A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  Her father’s birthday and his death day were separated only by four short months. He had been a Capricorn, like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, who died on September 11, 1948. A disaster for Pakistan sixty years ago; a disaster for the world sixty years later. April 4, 1979, had turned out to be a disaster for Pakistan thirty years ago; what disaster would befall her country on April 4 in 2008, thirty years later? She had always been suspicious, superstitious, that way; everywhere she turned, she saw signs, and they chilled her. She consulted holy men and oracles, Pirs and sheikhs, to try to find consolation, but her heart was always fluttering like a trapped bird beating its wings against her rib cage.

  Rawalpindi was the scene of yet another disaster for Pakistan: the assassination in October 1951 of Liaquat Ali Khan, the country’s first prime minister. An Afghan from the Zadran tribe had shot him twice in the chest as he was about to make an announcement at the Municipal Park. It had been renamed Liaquat Bagh Park in the murdered prime minister’s honor, and it was here that she was to address a political rally that afternoon.

  She had told everyone that she wasn’t afraid for her life. The long poems she had composed during those days in exile were her heart’s honest outpourings, testimony to what she felt about herself, her life. When you have buried a father and two brothers, what else is there left to fear from death?

  From Marvi I learnt

  From past mystic saints

  From my dear brother Shah I learnt

  That handsome youth who fought another tyrant

  That

  Were I to breathe my last, living

  Away from the home I loved

  My body won’t imprison me.

  Still, she wished for a moment that she was not in her house in Islamabad, but back home in Larkana. She always felt strongest in her ancestral home, not far from where her father was buried. It was as if his bones had leached into the sand and given her strength; as long as she could be connected to the earth, through her feet and legs, she would not lose him. And yet, as Shah Abdul Latif had written in the epic poetry she adored (and tried to emulate in her own humble attempts at poetry), life was about separation and loss; she had been through the cycle time and time again, exiled from her beautiful Sindh, forced to wander for years, away from the love of her life.

  Larkana, loved one, I remember

  The sweet scent of roses

  Of fresh rain on desert sand

  Of trees washed by nature’s hand.

  She could not bear it if she were to never see Sindh again. But then she shook her head and pushed away the gloomy thoughts: of course she’d get through this, as she had, by the grace of God, got through all the other days. She’d learned something from the terrible night back in October: not to trust the government’s assurances of safety, not to rely on their promises. Her security people had made arrangements for jammers, for strong floodlights; she’d talked to the Americans and the Israelis for private security contractors to protect her. The Israelis were still considering her request, but the Americans had provided her with some men, and she had faith in God.

  And then there were her children: handsome Bilawal, with his first term at Oxford nearly over—how proud she’d been to take him there herself, show him the lawns where she’d studied, the halls where she’d debated, the rooms where she’d talked politics and movies and life, late into the night. Her daughter Bakhtawar, who wanted to be a punk musician—she’d even asked that rapper, what was his name? Puffy, Puff Daddy, Diddy, something like that, to help Bakhtawar out when it came time to try to enter the music industry. The things one has to do for one’s children, she thought to herself with a wry smile. And Asifa, whose skin had begun to grow patchy, sending mother and daughter fleeing to the best dermatologist in London, the Dubai sun no good for her condition.

  She had so much to do for all of them; she thought constantly of them when she was away. A mother’s heart, pulled in so many directions; but her husband could never accuse her of not thinking of the children.

  The meeting that morning with the EU election observers had gone well. She’d informed them of the preparations the president’s party had been making for weeks: the plans to stuff the ballot boxes, the ghost polling stations, the intimidation of the voters that was by now a vital part of the playbook of Pakistani elections. The American lawmakers would be given another full dossier, when she met with them after the rally. She’d prepared her documents, working late into the night, hunched over her laptop computer with her glasses perched on her nose, a green pen in her hand to mark the printouts wherever she saw an error or a place where an amendment could be made.

  Nobody knew where she found the stamina to keep working the long hours after everyone else had fallen nodding into bed, but she knew she had to be note-perfect when she spoke to Senators Specter and Kennedy, after they’d been wined and dined by the president, and he’d sung his song of fair elections and honorable intentions to them. She would not let them be hoodwinked by him.

  She could hear muffled words, urgent whispers coming from outside the door where she was working, and she called out to them, “What is it? Tell me now …”

  A reluctant aide approached her, and stood in front of her, shuffling from one foot to the other. Finally, he spoke up: “Bad news: four Nawaz supporters were killed. Someone fired upon them from a rooftop. The PML is blaming the Musharraf group. Violence to scare opponents away from the polls.”

  “Nothing new,” she said. “Send a message of condolence through the official channels. Tell them that no dictator can stop the democratic process. It is what the people want.”

  Away I live in a mansion grand

  But I long to campaign

  On rocky roads

  In bumpy jeep rides

  With flags and banners

  With selfless zeal to change

  The sad present

  Into a smiling future.

  At two o’clock, she called out, “What’s for lunch?”

  “Aloo salaan, and chapati … sorry it’s so plain.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s my favorite!” She had always tried to watch her weight, what with her propensity for sweets, ice cream, and chocolate, but had given in when she realized that she would never regain the slim, willowy figure of her youth. She’d been interviewed by BBC reporters when she’d been prime minister, and one of them had asked her if she was pregnant again, after Bilawal’s birth.

  “No,” she smiled, coolly umoved by the man’s intrusiveness. “I am not pregnant. I am fat. And, as the prime minister, it is my right to be fat if I want to.” That had shut him up, she thought to herself with glee, watching the reporter open and close his mouth several times. She giggled behind her hand when she was alone and thinking what a fool he looked.

  They settled down to the meal, she and her closest circle of friends and colleagues, the inner circle, as they were called. Everyone seemed tense: she looked at the drawn, white faces, the hands that were only pushing the food around on their plates as they scanned her face for signs of a sudden loss of nerve. She felt calm, even concerned for those of her party who’d been traveling with her for months now, staying up nights in long vigils. “Please, Adda, relax and eat,” she told the man who was her right hand, a top official in the PPP, and he blushed like a schoolboy being told by his mother to clean his plate.

  “Do you want to go over the speech again?” he asked her, trying to cover his embarrassment.

  “No, let’s just enjoy the moment,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” But after the meal was over, she took her notes over to the window that overlooked the serene Margalla Hills, and she sat quietly in a large chair, reading them over and over again. I call on my homeland of Pakistan to come out and fight for Pakistan’s future. I’m not afraid. We cannot be afraid.

  There was still time for the post-noon prayer; she got up from her chair, leaving
the notes on the table, and went to her bedroom, where she gathered her prayer mat and her dupatta. She stood on the mat, dupatta draped primly over her head, and began the cycle of prayers, the four sunnat, four farz, two sunnat, two nafl, prescribed by the Prophet, peace be upon him. Then she lifted her hands in dua and asked God to look after her children, her husband, her ailing mother, her country. Finally, she prayed for her own safety. And for her father’s soul.

  I raise both my hands

  And ask my children

  To raise their little hands

  Marvi, of Maru and Malir

  In the mists of time

  She raised her hands

  While the world slept

  To God

  Full of hope

  Praying to see her homeland.

  Three o’clock: time to get dressed.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. She hated having to wear the bulletproof vest, but her husband and children insisted, as did her head of security. “But it makes me look so fat!” she’d wailed, the first time she’d put it on. She’d grown used to it, eventually, although she couldn’t bear the weight of it, or how much it made her sweat. But when she was out there, in front of her people, listening to their cheers of Jiye Bhutto! Jiye Bhutto! and smelling the sweet scent of the rose petals they threw on her path, she forgot everything: physical discomfort, fear, thirst, hunger, heat, and fatigue. She only remembered her father, telling her to be strong.

  Opening her closet, she took out the shalwar kameez to wear on top of the vest. She’d chosen a peacock-blue tunic: it offset the white dupatta perfectly and the silk material brought out the stark contrast of her pale face to her dark hair. The day she’d returned to Pakistan after those eight long years of exile, she’d worn a green one: green for Pakistan, green for Islam, green for the verdant farmland of Sindh. Today she’d chosen blue: honor, dignity, loyalty, serenity. She was no longer as young as she used to be, but she loved herself more: her confidence, her wisdom, the way she carried herself in the world. She smiled, reminded of the feminist diatribes in which she and her friends were so well versed, back in those heady days at Radcliffe when young women were just beginning to get a sense of their own potential. A woman’s worth is not in her looks, but in her personality, her mind! It’s not youth that matters, but confidence, inner strength, wisdom! What she would tell those raw, eager girls, if she could go back in time, share with them all the things she’d learned in the

  thirty-odd years since she’d been a student. But she could share them with her daughters—there were so many things her girls needed to hear from her.

  “Time to go, Lady,” said an aide, when she emerged from her bedroom into the drawing room once again. “It’s three

  forty-five. Your car is ready.”

  She looked around the room, at the sweeping view of the hills, the afternoon sun sending rays of light that slanted from heaven to earth, illuminating spots of land with the precision of a laser beam. How beautiful! As if God Himself had painted the scene, just for her. It had to be a sign. She was a firm believer in signs: it was all over the Quran, that God had littered the universe with signs of His existence, His power, His mercy. Verily, in all this there are messages indeed for those who can read the signs.

  She closed her eyes, thought once more of her children, said a small prayer. Then Benazir Bhutto gathered up her notes in her hands and called to no one in particular: “Come, let’s go. I don’t want to be late.”

  Children: Hear the desert wind

  Hear it whisper

  Have faith

  We will win.

  December 27, 2007

  RAWALPINDI

  “Dammit, I can’t see her.”

  The press pit was in the wrong place: Ali craned his neck to get a view of the podium, but it was impossible from behind the crowds, a great sea that stretched from one end of the public park to the other. They wouldn’t stand still; they surged up and down, heads rising, lowering, arms stretched out, people rising to their feet en masse, making Ali feel as though he were on the deck of a ship being tossed on endless waves. “Let’s move around this way.” He urged the cameraman to follow him, and they pushed and shoved their way through the gaps in the crowd till they found a space in which they could not only breathe, but also see Benazir Bhutto as she stood at the podium, waiting to begin her speech.

  They were a hundred yards away from the stage, but Ali’s vantage point was better now. He stood on top of a chair and directed the cameraman to start shooting even before she had begun to speak. The podium came midway up her chest, hiding most of her body, but they could see her white dupatta slipping from her head, and she had already begun to pull it up with her hands. She would have to perform this trademark maneuver at least two dozen times in the course of her speech, Ali knew from watching previous footage of her: she was too vain to pin it down, preferring to let it slip and slide around her face like a restless sea, while her carefully arranged hair remained visible underneath.

  She was watching the crowd with a pleased look, waiting for them to quiet down. Ali thought she looked nervous, a young schoolgirl waiting to give her first speech in the school assembly. There was a sweet smile on her face, and she waved her hands excitedly above her head, stirring up the crowd, who began to cheer and whistle and stamp their feet in approval. Banners bearing the colors of the PPP fluttered in the wind, party workers clutched even more flags and posters in the audience, and the red chairs and red-carpeted stage made it look as though they’d all gathered for the biggest birthday party anyone had ever seen. All that was missing was a gigantic cake and the sound of “Happy Birthday” playing on the PA system, he thought to himself wryly.

  She was speaking now, but all they could hear was a muffled whine from the speakers. “Shit,” said Ali to his cameraman, Rasool, who doubled as driver and cameraman for the channel’s Islamabad bureau. Rasool had collected him from the airport at one, then brought him straight here to get in position for the rally. “Can’t hear a thing. Are you picking anything up?”

  Rasool strained to hear through his headset, then shook his head. “Let’s go back to the press pit.”

  “No way, then we won’t see. Just wait … Ah, that’s better.” Someone had reached forward and adjusted Benazir’s microphone and her voice rang out from all four corners of the park, strong and strident.

  “I am happy to be here, to address you, at Liaquat Bagh … Rawalpindi is the home of the brave, of the simple people who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the cause of democracy … I used to live in Rawalpindi and I consider it my second home. When Bhutto Sahib was a minister, I lived here and went to school here. I have seen great happiness, and also great pain …”

  “She’s speaking well,” muttered Rasool.

  “At least she doesn’t make so many mistakes anymore.” Her lack of Urdu or Sindhi had been a running joke in Pakistan for years, but to Ali it seemed she’d finally conquered her linguistic failings, and had found a working compromise between the heavy political phrases and the simple speech of her heart.

  As she went on, Ali faced the camera and addressed a short commentary to its opaque eye. The feed would be sent to Ameena in Karachi; they’d edit it there and package it for the six o’clock news. “We’re here at Liaquat Bagh Park, where Benazir Bhutto is addressing a political rally consisting of her loyal party workers. She’s talking about how Rawalpindi has been the site of many brave sacrifices in the face of dictatorship and authoritarianism. She’s naming some of the prominent party workers who took up the struggle for democracy: Abdul Majeed, Idress Baig, and of course, her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged almost thirty years ago here in Rawalpindi, the scene of many difficult memories for Ms. Bhutto.”

  Rasool cut back to filming Benazir; Ali knew that the sight of the woman, in her dark blue tunic, garlands of jasmine and roses around her neck, would make for an arres
ting visual. She had always been photogenic, but today it seemed as though something else emanated from her: a depth and solidity that he’d never recognized in her before, a gravitas that had little to do with her statuesque frame, but everything to do with her squared shoulders and her strong hands firmly gripping the podium. He wrapped up his remarks for the camera, then stood back and let out a long breath. He took out his phone, shot a text message to his father: In Islamabad. Benazir rally. He paused, then pressed the buttons to type out: She’s speaking very well.

  The phone beeped back, almost instantly: Ok. Take care.

  Ali listened to Benazir’s speech carefully, taking each word and measuring it in his mind, trying to regard her as if he’d never seen her or heard of her before. Everyone deserved a fair trial, after all. This was hers, in his mind: her chance to convince him that she was sincere, in this, her third attempt to seek the seat of power.

  He heard her description of the travails of the people of Rawalpindi, of her father’s attempts to establish the PPP in the name of the poor, the disenfranchised. And then she said, “Even in the face of all this, you have never left your sister alone … Bhutto Sahib recognized the importance of Rawalpindi. It is the heart of the Punjab, and Punjab is the heart of Pakistan.”

  Yes, thought Ali to himself. She’s right. But there was something that she wasn’t saying, and he wanted more than anything to tell her the all-important truth that everyone had forgotten about Pakistan: if Punjab was the heart of Pakistan, then Sindh was its soul.

  Benazir put down her notes and stared intently into the crowd. Ali could feel the shiver starting from the top of his head and moving down his arms. He was too far away to be able to meet her eyes, but her intensity reached out and pushed into them all, as if she were alone in a room with each one of them, and taking them into her confidence. The connection between her and them began to sing and hum, as if wires were sparking and growing hot with energy.