Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  Murtaza walked into his dorm room at Winthrop House in the autumn of 1972. His roommate was a young man with a rich baritone voice from the frontier of Texas. His name was Bill White and he had requested a roommate from Asia, someone preferably with an interest in politics. Bill recognized the name Bhutto on their door, he knew the name was from Pakistan, he was a keen student of all things political, but he didn’t realize that his Bhutto roommate would be the son of the premier who made the name sound familiar. Both Bill and Murtaza were from warm countries, both had scarcely experienced snow. They were both fuelled by their fascination with politics. Bill didn’t care much for the bust of Lenin that Murtaza kept in the room or the requisite posters of Che Guevara and Chou En-lai, but Murtaza wasn’t crazy about Bill’s country music either. They became fast friends.

  I had already graduated from college in New York and was midway through studying for my master’s in London when I felt brave enough to begin the search through my father’s past. The first step, I reasoned, would have to be the college years. I was in the throes of finding my own independence and remembered how Papa had spoken of his time at university as uncomplicated and beautiful and so decided, in a preemptively nostalgic strike of my own, to visit the Harvard Alumni Association online. I wrote to the 1976 class officers cautiously explaining my situation and trying not to frighten them with the details of my father’s life since college or with my intention to move backwards through time so that I could be with my father again. My request, tame as it was, was ignored by three of the four Class of ’76 representatives, but then, a reply. Nancy emailed me and threw herself into my search and would become a formidable ally in my time-travelling. She sent emails, SOSs for information on my father, updates to the newsletter; Nancy regularly posted my plea for help and worked as though she felt phantom pains, as if she understood how important it was to me and my journey to start at the one place that seemed the hardest to manoeuvre in.

  One by one the emails started rolling in. It was as if the universe and the Harvard Class of 1976 Alumni conspired together, as if they had been waiting for me to come so that they could relieve themselves of information they had been holding on to, keeping it only for me. I got bites of information from strangers, people who never knew Papa in college but remembered him being friends with this person or the other. I received emails, heartfelt letters from people who took classes with Papa, others who lived on his floor, and soon I had the names of his friends and roommates, phone numbers and addresses of the people who loved my father when he was a lanky teenager freshly thrown into American college life.

  There was, to be honest, only one exception. Only one person received the news of my quest and my request for help with trepidation and misgivings. Oddly enough, the person in question was a professor who taught at my undergraduate college. He declined to meet and speak with me. It was 2005, I was twenty-three years old and perhaps a little naïve. I tried to persuade the professor to see me; I offered to fly to his city whenever he might have time to spare. The tenth anniversary of my father’s death was the following year, I was desperate. I needed to fill in the blanks, to have something to give to my brother, who was turning sixteen and needed now more than ever to know the father he lost when he was only six years old. The professor did not budge. He was a friend of Benazir’s. ‘I was a classmate and acquaintance of Benazir at Harvard,’ he wrote to me, ‘and she and I renewed our acquaintance and became closer friends at Oxford (partly through Mir). I have remained friends with Benazir over the years, seeing her occasionally in Boston, New York, and Oxford.’ I read his email and felt my stomach hurt. I knew where he was going but thought it unimaginably cruel. ‘I trust you have talked with Benazir about getting her contribution to your project?’ he asked. Though I knew he was a dead end, it hurt me more than I was prepared for at the time to find that even friendships are political and that there, in a totally separate and seemingly safe place, was a familiar roadblock. It made me worry about the reach of power, but I wrote the professor one last email.

  It saddens me that my aunts cannot be helpful resources to me at this time, but I must make clear that my aim here is not to launch a vitriolic attack on anyone but simply to honour my father’s life through a meaningful remembrance. If you feel that you would rather not participate, I will of course respect your wishes. However, if you would feel comfortable talking about Mir and the time you knew him, I would be most grateful for your help.

  He never replied.

  The professor was a glitch in the machine. Everyone else I found connected me to webs of other people who welcomed me into their homes and lives when I made plans to travel back to the US and start my interviews. My father’s friends were a family, that was my biggest surprise. He never lost their love and affection and, when I found them, they easily and warmly transferred that love to me.

  ‘Your father and I were best friends some of the most critical years of our lives,’ Bill wrote to me after he received my letter. ‘Fatima, if you ever want a home away from home or a visit to a part of the United States which you may have not visited, please feel free to come to Houston. I can tell you more about your father that would make you proud.’ I flew to Texas to stay with Bill and his family. When Bill and I finally met, I was sitting at his kitchen counter eating a cookie. We spent several days together, time-travelling.

  In their freshman year, Bill bought the television and Murtaza the stereo. A typical day in their dorm room saw the two roommates waking up around nine in the morning – they both liked to rise early, regardless of their penchant for late nights – and heading towards their classes. They studied together in the library or in their room till eight in the evening. Then they’d have friends over, play liar’s dice, socialize and listen to reggae – The Harder They Come was their favourite album – late into the night.

  At the end of each semester, as the time to return home approached, Murtaza and Bill had a standing agreement. They would bring each other newspapers from their cities and when meeting again in the autumn or spring they would spend hours sitting together poring over daily news items from Texas and Pakistan with curiosity.

  They roomed together for the rest of their time in college. They added other roommates from time to time, essentially to get better housing, but they remained especially close to each other. ‘Murtaza was a politically sophisticated eighteen-year-old,’ Bill, then the Mayor of Houston – America’s fourth-largest city – and a prominent member of the Democratic Party, told me when I met him, exactly thirty years after he and my father graduated from Harvard. ‘He had a natural dignity to him, a certain gravitas. Both of us were idealistic and populistic about what we thought of the world . . . we both had a yearning to get into politics. He had no desire towards making money – we talked about it especially as a public servant where it’s a weakness. There had been attempts on his father’s life, so he knew it was risky, but it’s just what he wanted to do. He had a genuine interest in history, ideology, policy.’6

  But he was also just a kid, away from his family for the first time in his life. Another friend of Murtaza’s at Harvard in his freshman year remembered him as gregarious and outgoing. Milbry recognized instantly that Murtaza was someone who knew he was going somewhere in life, somewhere big, but he never showed it. She saw it, this strange glimmer of his, through time; Mir was easy-going and relaxed, not a crazed Harvard connector like so many others in their class. He was young, carefree. Two or three weeks after their first meeting, at a Woody Allen movie they both walked out of, Murtaza called Milbry up to complain that all his clothes were dirty. ‘I told him to wash them,’ Milbry recalled, laughing, ‘and he had never done his own laundry before, so I walked him through getting quarters and putting in the detergent. Two hours later Mir called me back screaming, “What did you tell me to do? All my suits have shrunk! My shoes!” he had dumped everything into the machine, expecting it to come out neatly pressed and clean!’7

  Together with Milbry, Murtaza tried out f
or a Harvard letter. They joined the rifle team. Milbry had learned to shoot in Texas and Murtaza out in Larkana on occasional hunts with his father. When they turned up at the team’s practice grounds, however, they were strapped into a tiny space where whether you got a bullseye or not depended on a fraction of a centimetre. It was very professional, very little was left to chance. Milbry remembers they went back a couple of times until Mir whispered during one session, ‘This isn’t really a sport, you know’, and they decided to quit. His extracurricular activities at Harvard were thus limited. Murtaza and his friends, who all knew him as Mir, watched movies at the student centre on campus, especially the Bond films, and went out to Elsie’s for sandwiches, to Tommy’s, the local twenty-four-hour diner, for midnight snacks, and to a Chinese restaurant called the Hong Kong, which was known locally for its especially bad food.

  Benazir and Murtaza overlapped at Harvard, Benazir was at Radcliffe and a year ahead of her younger brother, but what distance didn’t exist naturally was quietly created. The siblings had different friends and interests and though they knew each other’s groups and spent time together, Murtaza was content to leave Benazir in her own world. He was closer to their younger sister Sanam, who joined her siblings at Harvard two years after Murtaza. As in childhood, Sanam flitted between her brother and sister, adapting to each but promising no exclusive loyalty to either. Sanam, easy-going and not fussed about politics, was malleable and fun, whereas Benazir was prouder and more remote, even to her contemporaries. She also famously despised all her brother’s girlfriends. In one of our letters, I once asked my father to tell me about his old flames, desperate to have some dirt on my near perfect Papa. ‘Ask Wadi,’ he wrote back. ‘She hated all of them.’

  ‘If I hadn’t known that his father was Prime Minister at the time, I would never have suspected it,’ Peter, one of Murtaza’s three roommates from his second year onwards, told me, still surprised at the thought all these years later. ‘He was very down to earth, even-keeled, he never got angry but I think he carried it with him, as a burden maybe. I think he felt a certain responsibility, he was part of something larger.’8 Peter remembers Murtaza fasting during the month of Ramadan. Peter was from a blue-collar background in Buffalo, New York. He hadn’t come across many Muslims before. ‘But how can you not drink water all day?’ he would ask his roommate incredulously, and remembers Mir saying, in a Pakistani accent – which he imitated for me when we met at his Phoenix office – ‘You just have to do it, man.’ Peter also remembers Bill’s frustration that he just couldn’t get Murtaza to fully embrace the joys of country music.

  ‘Mir was completely comfortable anywhere,’ remembered Magda, a comparative literature major who was a part of Murtaza’s circle of friends, all formed during his first year at college. Magda looks like a brunette Kathleen Turner, she has a husky voice and she wears a string of pearls that bounces on her chest with every beat of her laughter. Magda is part Cuban, part Basque, and she dated one of Mir’s later roommates. They would go dancing. ‘It’s in my blood, I’m Cuban, I can move,’ Magda told me. ‘But your father . . .’ She stood up and imitated him, a notoriously enthusiastic but bad dancer, standing perfectly upright with his hands at breast level flaying this way and that with a robotic kind of rhythm, all the while bobbing his head to the beat of the song. ‘We called it the Mir dance,’ Magda explained. Magda cried several times as we spoke. ‘Your father was one of the kindest people I ever knew,’ she told me. ‘He had an enormous heart.’9

  All of Papa’s college friends had been rocked by his assassination and they all reacted to meeting me by examining me for signs of my father – you look like him, you’re shorter than he was (how did that happen?), your hands are the same – and then, when comfortable, by peppering me with questions, trying to understand how the Mir they knew had been killed. Before each interview, each visit, I coached myself not to get too emotional and break down in front of the people I was so nervous about meeting. But I didn’t cry, not really, I was too amazed and taken aback by this world I had discovered to allow my sadness to take over. My universe expanded exponentially, as did my knowledge of my father, all in a matter of weeks. I was elated that I had discovered an important part of my father’s past. But I also felt upset, angry that these people, Papa’s alternate American family, had been kept from me and my family when it became clear that everyone I interviewed knew my aunts, both Benazir and Sanam. Or rather, my aunts knew them. They had kept in touch with Murtaza’s friends, especially the important ones, over the years, had their phone numbers and email addresses, exchanged condolences and Christmas cards, details of their children and their spouses. And here I was, playing amateur private investigator, running from pillar to post with only shadows to chase and footprints highlighted by kind strangers to follow. I tried not to dwell on the unfairness, on being kept in the dark; I had found everyone I needed to, no matter how. Milbry, whose warm laugh and hugs saw me through my first day of the journey back in time, gives me feedback on my articles and career advice now; I’m on Bill’s email list of supporters as he campaigns to be governor of Texas; and Magda – who my journey ended with – emails me comforting thoughts when the news in my country is depressing and we speak of meeting again soon so she can show my mother the Mir dance.

  At Harvard Murtaza studied government – he was a major in the politics department – but branched out and took classes on sociology, environmental science – a class called ‘future of the earth’ was his favourite – and history, mainly focusing on Russian and Soviet politics. Robert Paarlberg was a teaching fellow who had returned to Harvard to work on a doctorate after his service in the Navy, when he took over a class on International Relations and Security Policy in the spring of 1975. ‘I didn’t know what to expect when I saw Murtaza’s name on the list of students assigned to me,’ Professor Paarlberg confessed in his office at Harvard, where he still teaches. ‘He was the son of a Prime Minister. I wasn’t at Harvard when his sister was there, but she had a reputation for being outspoken, conspicuous and drawing on her connections. But the first time I met Murtaza it was pretty clear that he was there to take advantage of the undergraduate classroom experience. He was serious about his studies . . . he was unassuming, affable. I thought, OK, this is interesting, he’s just another good student.’10

  Murtaza had a specific interest in foreign policy. Across the oceans, Bangladesh was being formed, broken off from Pakistan. In the United States Vietnam was tearing apart a generation of young Americans and the Cold War was expanding its client list and moving across the lines drawn at the end of the Second World War. Paarlberg had served in the Navy as a Naval Intelligence officer. Murtaza found his record fascinating and they spent time talking together in and outside class. ‘He struck me as someone who would be a very effective politician,’ his professor remembers. ‘Mir connected with people so easily and paid attention to them. He had a light touch and a sense of humour but he wasn’t getting ahead of himself, trying to be a politician while he was a student at Harvard. He seemed to live in the moment.’

  Professor William Graham, now the Dean of the Divinity School at Harvard, taught Murtaza an Islamic Civilizations course. ‘I think he was curious about me, a white Anglo-Saxon teaching Islam,’ Graham recalls with a laugh, ‘but in the course he was very interested in expanding his knowledge of Islam outside of Pakistan – we covered the African world, for example, and that greatly interested him.’11

  In one of his blue Harvard exam books, marked with a slightly deformed-looking B grade on the cover, Murtaza threw himself into Professor Graham’s material. ‘The Islamic system is a society, a state, a thought and art,’ begins his answer, quoting Bernard Lewis (not yet known as the academic-cum-state-department advisor who pushed America to war after 9/11 or even, I suspect, as academia’s premier Orientalist). Murtaza reaches further, connecting his interest in government with the subject of Islamic order. ‘The prophet was a religious head as well as the legislature, the executive and th
e judiciary. He was a man with absolute and religious powers.’ He scribbled maps beneath his answers, maps of dry farming zones in the north of the Sahara desert and south of the Turkish mountains, explaining the nomadic nature of early Islamic communities. The comments at the end of his answers, written in pencil, read, ‘Good essay moving from general points to practical illustrations.’

  ‘I had no sense in class or in our interactions that Murtaza wanted everyone to know who he was,’ said Professor Graham, who also knew the two Bhutto sisters during their respective times at Harvard. ‘He was just Mir as Mir. It was very attractive about him. He didn’t have an idée fixe about position or power. He wasn’t pushy, he didn’t come across to me as someone gearing up to be a politician. He didn’t push himself on you, but when he opened up and you began talking to him he was very warm and sociable, easy to talk to.’

  In class, Murtaza’s political connections and family gene pool rarely, if ever, came up. He had grown up the son of a politician in Pakistan; that relationship formed the basis of how people saw him back home and he was determined not to let it follow him to college. The times when it slipped were more humorous than anything else. Professor Paarlberg remembers a day in the spring of 1975 when Murtaza, his eager student, missed class. He came over the next time the class gathered for its recitations and discussions and apologized to the professor, saying he had been out of town. Where were you? asked Professor Paarlberg. Washington, Murtaza answered. What were you doing there? his professor pressed on, ‘Well, I had to go to a state dinner,’ Murtaza replied, ‘I thought it might be interesting’. His father had been in town on a state visit to the United States, meeting President Gerald Ford, whose predecessor, Richard Nixon, had been very friendly to Zulfikar and Pakistan. Professor Paarlberg had opened up a can of worms; one of the other students jumped in and asked whether Ford’s daughter, known for her looks, had been a good dancer. ‘Murtaza said she wasn’t as good as he was,’ Paarlberg remembered, laughing, ‘but it took a lot of prodding to get that out.’