Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

A speeding jeep. Crowds frozen in fear behind security forces, not know-ing the fate of their Prime Minister. Prison gates hastily opened and closed. My mother and I being searched again by jail matrons, first leav-ing our own prison in Sihala, then again when we

arrived at the jail in Rawalpindi.

’Why are you both here?’ my father says from inside the inferno of his cell.

My mother doesn’t answer.

’Is this the last meeting?’ he asks.

My mother cannot bear to answer.

’I think so,’ I say.

He calls for the jail superintendent who is standing by. They never leave us alone with Papa.

’Is this the last meeting?’ my father asks him.

’Yes,’ comes the reply. The jail superintendent seems ashamed to be the bearer of the regime’s plans.

’Has the date been fixed?’

’Tomorrow morning,’ the superintendent says.

’At what time?’

’At five o’clock, accordng to jail regulations.’

’When did you receive this information?’

’Last night,’ he says reluctantly.

My father looks at him.

DAUGHTER OF THE EAST

’How much time do I have with my family?’

’Half an hour.’

’Under jail regulations, we are entitled to an hour,’ he says.

’Half an hour,’ the superintendent repeats. ’Those are my orders.’

’Make arrangements for me to have a bath and a shave,’ my father tells him. ’The world is beautiful and I want to leave it clean.’

Half an hour. Half an hour to say good-bye to the person I love more than any other in my life. The pain in my chest tightens into a vice. I must not cry. I must not break down and make my father’s ordeal any more difficult.

He is sitting on the floor on a mattress, the only furniture left in his cell. They have taken away his table and his chair. They have taken away his bed.

’Take these,’ he says, handing me the magazines and books I had brought him before. ’I don’t want them touching my things.’

He hands me the few cigars his lawyers have brought him. ’I’ll keep one for tonight,’ he says. He also keeps his bottle of Shalimar cologne.

He starts to hand me his ring, but my mother tells him to keep it on. ’I’ll keep it for now, but afterwards I want it to go to Benazir,’ he tells her.

’I have managed to send out a message,’ I whisper to him as the jail authorities strain to hear. I outline the details and he looks satisfied. ’She’s almost learned the ropes of politics,’ his expression reads.

The light inside the death cell is dim. I cannot see him clearly. Every other visit they have allowed us to sit together inside his cell. But not today. My mother and I squeeze together at the bars of his cell door, talking to him in whispers.

’Give my love to the other children,’ he says to Mummy. ’Tell Mir and Sunny and Shah that I have tried to be a good father and wish I could have said good-bye to them.’ She nods, but cannot speak.

’You have both suffered a lot,’ he says. ’Now that they are going to kill me tonight, I want to free you as well. If you want to,

you can leave Pakistan while the Constitution is suspended and Martial Law imposed. If you want peace of mind and to pick up your lives again, then you might want to go to Europe. I give you my permission. You can go.’

Our hearts are breaking. ’No, no,’ Mummy says. ’We can’t go. We’ll never go. The Generals must not think they have won. Zia has scheduled elections again, though who knows if he will dare to hold them? If we leave, there will be no one to lead the party, the party you built.’

’And you, Pinkie?’ my father asks.

’I could never go,’ I say.

He smiles. ’I’m so glad. You don’t know how much I love you, how much I’ve always loved you. You are my jewel. You always have been.’

’Time is up,’ the superintendent says. ’Time is up.’

8
THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER
I grip the bars.
’Please open up the cell,’ I ask him. ’I want to say good-bye to my father.’

The superintendent refuses.

’Please,’ I say. ’My father is the elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. I am

his daughter. This is our last meeting. I want to hold him.’

The superintendent refuses.

I try to reach my father through the bars. He is so thin, almost wasted

away from malaria, dysentery, starvation. But he pulls himself erect, and touches my hand.

’Tonight I will be free,’ he says, a glow suffusing his face. ’I will be joining my mother, my father. I am going back to the land of my ancestors in Larkana to become part of its soil, its scent, its air. There will be songs about me. I will become part of its legend.’ He smiles. ’But it is very hot

in Larkana.’

’I’ll build a shade,’ I manage to say.

The prison authorities move in.

’Good-bye, Papa,’ I call to my father as Mummy reaches through the bars to touch him. We both move down the dusty courtyard. I want to look back, but I can’t. I know I can’t control myself.

’Until we meet again,’ I hear him call.

Somehow my legs move. I cannot feel them. I have turned to stone. But still I move. The jail authorities lead us back through the jail ward, the courtyard filled with army tents. I move in a trance, conscious only of my

head. High. I must keep it high. They are all watching.

The car is waiting inside the locked gates so the crowds outside won’t

see us. My body is so heavy I have difficulty getting in. The car speeds forward through the gate. At its sight the crowds surge towards us but are
shoved back roughly by the security forces. I suddenly glimpse my friend Yasmin at the edge of the crowd, waiting to deliver my father’s food. ’Yasmin! They are going to kill him tonight!’ I try and shout from the window. Did she hear me? Did I make any sound at all?
5.00 came and

went. 6.00. Each breath I took reminded me of the last breaths of my father. ’God, let there be a miracle,’ my mother and I prayed together. ’Let something happen.’ Even my little cat Chun-Chun whom I had smuggled into detention with me felt the tension. She had

abandoned her kittens. We couldn’t find them anywhere.

Yet we clung to hope. The Supreme Court had unanimously recommended that my father’s death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. Moreover, under Pakistani law, the date of any execution must be announced at least a week before its implementation. There had been no such announcement.

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PPP leaders on the outside had also sent word that Zia had promised Saudia Arabia, the Emirates, and others in confidence that he would com-mute my fathers death sentence. But Zia’s record was filled with broken promises and disregard for the law. In the face of our persistent fears, the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia and the Prime Minister of Libya had promised to fly in should a date for execution be announced. Had they heard my message on the BBC? Was there time for them to fly in now?

A Chinese delegation was in Islamabad. My father had pioneered Pakis-tan’s friendship with China. Would they sway Zia on his behalf?

My mother and I sat motionless in the white heat at Sihala, unable to speak. Zia had also let it be known that he would entertain a plea for clemency only from my father, or from us, his immediate family. My father had forbidden it.

How do such moments pass in the countdown towards death? My mother and I just sat. Sometimes we cried. When we lost the strength to sit up, we fell onto the pillows on the bed. They’ll snuff out his life, I kept thinking. They’ll just snuff out his life. How alone he must be feeling in that cell, with no one near him. He didn’t keep any books. He didn’t keep anything. He has just that one cigar. My throat tightened until I wanted to rip it open. But I didn’t want the guards who were always laughing and talking right outside our window to have the pleasure of hearing me scream. ’I can’t bear it, Mummy, I can’t,’ I finally broke down at 1.30. She brought me some Valium. ’Try to sleep,’ she said.

Half an hour later I shot up in bed, feeling my father’s noose around my neck.
The skies rained tears of ice that night, pelting our family lands in Larkana with hail. At our family graveyard in the nearby ancestral Bhutto village of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, the people were awakened by the commotion of a military convoy. While my mother and I were passing the agonising night in prison, my father’s body was being secretly flown to Garhi for burial.

The advance party of Martial Law administrators made their grim arrangements with Nazar Mohammed, a villager who oversees our lands and whose family has worked with ours for generations.

Nazar Mohammed:
I was sleeping in my house at about 3.00 am on April 4 when I woke to notice strong lights of fifty to sixty military vehicles on the outskirts of

the village. At first I thought they were rehearsing again for the actions

THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER Vwwww
they were to take after Mr Bhutto was to be hanged as they had two days earlier, claiming they were normal military exercises. The people were quite terrorised then, especially after the police entered the Bhutto grave-yard to take a careful look around. When the police summoned me out of my house at such an early hour, all the village folk - old, young, men and women - came out of their houses. All feared that Mr Bhutto had either already been hanged or was soon to be. There was wailing and crying and desperation in their faces.

’We must arrange for the burial of Mr Bhutto,’ the large number of army and police personnel said to me at their temporary headquarters. ’Show us where the grave is to be.’ I was weeping. Why should we point out the place of burial to you?’ I asked them. We will perform the final rites by ourselves. Mr Bhutto belongs to us.’

I asked that I be allowed to bring our people to dig the grave, fetch the unbaked bricks to line it, cut the wooden planks to put on top of it, and perform our religious recitations. They permitted me only eight men to help.

While we got busy with this sad task, military and police vehicles not only surrounded the entire village but blockaded every small street. No one from the village could go out and no one from outside the village could enter. We were completely cut off.

At 8.00 am two helicopters landed close to the village on the road where an ambulance was waiting. I watched the coffin being transferred to the ambulance and followed it to the graveyard. ’Evacuate this house,’ the Army Colonel said to me, pointing to the small dwelling place in the south comer of the graveyard where the prayer leader who tends the graves lives with his wife and small children. I protested at the cruelty and inconvenience this would be to the Pesh Imam and his family, but the Colonel insisted. Twenty armed uniformed men then took up positions on the roof with their rifles pointed into the graveyard.

Near relatives must have a last look at the face of the departed. There were Bhutto cousins living in Garhi right next to the graveyard. Mr Bhutto’s first wife also lived in the nearby village of Naudero, and after

great argument the authorities allowed me to fetch her. When she arrived we opened the coffin and transferred the body onto a rope cot I had brought from my house before carrying it into the walled home. The family lived in purdah and kept their women protected from the eyes of strangers. No males outside the family were allowed in. But the army people forced their way into the house against all norms of decency.

When the body was brought out half an hour later, I asked the Colonel, on oath, if the bath in accordance with religious rules and the traditional burial ceremony had been given. He swore that it had. I checked to see if the kaffan, the unstitched cotton shroud, had been put on the body. It was there.

DAUGHTER OF THE EAST
We were too perturbed and grief-stricken to look at the rest of the body. I’m not sure they would have allowed it as their doings would have been exposed. But his face was the face of a pearl. It shone like a pearl. He looked the way he had at-sixteen. His skin was not of several colours, nor did his eyes -or tongue bulge out like the pictures I’d seen of the men that Zia had hanged in public. As ritual demands, I turned Bhutto Sahib’s face to the West, towards Mecca. His head did not fall to the side. His neck was not broken. There were strange red and black dots on his throat, however, like an official stamp.

The Colonel became very angry. 1,400 to 1,500 people from the village were forcing their way near the coffin and looking at the glow from the martyr’s face. Their wailing was heart-rending. The Colonel threatened to baton-charge the people if they didn’t leave.

’The burial must take place at once,’ he said. ’If we have to, we will do it with the help of the rod.’

’They are mourning and heart-broken,’ I told him.

At gunpoint, we hurried through the last prayers for the dead and then, with ceremony befitting the departed soul, we lowered the body into the grave. The recitation of the Holy Book mingled with the wailing of the women rising from the houses.
For days at Sihala, after my father’s death, I couldn’t eat or drink. I would take sips of water, but then I’d have to spit it out. I couldn’t swallow at all. Nor could I sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I had the same dream. I was standing in front of the district jail. The gates were open. I saw a figure walking towards me. Papa! I rushed to him. ’You’ve come out! You’ve come out! I thought they had killed you! But you’re alive!’ Just before I reached him, I would wake up and have to realise once again that he was gone.

’You must eat, Pinkie, you must,’ my mother said, bringing me some soup. ’You will need all your

strength when we get out of here to prepare for the elections. If you want to keep fighting for your father’s principles, to fight the way he fought, then eat. You must.’ And I ate a little.

I forced myself to read the messages of condolence that were slipped in to us. ’My dear Auntie and Benazir,’ wrote a family friend from Lahore on April 5. ’I have no words to describe my sorrow and grief. The whole nation is responsible to you for what has happened. We are all culprits .+-++ . . Every Pakistani is sad, demoralised and insecure. We are all guilty and burdened with sin.’

On the same day, ten thousand people gathered in Rawalpindi on Liaquat Bagh Common, where a year and a half before my mother had drawn huge crowds, standing in for my imprisoned father in the first
THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER
election campaign. Seeing the overwhelming popularity of the PPP, Zia had cancelled the elections and sentenced my father to death. Now, while offering funeral prayers and eulogies for my father, his followers were once again tear-gassed by the police. The people ran, hurling bricks and stones at the police who moved in with batons and started making arrests. Yasmin, her two sisters and her mother attended the prayer meeting. So did Amina Piracha, a friend who had helped the lawyers working on my father’s Supreme Court case, Amina’s two sisters, her nieces and their old ayah of seventy. All ten women were arrested, along with hundreds of others, and imprisoned for two weeks.

Rumours quickly began to circulate about my father’s death. The hang-man had gone mad. The pilot who had flown my father’s body to Garhi had become so agitated when he’d learned the identity of his cargo that he’d had to land his plane and have another pilot called in. The papers were full of other lurid details about my father’s end. He had been tortured almost to death and, with only the barest flicker of a pulse, had been carried on a stretcher to his hanging. Another persistent report claimed that my father had died during a fight in his cell. Military officers had tried to force him to sign a ’confession that he had orchestrated the coup himself and invited Zia to take over the country. My father had refused to sign the lies the regime needed to give it legitimacy.

In this version one of the officers had given my father a violent push. He had fallen, striking his head on the wall of his cell, and had never regained consciousness. A doctor had been summoned to revive him, giving him a heart massage and a tracheotomy which would explain the marks Nazar Mohammed had seen on his neck. But it had been to no avail.

I tended to believe this story. Why else

had my father’s body shown no physical signs of a hanging? Why else had I woken up at 2.00 am, a full three hours before his scheduled execution? Another political prisoner, General Babar, told me he, too, had woken in a sudden chill at 2,.00. So did other friends and political supporters scattered around the world. It was as if my father’s soul was passing among those who had loved him.

And the rumours persisted.

’Exhume the body and order a post-mortem,’ my father’s cousin and then People’s Party leader Mumtaz Bhutto urged me during a condolence call at Sihala. ’It could be to our political advantage.’ Political advantage? My father was dead. Exhuming his body was not going to bring him back to life.

’They did not let him live in his death cell even before they killed him,’ I told Uncle Mumtaz. ’Now he’s free. Let him rest in peace.’

’You don’t understand what historical importance this could have,’

DAUGHTER OF THE EAST

Uncle Mumtaz persisted.

I shook my head. ’History will judge him on his life. The details of his death do not matter,’ I said. ’I will not have him exhumed. He needs his rest.’

My mother’s niece, Fakhri, was permitted to come to Sihala to mourn with us, as was my childhood friend, Samiya Waheed. They were relieved to find that, although we were grief-stricken, we had not fallen apart. ’We had heard you were so depressed you were going to commit suicide,’ said Samiya, recounting another rumour the regime was spreading.

Fakhri, who is quite emotional, rushed to embrace my mother, consoling her in Persian. ’Nusrat joon, I wish I had died. I wish I had never seen this day,’ she cried. ’People are saying hanging is too good for Zia.’

Fakhri hugged me too. She had been the one to bring me the news of my father’s death sentence a year before, slipping through the police guard at our house in Karachi where I was being held in detention. I had been sitting in the living room when she suddenly burst through the front door and prostrated herself in the entrance hall, howling in grief and hitting her forehead on the floor. Within half an hour the military auth-orities had brought a detention order for Fakhri herself, a woman who didn’t have a political bone in her body but who spent her days playing mah-jongg and bridge. She had been imprisoned with me for the next week, unable to return to her husband and small children.

Now we wept together. Hundreds of people, she told us - factory workers, taxi drivers, street pedlars - were gathering in our garden in Karachi in preparation for the soyem, our religious ceremony on the third day following death. Every night for weeks before, women had come to the house by the busload

to pray for my father through the night, holding their Holy Qurans over their heads.

The uniforms of the army, which had always been a source of national pride, were now the objects of derision, Fakhri also told us. On the plane flight from Karachi, she and Samiya had refused to sit next to any man in army uniform. ’Murderers!’ they had screamed. The other travellers had lowered their heads in a mark of respect towards those who were grieving. Nobody said a word. There were tears in everyone’s eyes.

We had applied to the authorities to visit my father’s grave on the soyem, and at 7.00 am on April 7 we were told we had five minutes to get ready. We didn’t have black mourning clothes to wear and went in what we had brought with us to prison. ’Hurry! Hurry!’ a Martial Law officer insisted as we packed into the car to drive to the airport. They were always hurrying us, frightened that the people would catch a glimpse of us, wave, cheer,
THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER
or in any way demonstrate their sympathy for us and by implication their antipathy for Martial Law.

But not all the military had turned into inhuman machines. At the airport, members of the crew of the military plane were standing like a guard of honour when we arrived, their heads lowered. When my mother got out of the car, they saluted her. It was a fitting gesture for the widow of the man who had brought over ninety thousand of their fellow soldiers safely back from the prison camps of India. Not everyone had forgotten. During the short flight they offered us tea, coffee and sandwiches, their faces showing their shock and sorrow. The crime of the few had become the guilt of the many.

The plane didn’t land at Moenjodaro, the airport nearest to Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, but at Jacobabad an hour away. Nor did the local military auth-orities choose a direct route from the airfield to the village over the modern roads my father had built. Instead, the car bumped and lurched along unpaved lanes, the driver going out of his way to avoid the possi-bility of our being seen through the heavily curtained windows. We were covered in sweat and dust when we finally arrived at the entrance to our family graveyard.

As I moved towards the narrow portal, an army officer moved with me. I stopped.

’No. You can’t enter. None of you can enter,’ I said. ’This is our grave-yard. You don’t belong here.’

’We are under orders not to let you out of our sight,’ he told me.

’I cannot permit you to come in here and violate its sanctity,’ I told him. ’You killed my father. You sent him here. If we mourn him now, we will mourn him alone.’

’We have been ordered to be with you at all times,’

he insisted.

’Then we won’t visit the grave. Take us back,’ my mother said, moving towards the car. He stepped back, and we entered the walled graveyard, leaving our shoes at the entrance as a sign of respect.

How peaceful it seemed. And how familiar. Generations of Bhuttos whose lives were sweeter lay there: my grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Junagadh State, knighted by the British for his services to the Bombay presidency before the partition of India; his wife, Lady Khurshid; my uncle, Sikander Bhutto, and his legend-ary brother, Imdad Ali, so handsome, it is said, that when he drove his carriage down Elphinstone Street, Karachi’s main shopping area, the Eng-lish ladies ran out of their shops to stare at him. Many other relatives also lay there, in the soil which had given us birth and to which we return when we die.

My father had brought me here just before I had left Pakistan to go to

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Harvard University in 1969. ’You are going far away to America,’ he had told me as we stood among the graves of our forebears. ’You will see many things that amaze you and travel to places you’ve never heard of. But remember, whatever happens to you, you will ultimately return here. Your place is here. Your roots are here. The dust and mud and heat of Larkana are in your bones. And it is here that you will be buried.’

Through my tears now, I looked for his grave. I didn’t even know where they had buried him. I almost didn’t recognise his grave when I saw it. It was just a mound of mud. Raw mud sprinkled with flower petals. Mummy and I sat at the foot of the grave. I couldn’t believe my father was under it. I dropped down and kissed the part of the mud where I imagined his feet to be.

’Forgive me, father, if I ever caused you any unhappiness,’ I whispered.

Alone. I felt so alone. Like all children, I had taken my father for granted. Now that I had lost him, I felt an emptiness that could never be filled. But I did not weep, believing as a Muslim that tears pull a spirit earthward and wont let it be free.

My father had earned his freedom, had paid dearly for his peace. His suffering had ended. ’Glory be to Him who has control over all things,’ I read from the Ya Sin surah of the Holy Quran. ’To Him, you shall all return.’ My father’s soul was with God in Paradise.