“Margaret Thatcher, John Major, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi”—she turned to me and grinned— “Genghis Khan.”
Our hull full of exotic treasures, from pearls to peppercorns, we docked our avocado at the port of Gwadar in the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan along the shores of the Arabian Sea.
Later, my father would go out onto the grass and spread a sheet over the wide base of a twenty-foot jamun tree, whose oblong-shaped and purple berries grew in abundance. Hoisting us up with interlaced hands, he sent us climbing high into the full branches, and we felt like explorers in some prehistoric Himalayan world. Fruits so rich and purple and hanging like dark juicy gems.
“Now, my children—jump!”
And we did, Ayesha and I both giggling like birds up there and the branches shaking, ripened fruit coming down like purple hailstones over the clean white sheet.
“Why are leaves green, Ayesha?”
“Chlorophyll.”
“How do leaves make food, Genghis?”
“There is a kitchen in the trunk.”
“Answer now, my boy, or I will make you memorize ten suras instead of five.”
“I already know ten today, so it’s no matter. But I will tell you, Baba. The answer is photosynthesis, from Allah’s great big sun.”
And my father let out a roaring laugh. And as he laughed hard, he waved his arms wildly like a conductor, and we jumped high up and down on our branches, arms holding on tight, the fruit raining down all over him, pounding against his head, shoulders, and back, and he caught one in his hand, bit into it, his lips instantly going purple, his tongue dark, as though he’d just dipped it into a pot of ink.
“Ayesha, tell your warrior brother up there on his jamun throne the three best words said together in any language.”
I could see Ayesha above me, sitting among the leaves and branches. When she grinned at our father’s command, I glimpsed the pearls of her teeth. Even now I can still hear that elegant, booming voice. And the thuds of three jamun fruit hitting the ground at my father’s feet, one for every word.
“We the People . . .”
*
Later, on a television screen—a black-and-white Zenith whose speakers crackled in rhythm to the whirring tape rotors of a VCR borrowed for the weekend from a teacher at the college—stood a woman with big eyes and high cheeks, all in white, speaking. Long arms spread like wings, gaze unflinching. Once, we counted to ninety-nine before we saw her blink. Scouring university libraries, my father brought home tapes of all her famous speeches. I knew her face well, the sound of her voice a torrent of strength as familiar as my mother’s; she was the daughter of our once-great leader Zulfikar, and the first female ever elected to lead a Muslim state. Benazir Bhutto—the only hero Ayesha and I had ever had.
As the ninth prime minister of Pakistan, her father had opened over six thousand schools across the country, and Benazir had raised the bar of that legacy to inspire all girls, from one end of the tribal lands to the other, to seek an education. Benazir Bhutto made us believe that we too could aspire to and achieve greatness. Ayesha stood tall in her own veil, facing the grainy screen, speaking. In perfect pitch, she synchronized their voices and mirrored every gesture even adjusting her white hijab to punctuate a particular point, stopping to tilt her head and then speak again. Her voice, humming with a power so beyond her years and stature, took all the air out of the room. Suddenly our house was transformed into an auditorium, where I sat with the rest of my family on folding chairs my father had brought back from the college. Then my sister turned to us, Benazir behind her addressing the US House of Representatives back in 1989, both their faces slightly turned, held high; and they said together, as though meeting within a fold of time:
“We gather here to celebrate freedom, to celebrate democracy, to celebrate the three most beautiful words in the English language . . . We the People.”
Within a month, Ayesha was sitting next to my father in the pick up, singing out suras, hurtling along the Suleiman Mountains and down into the quiet valley of our native village. Benazir Bhutto had accepted an invitation to speak at an assembly of Pashtun leaders deep inside FATA (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas). My father’s extended family, who were influential and politically engaged in the region, were key organizers of the event. My father had heard about the meeting and made up his mind to attend it with Ayesha. It might be the only chance she would ever have to actually meet her hero. My sister was determined that she would do more than attend; she told us all that she was going to deliver her best speech to Benazir. My mother and Ayesha honed her speech; cleaned and pressed her whitest veil. Then my father gassed up the pickup for the long, winding journey back to our tribal land. Despite appearances, they were not really welcome there—someone had ratted out my mother for abandoning her domestic duties to go to college. I would be next. But Pashtunwali code demanded unreserved hospitality. Baba knew it would be just enough—they needed less than one day, even one hour.
Armed guards in convoys surrounded the village on all sides. My father needed no papers—you could tell from his eyes and the way he spoke that he belonged. With offhand waves, the guards let them in. My father and sister could see the tent was up, hear drumbeats and a rifle discharge several times. Ayesha unfolded her white hijab and draped it over herself, my father making adjustments here and there. He knew his cousins and uncle would be mortified to see them.
By the time my father and nine-year-old Ayesha, in her clean clothes, entered the tent, it was far too late to turn her away. No one wanted to risk a scene at such an important event, and they all knew they could count on my father to make one if anyone crossed him. Heads whipped around, mouths opened, but no one dared do a thing. Who could say a word when the only other female in the room, invited to address the most powerful families of FATA, was an ex–prime minister and the progeny of a great liberator? My father said as much, laughing when he later told us every detail of the story.
Within minutes of their entrance, Benazir Bhutto took to the stage. Her eyes commanded the room. Ayesha started counting in her head, and she told me that she had reached forty-three when those eyes locked on her own. They blinked in tandem, touched their veils. No one made a sound when Benazir spoke; all that could be heard was her voice rising like a great tide washing over the assembly. Cameras flashed. Guards lined the perimeter, on the lookout for gunmen, suicide bombers; there was always a multitude of threats. After a few minutes, one or two older men groaned, but most were still; a few feet shifted on the bright silks of the Afghan rugs laid out over the gravel.
The assembly rose as soon as Benazir Bhutto was done speaking.
The boom of a rifle sounded, and the crowd closed in as she descended the dais to greet several people in person. Our Wazir cousins, who should have taken her small hand, pushed against Ayesha, letting her know that her presence was unwelcome. She might have gotten away with sitting in the audience, but they were determined to keep her from getting anywhere near Benazir Bhutto. Somehow, as the gathering surged, she’d lost my father. The men were raucous and shoving one another to get in closer. Female or not, the woman up there was powerful, and just to touch her hand they would have severed another. Twenty-five men in each row, fifteen rows—Ayesha had counted. Seeing my father through the mob of bodies, she held out her hands to slice her way through. She told us later that it felt as though she was squeezing through a narrow tunnel, there were so many people all pressed around her.
My father grabbed Ayesha’s hand and pulled her through the heaving throng. Then, a row of figures, Ayesha spied through the flutter of a white robe slip over a red Afghan rug—almost close enough to touch. A second was all it took for the woman to see that small rose blooming in the forest, and Benazir turned.
“There is a child here. Let her speak to me.”
“Your Excellency, I have written a speech for you. In English. May I, please?�
�
“Make her a path up to the dais, and let us all hear her.”
When Ayesha spoke, her voice poured in waterfalls of perfect pitch and cadence over the assembly:
“Why should a girl not learn in university, see a doctor, travel the world as Benazir Bhutto has? Why marry a man at all, if a girl chooses not to? Why should a gun decide where the mind should hold dominion? Where did our choices go? Allah didn’t take them—men did. Nothing anyone can do will stop me from saying these things. I will speak for women’s rights and against injustice everywhere. Try to stop me and I will say it all, even louder.”
When Ayesha was finished, Benazir, sitting on a silk-draped seat, beckoned, her gold bangles singing.
“I have ten thousand rupees in my purse. I give them to you, as I believe that must be your price.”
Ayesha, with a soft smile, said:
“Excellency, as you are no longer our prime minister, I cannot accept such a gift. You must need every rupee in your purse.”
Benazir Bhutto turned her head to one side, considered a moment, and stared a long time at my sister, who stared back straight-faced, unblinking. So many minutes passed, the crowd held in a hush, my father thought they might be speaking in a way no one else could hear. Then Benazir laughed. Those intelligent eyes, those perfect teeth and jamun lips; with her Harvard and Oxford degrees and bulletproof mind, she was the embodiment of every dream Ayesha had for herself.
“Child, do not call me Excellency. From this day, call me Mother.”
One encounter with her hero heightened Ayesha’s resolve to fulfill her political aspirations, and she never once wavered from that path. By the time she was in her early teens, she had a job working as a current affairs host on a national television show filmed in Islamabad. Sitting before the camera all grace and poise, no one would have guessed that she was still a child. When my sister had a dream, she reached for it with both arms. And she never gave up on the dream of meeting Benazir Bhutto in person again. As soon as she was of age, Ayesha joined the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and stepped onto the political stage as though she owned it. Over the years, there had been letters back and forth, the gift of an Oxford dictionary as big as a cinder block, two lavish dresses.
Nine years after that first encounter, Ayesha’s dream would be realized in Islamabad. Then, at just eighteen and once again draped in her pristine whites, but with ministers and members of the national and provincial assemblies surrounding her instead of tribal elders, Ayesha was in another crowded room waiting for Benazir to address the crowd. If my sister was nervous, she never showed it. Someone once said that when crossed in a debate, Ayesha could bring about an ice age with a look from her eyes— though she melted more hearts than my father could count. When she was barely ten, a rich Pashtun who wanted her as a bride for his reckless son offered her full weight in gold to my father to make the promise.
That day, Benazir Bhutto was sitting in a chair when Ayesha came forward, sun streaming behind her through a wall of tall windows; her figure glowing white, that crown of black hair just visible against the edge of her veil. Bhutto later told her secretary she thought in that moment she’d glimpsed an angelic vision of herself, years before, when she’d come back to Pakistan from Massachusetts and Oxford to cash in her lofty dreams.
“I have seen you before, but you are not me.”
“No, we’ve met before, half my lifetime ago. I’m from South Waziristan and I won’t call you Excellency.”
Bhutto brought her hands to her face, the polished gold bands and bangles shackling her fingers and wrists flashing. Later, they said, she left the room to weep, as that small child coming back to her as an educated woman was a manifestation of all the work she had done to liberate young girls in Pakistan. After that meeting, people began to say that Ayesha was Bhutto’s muse. The minute my sister had uttered the first word, Benazir Bhutto knew exactly who she was.
“What will you call me then?”
“You remember—I will not call you Excellency, I will call you Mother.”
*
Muslims believe in predestination, or qadar—that everything that has transpired or will come to pass was written out in a divine decree at the inception of all life. Our births were written before we were born. The very hour and manner of our deaths were foretold millennia before we take our last breath. And my father always taught us that great leaders are granted only a flash of life to set the world on fire, such was their written destiny—Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, a founding father of modern Pakistan—Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. We never wanted to consider that his daughter might one day join that list, though we feared it—courage in Pakistan is often a fatal virtue. In our hearts and minds, Benazir Bhutto was smarter than the others, special, and her work to emancipate the women of Pakistan and to rid the tribal region of extremists was not nearly done. When her political rivals drummed up corruption charges against her in the late 1990s, she left the country for eight years of self-imposed exile in Dubai and London to assure her own safety.
When she returned triumphant, with an amnesty from President Musharraf, my father said it was a mistake. “Go back, go back,” he said, as he watched news footage of her plane landing in Karachi. We all knew her life was at risk—two suicide bombers tried and failed to kill her shortly after she left the airport, massacring 136 people. Even now, I can hear my father pleading with her exquisite image, as she waved to the masses, to leave our country. She did not, and all we had for solace was our faith in qadar—Benazir Bhutto’s time, as it was written long before time itself, had come. We saw it happen in our living room. It was 2007. We sat on a semicircle of rugs, and when the screen showed blood, we saw it for what it was.
Thousands of people were gathered in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, the elections just two weeks away. Everyone there believed our new leader had come home for good. There she was, standing alone on the lectern among a sea of chanting men. Big smile. Unafraid. White veil—translucent this time; the glasses she wore more often than not; royal-blue dress, satin sheen. She glanced at her watch before leaving, as though time didn’t matter anymore. Or perhaps it did, each squandered second a lost linchpin to survival, though she didn’t know it. She tripped on the hem of a long scarf, a drab thing that might have been dipped in mud, going down the steps, flanked by people singing her name again and again all the way to her car. I remember thinking that had she not slipped on that fringe, she could have gained the seconds needed to cheat the echo of her father’s destiny. Not checked her watch. Not waved to the crowd that one time. Not been there at all. Never come back to us from her exile. A man stepped forward and helped her with a flourish, and she stopped to thank him. Another four seconds—far too late.
She took a white armored Toyota Land Cruiser. But she stood up through the open roof hatch, head and shoulders exposed to greet the wild, jubilant throng. Hundreds deep, arms raised, bodies swarmed the car. Voices called her name, chanting out into a great roar of adulation. The video, grainy and crude, showed her white veil, her face turned away when it happened. Amid the chanting, the chaos of the crowd—three quick shots. One pistol, one clean-shaven man. And Benazir Bhutto, our high hope, her smiling picture adorning the walls of our rooms all our lives, wherever we lived, however we suffered, went straight back down into the hatch. My father played the video back again several times to listen to those shots. Closed his eyes, held up his fingers. One, two, three. He pointed out the way her head moved and her hijab shifted just as the gunman fired. Immediately following the bullets, a bomb blast detonated and the screen went white, then black. We knew already from her sudden lifeless fall that the wound was fatal. The news stations reported that Benazir died in the hospital some time later.
There was carnage in the aftermath. Cries of pain through smoke. The exuberant scene one moment before suddenly transformed into an abandoned battlefield. Everywhere, parts of people, parts of cars, parts of buildings, all scattered
in bits like garbage strewn over the rally square. The black, blood-spattered floor of an abattoir in hell. The living walked like zombies among the dead and half dead, the whites of their eyes bulging, stains on their clothes. Some of them were soaked red from limb to limb. Pant legs shredded, one man sat in a daze against another, missing his feet. He was pointing to another man, still able-bodied, walking past, and somehow I knew he was sending him out to find his shoes, his incinerated feet. When I asked my father, he said the man was in shock and wouldn’t die. The heat from the blast had cauterized his wounds.
Later in the week, we saw footage of the interior of Bhutto’s car. Blooms of blood stained the seat where she had fallen back like an angel, unconscious. A gush soaked into the cushion. Her black leather shoes, the insides pink, lay on their sides. Two shots hit her, my father said, one in the neck; he called it a mortal wound. At the time, I thought a fatal injury should be called immortal, because we all know our bodies die but we do not. There were two men—the gunman and a sidekick bomber. Plan A and Plan B. The first got Bhutto point-blank; then the second man got himself and twenty others, just one second later. Dozens were maimed. All those half-ruined limbs lying in puddles of blood belonged to people now dead or only partly alive. The meticulous bomber must have packed all of his clothes with lethal shrapnel—mostly nails, packets of razor blades, metal pellets designed for BB guns. Just one through an eye could kill.
The government tried to control the information about the method of death, and their narrative changed by the week. They said Benazir hit her head, cracked her skull open on a window lever. They showed X-rays on TV. It did not matter one way or the other, not to us. Not to my sister, who had pinned her very soul to Benazir. We saw the end of the thing we cherished most, our high hope—vanquished.
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 7