Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  I enrolled at the Karachi American School, starting in the second semester of sixth grade. Unlike in Damascus, everyone knew who I was. My aunt was Prime Minister and my father was in jail. I wasn’t anonymous any more. The school was enormous, with a swimming pool and tennis courts and a football field the size of my old school. I missed Damascus and my friends more than I thought possible. I spent all my free time on the telephone to my friends in Syria, racking up huge bills.

  A few days after reaching Karachi, we finally saw Papa, in court. He was being brought to the High Court near the American consulate and we went with Joonam to see him for the first time since he’d left that early November morning. We were all so excited, Mummy dressed up and I imagined a family reunion with Joonam at our side. But the minute we reached the courts, I felt out of my depth. There were reporters everywhere and hundreds of men who had come to meet Papa and shake his hand and have a picture taken with him. There was almost no space for us. We sat behind him in court and I leaned forward, not understanding a word of the court proceedings. Papa was wearing a starched white shalwar kameez, which I’d rarely seen him in. He was seated at a bench with his lawyers but his co-accuseds in the case, young men, were standing in the dock, their arms and feet shackled in large rusty chains. I’d never seen anything like it. Papa leaned over to talk to them in between proceedings and joked and laughed with them, his way of reaching out and breaking the barriers that kept him seated on a bench and them standing in chains.

  Shahnawaz Baloch told me later that the first time he met Papa after his return was in court. He was in custody too at the time, jailed by Benazir without warrant, and appearing as one of the co-accused in Zia’s ninety or so cases against the Bhutto brothers. ‘He hugged me’, Shahnawaz said, ‘like a bear. He told me, “Shahnawaz, don’t worry. Now I’m back, everything will be fine.”’12

  Everyone flocked to see Murtaza in court – it was the only glimpse of him that they could get: parliament was too secure and the gates guarded against citizens coming in. Hameed remembers how after not being able to see Murtaza land at Jinnah Airport, he and some fellow workers prepared to receive him on his first showing in court. ‘We were in our area, Malir, and we had gone and bought rose petals. We parked on a street that we knew the police car carrying him to court would pass through, and sat there right in the middle of the road! We didn’t want to miss Mir baba this time. We covered the flowers in the back seat with fabric so that the police wouldn’t stop us, and got out of the car and waited. We showered the street with rose petals when Mir baba passed, we shouted Jiye Bhutto, and he saw us. He raised a fist to us, we knew the signal. Be strong. Then when we got to court, he hugged me and said, “Hameed bhai, what name are you using here?”’ Hameed laughs, expecting me to understand the Kabul connection, but I don’t. He has to explain it to me. I am learning the codes of this language, it has taken time but after enough nom de guerres are bandied about you eventually start to think in double identities.

  We had to share Papa in court that day. I wanted to have him all to myself and I kept trying to squeeze my way closer to him. Finally the court broke for a recess and we went into a side room for Papa to smoke and for us to finally be alone. We hugged and I cried. He seemed larger, taller, stronger here. He was more formal. He told us, when everyone had left, that we had brought too much luggage from Damascus, which rather annoyed Mummy and me. After all the trauma we’d been through that’s the first thing he thought to say to us? But we didn’t dwell on it. We were so happy to see Papa and to know that he was OK. We had all felt so stranded in 70 Clifton without him, as if we were in a waiting room, in transit, living unofficially until he returned. We spent a lot of strange moments in courtrooms while Papa was imprisoned. Mummy and I both spent birthdays in court, watching bail hearings being postponed. We had our first – our only – family portrait taken in a Karachi courtroom. We experienced Papa in public, as a politician, in those rooms for the first time.

  { 18 }

  I n an interview with the local Weekend Post, Murtaza was asked what had become a frequent question. His sister, the Prime Minister, insisted there were no problems between the two siblings. Everything was fine. He’s in jail, yes, I had him arrested, but aside from my brother being a terrorist we have no problems, only personal ones here and there. She projected their differences as trivial, familial ones. ‘There is no personal conflict between me and Benazir,’ Murtaza answered – sometimes he called her Mrs Zardari, because he said she had long since stopped behaving like a Bhutto. I’m a feminist, I kept my name, Benazir would return, infuriated at being called by her husband’s name. If the Prime Minister is a feminist, it prompts the question as to why she hasn’t repealed the Hudood Ordinances, Papa would retort. The argument usually met its end at this point – ‘There, however, exist differences in political perceptions, concepts and method.’

  The question that followed was, again, typical; was this all a show then? Some sort of inter-family drama being played out on the national stage? And Murtaza answered as clearly as he always did.

  As far as the ‘drama’ is concerned, I can assure you that . . . had it been a drama, my plane would not have been turned back. I would not have been arrested without a warrant, locked in jail without formal charges, wouldn’t have been brought to the court until after a lapse of seventy hours. I should have met my lawyers the next day and not after twenty days. We should have got all the papers pertaining to my cases immediately. At the time of writing this, my lawyers still do not have them. If all this had been a drama, the champions of justice who believe that ‘the law should take its own course’ would have not arrested thousands of my supporters, my reception camps (at the airport) would not have been uprooted, my supporters’ houses would not have been bulldozed. I would not be sitting and writing these answers to you from solitary confinement in the former punishment ward of Landhi District East Prison.1

  Murtaza was taken to the Sindh Assembly to swear his oath and when he rose to speak for the first time in parliament, the Daily Nation newspaper noted that ‘the hall of the Sindh Assembly was in a state of pin-drop silence when a new voice intended to introduce itself in the House for the first time, the voice of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, jailed brother of the Prime Minister.’2

  I was at school that day. I wasn’t allowed to miss any of my classes. Papa was strict about only one thing – my education – and when I returned home I saw my grandmother crying. ‘He sounded just like his father,’ Joonam said. It was true; they shared the same hoarse almost high-pitched voice when they were speaking publicly and the same deep tone in conversation. ‘It was people from her party, from what was supposed to be the opposition to Mir, who had tears in their eyes when he spoke that day,’ Suhail tells me. ‘Some of them broke party lines and came and kissed your father’s hand after he spoke, it was such a strange thing to do, but they were moved. You see, that’s what really threatened Pinky. The challenge to her and the support for Mir came from within the workers in her own party, from inside not outside.’3

  Though Murtaza was essentially received as the heralded elder son of his father when he returned to Pakistan, he had a lot to prove. He was keenly aware of this. It informed his decision to contest a provincial seat, as opposed to a national one; he wanted to start from the bottom. Murtaza was different from his family. He didn’t believe in the feudal entitlement that came with the name; he had seen his sister go from gainfully unemployed to Prime Minister at the age of thirty-five and then back out of a job two years later. Murtaza made it clear that he would start from the bottom and work his way up. People had to learn about him, they had to discover who he was – he had to prove himself. And slowly, he did.

  Speaking to a Dawn journalist during a court recess Murtaza addressed the negative campaign the PPP was launching against him, ‘It has become a favourite pastime for certain opportunist elements in the party to harp on the theme that Murtaza Bhutto is living in a time warp,’ he said.

  This presumes th
at when I speak of the crippling poverty around us, I am living in the past because there is supposed to be no poverty in Pakistan. When I speak of the poor, of the shirtless, the homeless, and the hungry, of the need for clean water, rural dispensaries, schools, the crying need to eradicate corruption, rape, drugs and so on, I am supposed to be living in the past. The presumption being that these are not the urgent tasks facing us as a nation about to enter the twenty-first century. If I’m living in a time warp, where are these jokers living? In Switzerland?4

  Papa was a sharp and sarcastic breath of fresh air. He said that the PPP had become a party of ‘robber barons’ and called for a ‘system of progressive taxation on all sectors of a certain income bracket, including agrarian land owners’ to be strictly implemented, no small suggestion coming from a man with a rich feudal background. He said the country would need ‘open heart surgery’ to treat corruption. The newspaper noted that he also ‘favoured party elections’. Murtaza had become the anti-Benazir in the media. He was, by virtue of his ideology, the antithesis of what Benazir had become in power. And this did not please her.

  I still spoke to my aunt, somewhat awkwardly. We had been very close when I was younger. I was the first child born into the family and she was my Wadi bua. I loved her deeply and used to ask to spend time with her whenever I could. I was present at her engagement to the man who would take over her life and party. I was a chaperone on their dates, including the one – at an amusement park outside London – where she decided to marry Zardari. Her hand had been stung by a bee and Asif asked an amusement park stall holder for some ice to put on it. She said later that that’s when she knew he was ‘the one’. But since we returned to Pakistan I had seen a different, ugly side to my aunt.

  I called her one afternoon and in a fit of childish hope asked her why she was being so vicious to my father. Wadi was conciliatory, as she usually was when backed against a wall. You don’t know what’s happening, I’m not doing anything. You’ve misunderstood the situation, etc. etc. Finally, I had her where I wanted her. ‘Well, if you’re being honest and you have nothing to do with his bad treatment,’ I said, ‘come and see him with us in jail tomorrow.’ She froze. I was eleven years old. I pushed again. We have to be there at four. She was in Karachi. I had waited for Wadi to be in the city before making the call. She mumbled something about speaking to the head of some department for permission to visit the prison and promised she would call me back to confirm. I was elated. ‘She’s coming!’ I told Mummy and Joonam. ‘Wadi said she would – she just needs to confirm.’ They both looked at me a little sadly. ‘No, no,’ I assured them, ‘she’s coming.’ I knew what they were thinking. I was naïve; she was engaged in a political war against her brother. But I thought that if she’d only come and meet him face to face, alone, she’d realize that she was wrong; that they were strongest together, not apart; that she’d been led astray, that his politics were the ones their father built a nation on years ago and were the beliefs Wadi had held as her own before power happened to her. I thought these things could be true, could happen. She didn’t call me back. I called her in the evening, several times, starting from 6 p.m. Finally, somewhere around dinner time Wadi took my call and said, ‘Sorry, Fati, I can’t come.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. I had started to cry, but was biting my lip, hoping she wouldn’t hear. ‘I couldn’t get permission from the jail to come’ was Wadi’s reply. ‘But you’re the Prime Minister ,’ I shouted. ‘Yes, well. They didn’t give me permission.’ And with that, the conversation was over. I couldn’t shift the blame from her any more. She was involved. She was running the show.

  We made the trip to Landhi Jail to see Papa once a week. I remember it being midweek, Wednesday or Thursday. It took us forty-five minutes to get to Landhi from our school, which was near Karachi’s Jinnah Airport. Our visits began at 4 p.m. sharp; if we were held up in traffic or for some reason delayed, the time started without us. We couldn’t have a minute longer than the forty-five given to us once a week.

  During the first few trips, I’d ask, beg, for a few more minutes with Papa. He wouldn’t ask. He knew that his warden, Durrani, who was kind and accommodating, would lose his job if it was discovered that he was treating Murtaza Bhutto too well. So I would ask. Could we have one more minute, please? The warden would bow his head, unable to grant my request, and shake his face from side to side without looking at me. It wasn’t his fault, I knew that, but I had to ask. What damage would an additional sixty seconds do? I remembered, in those minutes, those head-shaking minutes, Wadi’s descriptions in her book of how she was torn from her father, from Zulfikar, when he was spending his last days in Rawalpindi Jail. Why didn’t she remember that? I used to stay up late at night thinking. Why was she punishing us the way she had been punished herself?

  It bore away at my heart to have only forty-five minutes a week with my father. Mummy assures me we only had forty minutes a week with Papa, I don’t remember. Five minutes extra seems generous to me now, 300 glorious seconds, so I add them on. We couldn’t speak on the telephone – there were no mobile phones around then, and even if there had been, Papa would not have been allowed to keep one. I had grown up with my father being my sole property until the age of seven, I couldn’t handle not sharing my day with him, not having him nearby to listen to jokes or check my homework. It was too much for the eleven-year-old me to handle.

  So I wrote Papa a letter on my adolescent stationery, the kind printed on Day-Glo paper and covered with unicorns and rainbows. ‘For Papa: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY,’ I wrote on the envelope. I spent two pages wailing and moaning. It wasn’t fair that Mummy got to see him in court when I was at school, I whinged. I offered, quite magnanimously, to miss school on the days when Papa had court appearances or Sindh Assembly meetings, which always met in the mornings and during the week. He wrote back and marked his own plain white envelope: ‘To Papy from Papa’. The top right hand corner had ‘PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL’ underlined in all capitals and on the bottom left ‘FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, also underlined.

  ‘Dear Fatima (frustrated) Bhutto’ he wrote, instantly making me laugh.

  My little darling, I read your letter and sympathize with your complaint. You have every right to see me and be with me as much as possible. And you know that nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see you, be next to you and to hold you in my arms. But, because I love you so much I want to make sure that you get your full education. You are a brilliant child and will one day become famous in your own right. But that won’t be possible without a complete education. Grandpapa used to say that you can take everything away from a person – homes, money, jewellery – but you cannot take away what is in the mind. That is the safest treasure . . . If my court meets on Saturday then I would be more than happy if you came. When I am free from this jail where Wadi has put me then we will again be virtually inseparable. Until then, and for ever, I love you and adore you more than you can imagine. Love Papa. P.S Papy, you know when you were much younger you already had a natural talent for poetry. I still have in Damascus one lovely (and funny) poem you wrote about Mummy about 2 or 3 years ago. And the poem you read me recently (during your last exclusive visit) was beautiful. Here is a small one on Wadi and Slippery Joe:

  Inky, Pinky, Ponky

  Her husband is a donkey

  Both loot the country

  Her husband is a monkey

  Inky, Pinky, Ponky

  From then on, buoyed by my father’s letter and his efforts to make me laugh and look on the bright side of our strange life, I reconciled myself to counting the minutes until Papa was released from jail, but resolved to make the most of our miserly time together.

  Soon, the jail visits became a normal part of our bizarre lives. We would always arrive full of jitters and sit in the empty cement room, which was unpainted and grim but at least cool in Karachi’s repressive heat and open the tiffin boxes we’d packed with food to share with Papa. Mummy and Zulfi both ate earlier in the day, small meals so they’d have ro
om for another later, but I’d starve in school so I could have lunch with Papa at 4 p.m.

  We sat on wooden chairs that would have seemed uncomfortable if we weren’t so thrilled to be there and put the food and plates out on the rectangular table covered with a gingham plastic tablecloth, waiting anxiously to see Papa. Zulfi and I would stand at the window until we could make out Papa being escorted across the dusty prison yard, at which point we’d bolt out of the room to run to him. The warden would always smile when he saw us and would pat Zulfi’s head affectionately.

  Zulfi would often sit on Papa’s lap during our visits and would get his father’s undivided attention whenever he spoke; he was going to be four years old and was already a chatty and clever young boy. Sometimes Papa would ask us to bring Kashmiri tea. He never drank tea or coffee, but he liked Kashmiri chai, a strange drink of coagulated pink tea, flavoured with spices and pistachios. I never cared for it much then, but I always had a cup. Now I can’t drink it. It reminds me too much of those forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes I would kill for now.