A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  Two years later, Bhutto had split from President Ayub over the acrimony generated by the 1965 war. He began to travel up and down the country giving political speeches. Without telling anyone in his family, Sikandar went to hear a speech in October 1966. He watched as Bhutto stood at a podium and enthralled the masses of poor people with his rhetoric, his powerful words. He was tall and handsome, full of charisma. Sikandar could not take his eyes off Bhutto as he raised his hands in the air and clapped them above his head, shouting, “Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy. Power to the people!” The crowds swelling in front of him raised their hands, taking up his cry with one voice. His face glowed with their adulation. Sikandar felt he was witnessing the beginning of a revolution, and shivered, because he did not know what it would mean for his family.

  Bhutto became so popular that in 1967 he formed his own party, the Pakistan People’s Party; entranced by his message of people power, men and women from all over joined, whether they were Sindhi, Punjabi, or Muhajir. In that same year Pir Hassan arranged Sikandar’s marriage with his cousin, Pir Hassan’s brother’s daughter. The young couple was married in Sukkur in December, but their wedding guests, arriving in Sukkur from all parts of Sindh, faced erratic trains and roads blocked by PPP activists who were holding protest strikes and marches all over the country against Ayub’s dictatorship.

  Sikandar’s wife became pregnant, and he ignored Bhutto’s metamorphosis, concentrating instead on the transformation of his own life. He began to prepare a portion of the family house for his wife and unborn child, and already inquired about the best schools in Hyderabad and Karachi for when his son would take his first steps toward his future as a learned man.

  But as Bhutto’s star climbed ever higher, disaster struck Sikandar. His wife died in childbirth and took with her their child, a daughter. Sikandar was himself unable to recall most of that terrible day, when he waited outside the haveli, the women’s quarters, but he did remember standing against a wall, kicking at the dirt with his shoes, when a mangy little kitten came walking in front of him. Sikandar looked at its thin face, its ribs straining against its meager chest, and went to the kitchen to fetch a plate of milk.

  As he passed by the chamber where his wife lay in her childbed, he strained for any sound, any sign of what was going on inside. But there was only a deadly silence. Then suddenly the air was cut by the wails of the women who were attending her, shrieks and howls of grief and horror.

  Sikandar dropped the saucer on the floor. The milk splashed onto his legs and puddled around his feet. Before anyone could find him to tell what had happened, he ran outside. The kitten was still squirming in the dust. He picked it up and walked slowly to the nearest well. He leaned over the sides, smelling the dank, blackened water, his eyes blinded by the shadows inside. It must have been a type of madness that made him take the kitten and suddenly fling it into the depths of the well. He still begged Allah for forgiveness for that evil deed, and knew he would carry the sin of it to his grave.

  After that, he put aside all thoughts of family and children, even though his mother pleaded with him to remarry within the year. But he could not bear the thought of embarking upon that exercise so soon. Instead, he threw himself into zamindari, taking over from his father much of the day-to-day running of the farm. He rose before dawn, reciting his prayers before going out to inspect the fields and take accounts from the overseers. He did not return until noon, when the heat was so strong that a grown man could faint if he spent half an hour in an unshaded place. It was a punishing schedule, but he did not feel he deserved anything better.

  Sikandar began again to follow Zulfikar Bhutto’s path to power, as the People’s Party won a huge number of parliament seats in the 1970 elections. He listened to the radio into the dark long hours of the night, the whine of the shortwave comforting him in his loneliness, and learned that the Bengali Sheikh Mujib, leader of a rival party, had won the majority in East Pakistan. Bhutto refused to allow him to become the prime minister of Pakistan. The night that President Yahya had Mujib arrested and the Pakistani army embarked upon a genocide that saw the streets of Dhaka run black with innocent blood, Sikandar was haunted by dreams in which faceless dead Bengalis knocked on his door and cried and asked him, For what crimes have we been killed?

  By the end of 1971, they were plunged into war. Bangladesh was a place that nobody in the interior had ever seen, but the war reached out beyond its borders to strangle everyone who laid claims to that far-off land. At night Indian Air Force jets whined over Sindh, bombing army installations, the cold clear desert sky lit up by the flashes of incendiary weapons, which hazed the air with phosphorescence and drowned out the stars. Women wept under the stairs and in makeshift bomb shelters, while children eagerly put up black paper on the windows and practiced marching to air-raid sirens. Everyone in Sindh, including Sikandar, believed that Pakistan would win in the end; patriotism was a tide that swept everyone along with it, inflating their egos and convincing them they could beat the Indians simply because Allah was on their side.

  Ya Fattah, called all the maulvis in their Friday sermons. Sikandar sat among the congregation and listened to their speeches, as incendiary as the bombs that were falling all over Pakistan. He is the Victorious One, He will grant us Victory over our enemies!

  And then they lost.

  Yahya resigned and turned power over to Bhutto, and while the rest of Pakistan mourned, all of Sindh was enthralled with the ascent of a fellow son of the soil to the most powerful position in Pakistan.

  “We should join the People’s Party,” Imtiaz, Sikandar’s brother, told Sikandar one evening as they sat smoking after dinner in the verandah.

  “Why?”

  “A Sindhi prime minister, Saeen! We must show our support.”

  “You care for nationalization? And labor reform?” said Sikandar, who by now could read well and was following the debate in the newspapers and on the radio. “Do you know he’s been talking about land reform?”

  Imtiaz’s face darkened. “I know, I’ve heard it, too, but if we don’t show our loyalty, it will be worse for us when it actually happens.”

  Sikandar shook his head. “You join if you want to. Leave me out of it.”

  “But Saeen! We have to show our unity as a family …”

  “Leave me out of it.”

  Imtiaz fell silent, hurt by Sikandar’s offhanded dismissals. By the next morning, he seemed to have forgotten about his idea of joining the party. It was a relief to Sikandar; politics had never interested him, despite his father’s and uncle’s endless appetite for the petty machinations of rural governance. He preferred the daily rhythms of agriculture, which never varied or wavered, no matter who was in office or out of it.

  But in early 1973, when Sikandar’s friends in the district government whispered in his ear that the government planned to take over a million acres and give them to the landless peasants of the province, Sikandar summoned his father, brothers, and cousins to a series of discussions to devise a rational strategy to deal with the coming storm.

  Imtiaz, his voice trembling with indignation, began to shout even before he sat down in the leather chair where Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto had talked to Sikandar all those years ago. “How can he do this to us? Bhutto is one of us. His father was one of the biggest zamindars in all of Sindh. How can he betray us like this?”

  “It’s his Hindu mother,” their cousin Akbar spat. “She’s the one that filled his head with ridiculous ideas. Because she came from nothing, so he thinks that he owes the poor a debt that we have to pay on his behalf. It’s preposterous!”

  “Don’t speak like that about a lady,” Imtiaz said.

  “All right, but it’s still her fault!”

  “But what should we do?” This was Pir Hassan, whose voice quavered—Sikandar glanced at him and took in at a glance how white his hair had become, how he had lost
inches in height, pounds in weight. He had placed the turban on Sikandar’s head last year in the dastarbandi ceremony that conferred upon him the title of sardar, head of the clan, but for all intents and purposes Sikandar had been leading the family for the last three or four years now. Responsibility had made Pir Hassan old, and now it was Sikandar’s turn to become aged and haggard through its demands. Just this morning he had noticed the first strands of white in his hair when he combed it. He should have had a wife to show her, so that she could coo and fuss and assure him that he was not getting old, just wise. He should have had a child who could sit on his knee and pull his beard with both fists, so that he knew that when he became as old as his father, someone else would wear the turban and look after all their concerns. But Allah had decreed something else for him, and he had no choice but to fight for the future of their family, such as it was.

  “I’ve devised a plan,” Sikandar said. “You’ll all transfer some of your land to your children and wives. I’ve worked out the numbers, the amounts, and the notaries who are willing to file the papers. Come here on Friday after the prayers and we’ll start the process. But we have to act fast. The reforms will come soon, I’m told.”

  “And you, my son?” said his father. “In whose name will you put your land?”

  “I will transfer my land to anonymous holders. Khatedars.”

  “Are they trustworthy people?”

  “Very.”

  “Good, my son. What else?”

  “We’ll sell off our unproductive land, get rid of the useless pieces. Consolidate our holdings and distribute across the family so that none of us exceeds the allowed amount. Don’t you worry, Father. We’ll be all right.”

  Sikandar’s brothers and cousins were looking at him in admiration, at his unshakable confidence. They had always thought of him as somewhat of a fool, discounting him while they rushed around in their pursuits, which they deemed more important than his interests and activities. But now that the time had come where they needed a brother to look up to, a son to trust, they all came back to Sikandar. The power in his hands was like a strong horse that could buck and throw him at any moment. But they were sure that he had learned, over the past ten years, how to ride.

  “Don’t worry,” Sikandar repeated. “Bhutto cannot defeat us. He has been prime minister for three years. We have been zamindars for three centuries. We will survive.”

  Bhutto was now buried in his family graveyard at Gahri Khuda Baksh, next to his father. Sikandar had made the shorter journey from Larkana to Naudero, the Bhutto ancestral village, and now stood at his tomb, jostled by the crowds in the morning sun, watching as they pushed and shoved each other, men, women, children, the elderly—Sindhis of all ages and classes, come to pay homage to their slain martyr. Most were weeping openly. Others read from Qurans and little prayer booklets, while those who could not read simply fingered prayer beads and whispered the names of God. People held green cloths and strings of roses and marigolds to lay on his grave. The wound was still open, their loss still bleeding and raw. Their grief was a live animal that lay stretched out on the ground and howled its loss to the world.

  “They’ve taken our son, our son …”

  “Our father … stolen him from us …”

  “May Allah Saeen bring a painful death on that traitor, that tyrant, General Zia!”

  “Ameen!”

  “May he burn in hell for the ignominy he’s heaped on Shaheed Bhutto’s head!”

  “Ameen!”

  “Hanging him in the middle of the night like a common criminal!”

  “Not even giving him the chance to say goodbye to his family …”

  “His poor sons, in London, couldn’t even come back to see their father buried …”

  “Those poor daughters … orphaned, all orphaned …”

  As Sikandar pushed his way to the front and stood in front of the stone marker of his grave, the scent of thousands of rose petals rising up in a heavy, intoxicating perfume, he was reminded for some reason of that Greek myth his tutor told him about a man who lived thousands of years ago and dreamt every day of flying like a bird. He’d made wings and glued them to his shoulders. But he flew too close to the sun, and its heat melted his wings, sending him plummeting to earth, to his death. The same thing had happened to this man, who’d had such dreams for Pakistan. Had God punished him for forgetting that he was only a mortal?

  Sikandar looked around at the other graves in the tomb. All the members of the Bhutto family were buried here: Sir Shahnawaz, Lady Khurshid (née Lakhi Bai), Sikandar Bhutto, Imdad Ali … A space in his own family graveyard lay in wait for Sikandar, the bones of his wife and daughter crumbling into the dust, patiently awaiting the day when his body would meet theirs. Their bones would mingle with the soil, nourishing it as it had nourished them for so many generations, so repaying the debt of fertility and affluence with their deaths. This was what it meant to be a zamindar. This was what it meant to be a Sindhi.

  Sikandar raised his hands in prayer and recited the Fateha for Bhutto under his breath:

  In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

  Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds;

  Most Gracious, Most Merciful;

  Master of the Day of Judgment.

  Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek.

  Show us the straight way,

  The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose portion is not wrath, and who go not astray.

  He took one last glance at the tomb. Where Bhutto’s grave had once been a simple mound of earth covered with rose garlands, it was now reinforced with concrete; the concrete would be replaced by marble, and turned into an elaborate structure where people for generations would come to pay obeisance. The simple ancestral graveyard would grow into an opulent mausoleum, a massive shrine to which the devoted would flock. The people, the poor and disenfranchised of Sindh, to whom Bhutto had wanted to give equality and justice, roti, kapra aur makan, would say prayers for him and worship him as a martyr. He would be transformed from a man into a living saint. This, too, was the way of Sindh, and it would never change.

  “Goodbye, Bhutto Saeen,” Sikandar said, before he turned and walked away. “Fi Amanullah.”

  There was one more thing Sikandar had to do before returning to Sukkur: go to the house of the Bhuttos and condole with the family to express his sorrow. Bhutto’s sons were not in the country; they had been sent by Bhutto to London. Only his widow Nusrat and daughters Benazir and Sanam remained. Nusrat and Benazir had been kept in detention for months, and just recently been released. They had come straight to Larkana to visit Bhutto’s grave, then stayed at the house to meet with PPP leaders and supporters, which they had not been permitted to do since Bhutto’s death.

  Bhutto’s pride and joy were his children. Sikandar had heard rumors that he was not entirely constant when it came to his wife, but in his children he pinned all his hopes, lavished all his love and affection. Especially the eldest, Benazir, whom he had sent to the finest universities in the United States and England—an unheard-of thing for a Sindhi girl, the daughter of a feudal.

  Tongues had wagged in Sikandar’s family, as in all Sindhi families, at the ridiculous plans Bhutto had for his firstborn. “Is he crazy—sending her that far away? It isn’t safe to leave a girl alone like that, in America, of all the places …” said Sikandar’s father.

  “She’ll get up to all sorts of mischief, she’ll mix with boys and—” said his mother.

  “Don’t talk like that about a lady!” Imtiaz, ever the defender of the honor of women, spoke up.

  “All right, but still … Educating girls? He’s sending her to Harvard? I’ve never even heard of the place. The man’s been possessed by the devil, I tell you …”

  “She’ll go wild, disgrace the family. Bhutto will rue the day he
put her on the plane; he’ll wish he’d kept her in purdah like all honorable women!”

  Sikandar sat and listened to the conversation, unsure which side to take. He wondered, if his daughter had lived, whether he would even consider letting her go abroad to study. He was not as averse to the idea as the rest of them. In this, as in so many other things, Bhutto had been a revolutionary, and had not listened to people he considered backward and foolish—and the family of Pir Hassan Sikandar, affluent as they might be, were certainly counted among their numbers.

  But the daughter Bhutto sent as a gawky child had come back a polished, educated woman, with a backbone of steel. Now even Sikandar’s family spoke admiringly of her; they all knew how she had led the struggle against General Zia after her father had been imprisoned; Zia had sent her and her mother to detention in Rawalpindi, and house arrest in Karachi and in Naudero. It was only by some miracle of God that the harsh conditions of jail did not break her, accustomed as she was to privilege and luxury. Why, she could hardly even speak Sindhi, her own mother tongue!

  Sikandar was curious to see this girl, as were so many others, and everyone had, at some point, tried to meet with her. The Pirs and zamindars who were his contemporaries spoke of her in hushed, reverent tones, and all the young men could not help but fall a little in love with the idea of her, although they never would have shown disrespect to her or her father by approaching him for her hand in marriage. To them she was a mixture of several things: sister, daughter, heroine, queen. She was like the Seven Queens of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, that Sufi poet who wrote so movingly of the women of Sindh who’d fought oppressors, led wars, lost their lives for their lovers. Benazir had lost her beloved father, but she would not accept death or exile. She pitched herself in full tilt against General Zia and the might of the army: she was braver than most men Sikandar had ever known.