Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

I suspected that the CIA was deeply involved in Pakistan’s role in the war in Afghanistan. But I didn’t realise the extent of the CIA’s stake in maintaining Zia and his regime until years later when I read Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA by the American journalist Bob Woodward. ’No leader ruled a country in a more precarious situation,’ Mr Woodward wrote. ’Most crucial was President Zia’s willingness to allow the CIA to funnel growing amounts of paramilitary support to the Afghanistan rebels through Pakistan. [CIA Director] Casey, the CIA and the Reagan Admini-stration all wanted Zia to stay in power and needed to know what was going on inside his government. The CIA station in Islamabad was the biggest in the world.’

I hadn’t realised the depth of CIA Director Casey’s interactions with Zia, either. ’Congress had made it illegal for American business to make payments or bribes abroad to obtain business,’ Woodward wrote. ’The payments and favors to foreign leaders or intelligence sources were the exception - legal bribes, Casey realised. For example, he made certain to visit Pakistan’s Zia once or twice a year. Soon he had the closest rela-tionship with Zia of any member of the Reagan Administration.’

All this was helping Zia transform his image from that of a hangman and a brutal dictator to a ’world statesman’. His famous quotes like the one to a Daily Mail correspondent over tea in 1978 - ’We’ll hang people. A few.’ - were now replaced by his references to Pakistan as a ’front line state’ helping to fight a jihad, or holy war, against the godless Com-munists. The Americans were especially willing, if not eager, to swallow Zia’s new rhetoric. For the first time I saw, in a reprint of an International Herald Tribune article in the local press, Zia being described as a ’benevolent dictator’.

I distracted myself from the discouraging press reports by resuming my exercise regime, pacing up and down the narrow corridor that ran in front of the cell-block for an hour every day. Even when I had no appetite I forced down the food sent from 70 Clifton. As August turned into September, I allowed myself a slight feeling of optimism. Sanam’s marriage had been

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set for the 8th, and

I had applied for permission to attend. Perhaps might even be released.

I began to fantasise that the footsteps approaching my cell were bring-ing news of my release. I fantasised as my cell-block was unlocked for the delivery of my tiffin box, and then again with the arrival of the night matron. I fantasised at hearing the footsteps that came regularly on Monday mornings, the light footsteps of a small, nervous man. They belonged to the jail superintendent. Sometimes he came with his deputy, sometimes alone. His message was always the same.

’Why do you want to ruin your life behind prison walls while other members of the party are free and enjoying themselves?’ he asked me each week. ’If you agree to give up politics for a while, you will be freed.’

What was the regime up to? I knew the superintendent would never dare say such things without official support. Yet, if Zia wanted to set me free, he would. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t. But what was the point of trying to blackmail me, to compromise me? Did they really think I would consent? Or were they just trying to break me as Ayub Khan had attempted to do to my father?

’You can be free tomorrow,’ the superintendent would tell me. ’Only you are keeping yourself in jail. Wouldn’t you like to travel to London, to Paris? You’re a young woman, wasting her youth in prison. And for what? You can wait for your time to come, and it will, it will.’

I always felt unsettled after he left. Though I never had the slightest inclination to accept the temptations he offered me, I wasn’t sure of his motives. Did he wish me well - or ill? I hated my new and necessary tendency to be suspicious about everyone. But how else had I survived? The regime was just trying to unbalance me, I suspected. They were trying to destabilise me further, I decided, by making mysterious noises round my cell at night.

Whispers. Two men and woman speaking in hushed voices. Sometimes I woke to the sound before dawn. No one was allowed in my ward or even near by ward except for the police. I complained to the prison authorities that they were disturbing my sleep deliberately. ’There is no one in your ward,’ the deputy superintendent assured me. ’You are imagin-ing it.’

Footsteps. A man’s heavy footsteps coming closer and closer to my cell. ’ho is it?’ I called out, peering at the door from under my sheet. Silence. ’Did you hear the footsteps?’ I asked the matron. ’I didn’t hear anything,’ she said. I made another complaint. ’You’re just imagining it,’ they said.

Tinkle. Tinkle. A new sound, like the jingle of bells on a woman’s anklet. Then the whispers. I woke earlier and earlier,

and finally couldn’t go to sleep at all. When the old matron was replaced by a new one, I
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tried again. ’Don’t you hear any noises at night?’ I asked the toothless, wizened old Pathan woman who now slept in the courtyard.

’Hush! Pretend you have heard nothing!’ she replied, her eyes darting from side to side, her hands nervously smoothing down her thin grey uni-form. ’

’But who is it?’ I asked, thrilled to have some confirmation at last.

’It is the chur-ayle,’ she whispered.

A chur-ayle, the spirit of a woman whose feet point backwards instead of forward? ’There is no such thing as a chur-ayle,’ I told the matron, clinging to rationality. ’Yes there is,’ she insisted. ’Everyone in the women’s wing has heard her. Pretend you do not hear her and she will not harm you.’

Tinkle. Tinkle. That night and for many others, my reasoning vanished altogether. Why doesn’t she stay in the women’s wing instead of coming into my ward, I shivered in bed. And the noises continued.

Clank. Clank. Someone, something, was rattling what seemed to be rubbish bins outside by ward, searching through the refuse inside. Foot-steps approached my cell again, though there was no sound of the ward door being unlocked. Ya Allah, what is that! Ya Allah, help me! I heard my empty tiffin box being picked up right outside my door, the lid opened, the box knocked against the wall. Allah! I gathered my nerve and rushed to the cell door. The tiffin box was upside-down in the dirt. There was no one there.
’You’re under a lot of stress,’ the jail superintendent told me the next time he visited. Finally he told me that my cell-block had been built over a phansi ghat, a former hanging ground used by the British. ’Maybe it is some soul who has not found rest,’ the jailer suggested. The thought was not comforting. Neither was the explanation offered by the Pathan matron. ’My husband was a night watchman and he was murdered by thieves,’ she told me, her eyes blazing. ’His murderer was never found. It must be his soul which has not found rest.’

I am not superstitious, and suspected that the regime was trying to strain my nerves as they had my father’s in Rawalpindi Jail. But, as a precaution, I began to pray for the lost souls of the phansi gnat. After some months the voices stopped. I still don’t know what caused them.

I resumed the prayer ritual I had learned from the matron at Sukkur, breathing the surah of the Quran over the bucket of water and sprinkling a little in the corners of my cell. The cell was an odd shape and didn’t have four square corners and I was afraid the ritual wouldn’t

work. Would I at least be able to attend Sanam s wedding? I had heard nothing about my application. ’Qul Huwwa Allahu Ahad - Say He is One God,’ I prayed. After the second Wednesday and before the third, the Pathan matron came to my cell early in the morning. ’I heard the voices near my cot,’ she

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told me. ’They said ”she’s going today”.’ This old woman is mad, I thought to myself. Two hours later the jail authorities came. ’You are leaving immediately,’ they told me. ’You have permission to go to your sister’s wedding.’
70 Clifton. The brass plaques were still gleaming next to the gate. Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Butto. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bar-at-Law. The tensions of the last six months eased a little as the police convoy delivering me drew up in front of the gate. I had been convinced that I would never see this house again, that 70 Clifton would either be confiscated by the regime, or that I would be quietly put to death at Sukkur without ever going home again. But here I was, alive. And here was my home, the compound walls draped with strings of lights to celebrate my sister’s wedding. We had both survived.

I felt a new surge of life when the-familiar gates swung open. As the chowkidar saluted me and the convoy moved into the courtyard, I felt that God had sent me a second life. With His help, I had not been defeated by the enemy. A new sense of strength and resolve swept through me. In that instant, I was reborn.

Drums. Dancing. Garlands of jasmine and roses. The entire household staff was gathered on the front porch, beating on the dholak and dancing folk dances with their anus undulating in time with the beat. Chowkidars. Bearers. Secretaries. I saw Dost Mohammed, our major-domo, who had run faster than the prison guards to reach my father in jail; Urs, my father’s valet who had been pistol-whipped and beaten by the army during the raid to arrest my father; Basheer and Ibrahim who had been with my mother and me at Sihala when my father was hanged; Nazar Mohammed from Larkana who had received my father’s body, and buried him.

Their faces were wreathed now in smiles as they danced and sang. What a wonderful wedding atmosphere I thought as I got out of the car. They rushed towards me to drape the garlands around my neck. ’Save them for the wedding guests,’ I said as the garlands mounted to cover my ears. ’No, no, we got the flowers for you,’ they said. ’We are so happy to have you home.’

Home. I couldn’t believe it. Ululations vibrated in the air as my relatives streamed out of the carved wooden front door. My mother’s sisters were there, Auntie Bejhat, who’d come from London,

Cousin Zeenat from Los Angeles, my cousin Fakhri, who had been detained with me after my father’s death sentence. My father’s sister Auntie Manna greeted me as did his three half-sisters from Hyderabad who had petitioned Zia to spare my father’s life unsuccessfully. Other relatives had travelled from India, from America, from England, from Iran, from France, filling every bed in our

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house as well as the separate apartments belonging to my brothers, which had been empty for the last four years. Laila! Nashilli! We hugged each other and laughed and cried. I had never expected to see them again, nor they me. Left unspoken was the fear that I’d never come out of prison alive.

The luxury of a hot bath. Carpeting under my feet. Pure, cool water to drink. The feast of my family. I didn’t sleep for two days and two nights, not wanting to squander a single moment of freedom. My mother went to bed early and I stayed up until dawn talking to Sanam. Soon after Sanam went to bed, Mummy got up. I couldn’t get enough of them or of my other close relatives.

In the time I had to myself, I devoured the back issues of Asia Week, Far Eastern Economic Review, Time and Newsweek. I also scrubbed the walls of my bedroom. In the last raid, I soon discovered, the regime had stolen many of the letters my father had written to me while I was studying abroad; also irreplaceable photographs of my brothers, sister and me, and my jewellery including a favourite ring given to me by my mother and a gold kohl holder from my grandmother. But it was the feeling of the violation of my bedroom which bothered me most. I scrubbed and scrub-bed, trying to erase their psychological fingerprints from my walls. Be thankful that God left you this room and this house, I kept reminding myself. Just a few months back you didn’t know whether you would have that. ’They won’t take you back to prison, will they?’ said my cousin Abdul Hussein, forgetting that he was in Pakistan and not in San Francisco. I did not allow myself to share his hope, though it was hard not to.

Everything at 70 Clifton seemed so normal, so comfortingly traditional. The staff were rushing in and out, setting up buffet tables in the patterned tent in the garden, arranging upholstered armchairs to seat the guests. Sunny was having her hand hennaed by the mehndi artist who had come to the house to trace delicate and intricate patterns on the hands of the women in the wedding household. The mehndi artist made beautiful scrolls and arabesques on my sister’s palm with a toothpick, then sealed the henna with lemon juice and sugar.

Sanani s wedding was small by

Pakistani standards, only five hundred guests. And not every tradition could be followed. I hadn’t been able to have new silk shalwar khameez made for the mehndi ceremony or for the nikah or wedding ceremony, as had most of the other women thronging through the house. But it didn’t matter. I hadn’t seen the clothes in my cupboard nor worn anything dressy for so long that my old pink silk shalwar khameez seemed -like new to me.

’Mom is forcing me to wear make-up,’ Sunny said, rushing into my bedroom. ’And I have to wear a sari. I wish I could just get married in a pair of blue jeans. Do something.’
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’You only get married once,’ I said. ’And Mummy’s suffered a lot. Make her happy by listening to her.’
This bride is fairer than the moon. Yes she is, yes she is. The sound of singing, not silence, filled the house the first night I was home. This bride is fairer than the moon. Our female relatives clapped along with Sanam’s girl-friends, practising the traditional songs and dances for the mehndi cere-mony. Not wanting to waste a moment of my freedom and not knowing how long it would last, I went to talk to relatives and friends instead. Our worlds had become so different. But which world was real? Twice I caught myself referring to my jail cell as ’home’.

Sunny looked beautiful as she joined her husband-to-be Nasser Hussein on a green cushion inlaid with mirrors for the mehndi ceremony. As theirs was not an arranged marriage, there was little tension between them. But there were traditions to be gone through. Sunny kept her dupatta carefully over her face so that her groom wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her before the wedding, though she raised it and talked to me while I sat beside her.

’Nasser ji, Nasser ji, about-to-be brother-in-law. Seven conditions you have to accept before Sanam can become your bride,’ Sunny’s friends and relatives sang in front of us. ’The first condition is that Sanam will not make food.’

’I will get a cook,’ Nasser sang back.

’Sanam will not wash clothes,’ the bride’s side sang.

’I will take them to the laundry,’ Nasser sang back, responding to each condition until his side had a chance to return the teasing.

Relatives from both sides brought in platters heaped with henna and decorated with burning candles and silver foil. One by one Nasser’s rela-tives pressed a pinch of henna into a betel nut leaf laid on Sanarri s palm, placed a fingerful of sweet in her mouth, and waved money over her head to protect her from evil. Led by my mother, we on the bride’s side did the same to Nasser.

The festive air came to an abrupt end

when one of the staff suddenly came up to us. ’The police are at the gate,’ he said, casting a terrible silence over the entire room. I assumed the police had come for me, but our major-domo returned to say that they wanted my mother. The guests sucked in their breath. Mummy would never survive another detention.

’Call them in, Dost Mohammed. I don’t want the police breaking down gates while our guests are here,’ my mother said calmly. The police came in looking quite uncomfortable. ’What do you want with me?’ my mother asked them, her voice firm in spite of her illness. They sheepishly handed her a Martial Law Order. It wasn’t for her arrest, thank God, but instead notified her that she was externed from the Punjab. She didn’t have an-plans to visit the Punjab, and Zia knew it. He just wanted to harass us and dampen and spoil any happiness the Bhuttos might be having.

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And the harassment continued. The next morning, the wedding mus-icians my mother had engaged suddenly sent word that they weren’t coming. They couldn’t get a permit for a microphone from the authorities, they told us: the use of loudspeakers had been banned under Martial Law. We didn’t know’whether the regime had interfered or if the musicians had just got cold feet.

The harassment extended to our wedding guests whose number plates were noted by the regime’s intelligence agents stationed in vans across the street from 70 Clifton. The regime had already tried to obtain the guest list. My mother’s secretary had confessed to her in tears that the regime had threatened him with dire consequences if he didn’t hand it over to them.

The country, however, was to be kept in the dark about the wedding. The Bhutto name was not allowed to appear in the newspapers unless the stories were negative, though journalists in Pakistan had become used to getting around restrictions. To announce Sunny’s engagement they had noted that Nasser’s grandfather, like our own, had once been Prime Minis-ter of Junagadh state. ’GRANDCHILDREN OF TWO FORMER PRIME MINISTERS OF JUNAGADH STATE TO MARRY the headlines had read. To announce Sartain’s wedding and my temporary release from Karachi Jail, the headline read:
’SISTER ATTENDS SISTERS WEDDING’.

Inside the gates of 70 Clifton, we remained determined to carry off Sanam s wedding as a personal, family affair. My sister had suffered enough, dragged into the world of politics in which she had no interest just because her name was Bhutto. She had graduated from Harvard alone, two months after our father had been assassinated. She had been admitted to Oxford, but unable to concentrate on her studies, had

returned to Pakistan. But to what? To become a prisoner of sorts herself, living alone at 70 Clifton, her mother and sister in and out of prison, her brothers in exile. She had always chosen to keep her circle of friends small, disliking the attenton she got as a Bhutto and the constant questions about her father. She mixed now with only a handful of people she had known for years, including Nasser who had gone to school with Shah Nawaz and Mir.

’Don’t marry Sanam. The regime will ruin you,’ his uncles had warned him when he had asked them to propose for her. ’That is my decision, not yours,’ he told them. ’I love this girl. Whatever the price is, I will pay it.’ And he has. The regime has all sorts of ways of punishing those out of favour: opening tax investigations, withholding permits, cutting off water to farmlands. Nasser’s vulnerability lay in his successful telecom-munications business in Pakistan which sold state-of-the-art equipment primarily to the government. His bids for contracts were soon ignored, causing his business to drop by over 75 per cent. He and Sanam now live

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in London where Nasser had to start virtually all over again. Their wed-ding, however, was beautiful.

Holding a Holy Quran over her head, my mother and I escorted Sanam down the staircase to the nikah stage in the front hall. The sari Sanam wore for the ceremony was green, the colour of happiness. ’Do you accept Nasser Hussein, son of Nasim Abdul Qadir, as your husband?’ asked our cousin Ashik Ali Bhutto. Sartain smiled at my mother and me and remained silent, knowing Ashik Ali had to ask her the question three times in the presence of two other witnesses to be sure of her consent. Again he asked her. Again Sartain remained silent. Islam wants to make sure that the woman understands and agrees freely to the marriage. After the third repetition, Sartain finally consented and signed the marriage contract. Ashik Ali went to bring the good news to the men gathered in another room. The maulai read Nasser the marriage prayers. And my sister became the first Bhutto woman to marry a man of her own choosing.

Two of Nasser’s close friends brought him onto the dais to join his bride. The female cousins and Nasser’s friends held a silk shawl over the couple’s heads like a canopy while a mirror was placed between them. I fought back tears as Sanam and Nasser looked at each other in the mirror, the traditional moment when the bride and groom see each other as partners for the first time.

The dais was wreathed in roses, marigolds and jasmine, sending their sweet perfume into the night. Sartain

and Nasser sat on a blue velvet footstool surrounded by dishes of candied almonds, eggs painted in gold,
walnuts and pistachios dipped in silver. Candles burned in silver candelabra beside the couple so that their lives would be filled with light. Sanalri s happily married cousins ground sugar cones over the couple’s heads so that their lives would be sweet. The sound of ululating filled the air. The celebration had begun.

My mother and I sat with Sunny and Nasser while the guests lined up

to offer their congratulations. Many of them had spent time in jail and some showed it, looking thin and drawn. ’How well you look,’ they said

to me. I hoped they meant it, wanting to appear as unbroken by the

regime as my father had in his appearance before the Supreme Court. ’How nice to see you,’ I murmured automatically again and again. For all that my head was high, I felt shaky underneath.

Would I have to go back to prison? I had heard nothing from the

authorities. In the crowd I saw my lawyer Mujib, who told me he had an appointment with the Home Secretary of Sindh early the next morning. Since my detention was due to expire in less than a week anyway, he told me he would ask the authorities to let me stay at 70 Clifton for the remaining period. After the guests departed, I collected magazines and newspapers to try
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and smuggle back into jail if the police came for me, along with kleenex and insect killer. I stayed up all night, talking with my cousins, with Samiya, and writing a last minute letter to Peter Galbraith, my old friend from Harvard and Oxford. Peter was handling the South Asia portfolio for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, my mother told me, and had recently come to Pakistan to review American security interests. He had tried to visit me in Karachi Central Jail, she said, but he had received no response from the regime to his request. Later he told me what happened.
Peter Galbraith, August, 1981:
I carried a letter with me to Pakistan from Senator Claiborne Pell, the minority leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, requesting the regime to permit me to visit Benazir. I made a big pitch to the Pakistani Foreign Ministry as well as to the US Embassy, which at that time was quite hostile to the Bhuttos.

The regime didn’t even respond to Senator Pell’s request, nor to mine. Although the US Embassy tried to discourage contact with the Bhuttos, I went around to 70 Clifton to see Begum Bhutto anyway. She was pale and looked very tired. She was very concerned about Benazir’s confinements in Sukkur and Karachi jails over the previous five months.

Begum

Bhutto invited me to join her, Sanam and Fakhri at the Karachi Boat Club. As we left 70 Clifton she told me to smile for the security men who were taking pictures with a telephoto lens from a car across the street. I gave them my best politicians wave.

Through lunch, I could not keep my mind off Pinkie’s imprisonment. The last time I had seen her was at Oxford in January 1977. Pinkie had just been elected President of the Oxford Union and was holding court before fawning undergraduates in the President’s office.

Since then, her life had taken such an unexpected, almost in-comprehensible direction. I kept thinking of her returning home only to see her father overthrown, put on trial for his life and then executed. And then for Pinkie to spend so much time in prison, and under such terrible conditions. As I often handled human rights cases I knew these things happened, but it was still hard to comprehend that it was happening to a friend. As I left the Boat Club, I gave Begum Bhutto a long, newsy letter for Benazir which I had written the night before on a legal pad.