

Pakistani is sad, demoralised and insecure. We are all guilty and burdened

with sin.’

On the same day, ten thousand people gathered in Rawalpindi on Liaquat

Bagh Common, where a year and a half before my mother had drawn huge

crowds, standing in for my imprisoned father in the first election campaign.

Seeing the overwhelming popularity of the PPP, Zia had cancelled the

elections and sentenced my father to death. Now, while offering funeral

prayers and eulogies for my father, his followers were once again teargassed

by the police. The people ran, hurling bricks and stones at the police

who moved in with batons and started making arrests. Yasmin, her two

sisters and her mother attended the prayer meeting. So did Amina Piracha,

a friend who had helped the lawyers working on my father’s Supreme

Court case, Amina’s two sisters, her nieces and their old ayah of seventy.

All ten women were arrested, along with hundreds of others, and imprisoned

for two weeks.

Rumours quickly began to circulate about my father’s death. The hangman

had gone mad. The pilot who had flown my father’s body to Garhi

had become so agitated when he’d learned the identity of his cargo that

he’d had to land his plane and have another pilot called in. The papers

were full of other lurid details about my father’s end. He had been tortured

almost to death and, with only the barest flicker of a pulse, had been carried

on a stretcher to his hanging. Another persistent report claimed that my

father had died during a fight in his cell. Military officers had tried to force

him to sign a ‘confession’ that he had orchestrated the coup himself and

invited Zia to take over the country. My father had refused to sign the lies

the regime needed to give it legitimacy.

In this version one of the officers had given my father a violent push. He

had fallen, striking his head on the wall of his cell, and had never regained

consciousness. A doctor had been summoned to revive him, giving him a

heart massage and a tracheotomy which would explain the marks Nazar

Mohammed had seen on his neck. But it had been to no avail.

I tended to believe this story. Why else had my father’s body shown no

physical signs of a hanging? Why else had I woken up at 2.00 am, a full

three hours before his scheduled execution? Another political prisoner,

General Babar, told me he, too, had woken in a sudden chill at 2.00. So did

other friends and political supporters scattered around the world. It was

as if my father’s soul was passing among those who had loved him.

And the rumours persisted.

‘Exhume the body and order a post-mortem,’ my father’s cousin and

then People’s Party leader Mumtaz Bhutto urged me during a condolence

call at Sihala. ‘It could be to our political advantage.’ Political advantage?

My father was dead. Exhuming his body was not going to bring him back

to life.

‘They did not let him live in his death cell even before they killed him,’

I told Uncle Mumtaz. ‘Now he’s free. Let him rest in peace.’

‘You don’t understand what historical importance this could have,’ Uncle

Mumtaz persisted.

I shook my head. ‘History will judge him on his life. The details of his

death do not matter,’ I said. ‘I will not have him exhumed. He needs his

rest.’

My mother’s niece, Fakhri, was permitted to come to Sihala to mourn

with us, as was my childhood friend, Samiya Waheed. They were relieved

to find that, although we were grief-stricken, we had not fallen apart. ‘We

had heard you were so depressed you were going to commit suicide,’ said

Samiya, recounting another rumour the regime was spreading.

Fakhri, who is quite emotional, rushed to embrace my mother, consoling

her in Persian. ‘Nusrat joon, I wish I had died. I wish I had never seen this

day,’ she cried. ‘People are saying hanging is too good for Zia.’

Fakhri hugged me too. She had been the one to bring me the news of my

father’s death sentence a year before, slipping through the police guard at

our house in Karachi where I was being held in detention. I had been sitting

in the living room when she suddenly burst through the front door and

prostrated herself in the entrance hall, howling in grief

and hitting her forehead on the floor. Within half an hour the military authorities

had brought a detention order for Fakhri herself, a woman who

didn’t have a political bone in her body but who spent her days playing

mah-jongg and bridge. She had been imprisoned with me for the next week,

unable to return to her husband and small children.Now we wept together. Hundreds of people, she told us–factory workers,taxi drivers, street pedlars–were gathering in our garden in Karachi in

preparation for the soyem, our religious ceremony on the third day following

death. Every night for weeks before, women had come to the house by the

busload to pray for my father through the night, holding their Holy Qurans

over their heads.The uniforms of the army, which had always been a source of national

pride, were now the objects of derision, Fakhri also told us. On the plane

flight from Karachi, she and Samiya had refused to sit next to any man in

army uniform. ‘Murderers!’ they had screamed. The other travellers had

lowered their heads in a mark of respect towards those who were grieving.

Nobody said a word. There were tears in everyone’s eyes.

We had applied to the authorities to visit my father’s grave on the soyem,

and at 7.00 am on April 7 we were told we had five minutes to get ready.

We didn’t have black mourning clothes to wear and went in what we had

brought with us to prison. ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ a Martial Law officer insisted

as we packed into the car to drive to the airport. They were always hurrying

us, frightened that the people would catch a glimpse of us, wave, cheer, or

in any way demonstrate their sympathy for us and by implication their

antipathy for Martial Law.But not all the military had turned into inhuman machines. At the airport,

members of the crew of the military plane were standing like a guard of

honour when we arrived, their heads lowered. When my mother got out

of the car, they saluted her. It was a fitting gesture for the widow of the

man who had brought over ninety thousand of their fellow soldiers safely

back from the prison camps of India. Not everyone had forgotten. During

the short flight they offered us tea, coffee and sandwiches, their faces

showing their shock and sorrow. The crime of the few had become the guilt

of the many.The plane didn’t land at Moenjodaro, the airport nearest to Garhi Khuda

Bakhsh, but at Jacobabad an hour away. Nor did the local military

authorities choose a direct route from the airfield to the village over the

modern roads my father had built. Instead, the car bumped and lurched

along unpaved lanes, the driver going out of his way to avoid the possibility

of our being seen through the heavily curtained windows. We were covered

in sweat and dust when we finally arrived at the entrance to our family

graveyard.

As I moved towards the narrow portal, an army officer moved with me.

I stopped.

‘No. You can’t enter. None of you can enter,’ I said. ‘This is our graveyard.

You don’t belong here.’

‘We are under orders not to let you out of our sight,’ he told me.

‘I cannot permit you to come in here and violate its sanctity,’ I told him.

‘You killed my father. You sent him here. If we mourn him now, we will

mourn him alone.’

‘We have been ordered to be with you at all times,’ he insisted.

‘Then we won’t visit the grave. Take us back,’ my mother said, moving

towards the car. He stepped back, and we entered the walled graveyard,

leaving our shoes at the entrance as a sign of respect.

How peaceful it seemed. And how familiar. Generations of Bhuttos

whose lives were sweeter lay there: my grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz Khan

Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Junagadh State, knighted by the British

for his services to the Bombay presidency before the partition of India; his

wife, Lady Khurshid; my uncle, Sikander Bhutto, and his legendary

brother, Imdad Ali, so handsome, it is said, that when he drove his carriage

down Elphinstone Street, Karachi’s main shopping area, the English ladies

ran out of their shops to stare at him. Many other relatives also lay there,

in the soil which had given us birth and to which we return when we die.

My father had brought me here just before I had left Pakistan to go to

Harvard University in 1969. ‘You are going far away to America,’ he had

told me as we stood among the graves of our forebears. ‘You will see many

things that amaze you and travel to places you’ve never heard of. But remember,

whatever happens to you, you will ultimately return here. Your

place is here. Your roots are here. The dust and mud and heat of Larkana

are in your bones. And it is here that you will be buried.’

Through my tears now, I looked for his grave. I didn’t even know where

they had buried him. I almost didn’t recognise his grave when I saw it. It

was just a mound of mud. Raw mud sprinkled with flower

petals. Mummy and I sat at the foot of the grave. I couldn’t believe my

father was under it. I dropped down and kissed the part of the mud where

I imagined his feet to be.

‘Forgive me, father, if I ever caused you any unhappiness,’ I whispered.

Alone. I felt so alone. Like all children, I had taken my father for granted.

Now that I had lost him, I felt an emptiness that could never be filled. But

I did not weep, believing as a Muslim that tears pull a spirit earthward and

won’t let it be free.

My father had earned his freedom, had paid dearly for his peace. His

suffering had ended. ‘Glory be to Him who has control over all things,’ I

read from the Ya Sin surah of the Holy Quran. ‘To Him, you shall all return.’

My father’s soul was with God in Paradise.

They hurried us back to the airport over a different and even more tortuous

route. But the same crew again stood at attention. There was no difference

either in our searches at the gates to Sihala, no difference in the grimy

rooms we were being held in. But a sense of peace and a new certainty had

settled over me.

Stand up to challenge. Fight against overwhelming odds. Overcome the

enemy. In the stories my father had told us over and over as children, good

always triumphed over evil.

‘Whether you grasp an opportunity or let it slip away, whether you are

impetuous or thoughtful, whether you have unsinkable nerves or are timid,

all of these choices are up to you,’ he had always impressed upon us. ‘What

you make of your destinies is up to you.’

Now, in the nightmare that had engulfed Pakistan, his cause had become

my own. I had felt it as I stood by my father’s grave, felt the strength and

conviction of his soul replenishing me. At that moment I pledged to myself

that I would not rest until democracy returned to Pakistan. I promised that

the light of hope that he had kindled would be kept alive. He had been the

first leader of Pakistan to speak for all the people, not just for the military

and the elite. It was up to us to continue.

As my mother and I were being taken back to Sihala after my father’s soyem,

soldiers were lobbing tear gas shells among the hundreds packed into our

garden at 70 Clifton to read and reread prayers for my father’s soul. The barrage of shells was so intense that the canopy over the patio was set on fire. Clutching their Holy Qurans, the grieving people dispersed,choking.