Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

I introduced him to a few of my friends from Oxford. They liked him. I introduced him to a Pakistani school friend. She found him charming and told me to marry him. Asif took my family out to dinner and I had to sit next to him. I kept my niece Fathi, who talks non-stop, on my other side for protection.

The next day my cousin Tariq and Asif had a man-to-man talk. ’If you marry Benazir, you’ll be in the spotlight,’ Tariq told him. ’The tiniest thing you do, even staying out late with friends, will reflect on her.’ Asif won Tariq over, too. ’He understands the situation,’ my cousin assured me later. ’He has wanted to marry you for years. He knows exactly what it means.’

What’s the answer, Pinkie?’ Yasmin pressed. Every morning Sunny and Mummy rushed to my bedside and stared at me meaningfully. What’s the problem? What’s taking you so long to decide?’

’I don’t know yet.’

Fate presented itself in the form of a bee. On the fourth day of the Zardari visit, I took Fathi to Windsor Park while Asif went to a polo match. A bee stung me in the hand. By dinner time, my hand was very swollen. The next morning, it was even more swollen. ’I’m taking you to hospital,’ Asif told me when he arrived at the flat. He ignored my protests, calling for a car, arranging for the doctor, buying the prescribed medicine. ’For once I am not the one in charge,’ I thought. ’I am the one .being cared for.’ It was a very nice and unaccustomed feeling.

Fate intervened again the following night during our search for an elusive Pakistani restaurant. My mother, Sanam, Asif and I piled into a car with some other Pakistani friends to go to dinner. We got lost. But

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instead of getting irritable or impatient AsiE kept everybody laughing in the car. He was flexible and had a sense of humour, I noted, as well as being caring.

What’s the answer, Pinkie?’ my mother asked the next morning.

I took a deep breath. ’All right, Mummy,’ I said. Seven days after I met Asif, we were engaged.

’Conscious of my religious obligations and duty to my family, I am pleased to proceed with the marriage proposal accepted by my mother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto,’ read the statement I released to the press.

’The impending marriage will not in any way affect my political com-mitment . .. . The people of Pakistan deserve a better, more secure future and I shall be with them seeking it.’

The reaction in Pakistan was mixed. In spite of my statement, the regime’s agents lost no time in spreading rumours that I was giving up politics. Organised gangs began stopping buses on the highways and pulling my posters off them, saying they meant nothing now that I was getting married. ’Why have you still got the PPP flag up?’ party workers were taunted. ’Benazir has given up and left you.’ The Fears of PPP supporters were further fuelled by a false interview with Asif’s mother carried in the controlled press. ’I’m going to invite General Zia to the wedding,’ she was alleged to have said.

But many in the country were happy that I was going to live a more normal life. The sweet shops in the cities were sold out for three days as the public celebrated the event. ’For ten years we’ve been mourning. Finally we can rejoice,’ people were saying. Just as pleased were the Zardari tribe, fifteen thousand of whom gathered to welcome Asif on his lands in Nawabshah, singing and dancing and waving PPP flags.

When I returned to Pakistan, I travelled around the country, reassuring the people that I was their sister and would always be their sister, and that my marriage would have no bearing on my political career. Asif called me every night, wherever I was, and little by little, I got to know him over the phone. We had more in common than I thought. His family had suffered under Martial Law: his father Hakim Ali had been disqualified from politics for seven years by a military court and his crops on the family’s 1800 acre farm in Hyderabad ruined after the regime cut off the water. Worse trouble came after the engagement when Hakim Ali’s loans for construction projects were suddenly stopped by the nationalised banks. ’You are making a mistake,’ people had told Hakim Ali when our engage-ment was made public. ’Your only son is marrying Benazir and the whole army and bureaucracy will be against you.’ ’I don’t care,’ Hakim Ali had replied. ’My son’s happiness means more to me.’
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Asif, I knew, was not interested in party politics. ’One politician in a family is enough,’ he had quipped to the press in London. But like many in families with a feudal past, he followed local politics, and had filed nomination papers for the 1985 elections. He later boycotted them on the call of the MRD. And he, too, had felt the sting of Martial Law.

He had been arrested from his house in the middle of the night, the army

claiming that they had found him travelling on the road with an unlicensed weapon. Luckily for Asif, their false story didn’t even hold up in a military court. ’I only spent two nights in jail. That was enough,’ Asif told a friend of mine. ’I can only imagine what Benazir must have en-dured.’

He gave me a heart-shaped ring of sapphires and diamonds. He sent me roses every day. We talked and talked. Our marriage really wasn’t between strangers, he told me. When we were teenagers, he’d watched me enter and leave the cinema his father owned. Two decades later, it had been his idea to marry me, not his parents’. ’If you want me to marry, then propose for Benazir,’ he’d told his father five years before. He had waited patiently ever since. ’Are you in love with her?’ a journalist asked him. ’Isn’t everyone?’ he replied.

We didn’t really love each other yet, though my mother assured me that love would come later. Instead there was a mental commitment be-tween us, a realisation that we were accepting each other as husband and wife totally and for always. In a way, I realised, that bond was stronger than love. Though I certainly did not - and do not - want to be seen as an advocate of arranged marriages, I realised there was something to a relationship based on acceptance. We were coming into our marriage with no preconceptions, no expectations of each other other than good will and respect. In love marriages, I imagined, the expectations were so high they were bound to be somewhat dashed. There must also be the fear that the love might die, and with it the marriage. Our love could only grow.
The crowds began gathering outside 70 Clifton a week before the wedding in December of 1987. Presents began to be delivered to the gate: simple hand-made shalwar khameez from Sindh, embroidered dupattas from Punjab, sweets, fruit and wedding dolls made to look like Asif and me. At times my relatives went out and joined the people dancing with happiness. Women and children came in and sat in the garden.

It is traditional for a prospective bride to remain in seclusion for one or two weeks before the wedding, wearing yellow clothes and no make-up so as not to attract the evil eye. But I didn’t have time for this ancient custom called mayoon. I couldn’t afford to take two weeks off from work before the wedding. We weren’t even going to have a honeymoon.

EPILOGUE
We broke with more traditions as well, trying to set an example for the rest of the country. The wedding was to be dignified and simple, not the week-long lavish affairs many families in Pakistan feel compelled to hold, often draining their life savings and

sending them into debt. Instead of the twenty-one to fifty-one elaborate sets of clothes traditionally pre-sented to the bride by the groom’s family, I set the limit at two, one for the wedding and one for the reception the Zardaris would give two days after the wedding. The bride’s wedding clothes are usually sequinned and embroidered throughout with gold thread, but I requested that my dress have gold either on the top or bottom, but not both.

Presents of jewellery, too, are part of our tradition - the bride often wears seven sets of jewellery running from a choker around her neck to necklaces reaching her waist. I asked Asif to give me only two simple sets, one for the wedding ceremony and the other for the reception given by the groom’s family. I don’t live a life that calls for jewellery. How many diamond necklaces can you wear to the office? ’You have your whole life to give me jewellery,’ I consoled Asif, who wanted to give me the best. I even eschewed the traditional gold bangles that brides wear on each arm from elbow to wrist, planning to wear a few of pure gold and the rest of glass. I wanted people to say that if Benazir can wear glass bangles on her wedding day, so can my daughter. I also chose to keep my own name. I had been Benazir Bhutto for thirty-four years and had no intention of changing my identity.
On my beloved’s forehead, his hair is shining. On my beloved’s forehead, his hair is shining. Bring, bring the henna, the henna which will colour my beloved’s hands. For the three days before the henna ceremony on December 17, my sister, my cousins and my friends gathered at 71 Clifton, the annexe we use for receptions and offices, to practise for the friendly song and dance competition with the groom’s family at the mehndi. Samiya, Salma, Putchie and Amina were there, as was Yasmin who had flown in from London. Every day more friends arrived from England: Connie Seifert, who had been highly instrumental in pressurising Zia into letting my mother leave Pakistan on medical grounds, David Soskind, Keith Gregory and others from my Oxford days, Victoria Schofield whose visa was withheld by the regime until the very last moment. Anne Fadiman and my former roommate, Yolanda Kodrzycki came all the way from America, Anne to do a story on the wedding this time for Life. ’You came here to get tear-gassed in 1986,’ I laughed with Anne. ’It’s good that you’ve come here now to laugh and dance.’

It was a miraculous reunion of sorts, relationships that had not only endured but grown stronger through all the tyranny of Martial Law. My

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father’s lawyers came, as did many

former political prisoners. There was a stir when Dr Niazi arrived at 70 Clifton. Even though my father’s dentist still faced serious charges in Islamabad, he had returned for my wedding after six lonely years in exile. He was safe enough in Karachi, but no one knew what would face him when he returned to Islamabad to try and resume his dental practice. Through it all moved my mother, anxiously checking on the details like any mother of a bride. She had not been in Pakistan since 1982 and, not surprisingly, was having difficulty sleeping.

While friends and family were gathering inside 70 Clifton, thousands were pressing towards Lyari in the centre of Karachi. We were going to have two weddings, one at home in the presence of family and friends, the other among the people in the poorest section of Karachi and a stronghold of the PPP. We had sent 15,000 invitations to party supporters who had been imprisoned during the years of Martial Law and to the families of the martyrs for the Awami or People’s reception. The reception was to be held at Kakri Ground, the large sports field in Lyari where my father had been the first politician to speak to and for the underprivileged and where six people had been killed and others beaten and tear-gassed by the police in the demonstrations of August 14, 1986. Sections of Kakri Ground were also set aside for the public.

The night before the henna ceremony I slipped off to Lyari wearing a burqa to check on the preparations. Members of the Maritime Union and members of other unions were putting the finishing touches on the fifty by forty foot main stage at Kakri Ground, solidly constructed out of wood and eighty tons of steel. Emergency generators were in place to light the grounds if the regime decided to cut off the electricity, and twenty big-screen television sets were set up around the grounds to show the proceed-ings. Bowers of jasmine, marigolds and roses were being put up around the seating areas on either side of the carpeted stage for our two families, and chairs placed in between for Asif and me.

Hundreds of strings of lights, red and green in the PPP colours, and white, hung the length of the five-storey buildings surrounding the grounds, and spotlights shone on a huge painting of my father putting his hand on my head in blessing. We were expecting one hundred thousand people to come to Kakri Ground. At least ten thousand were already camped there, some having walked or bicycled from Interior Sindh. As my brothers and sisters, they felt they didn’t need invitations. They had come to a family wedding.
The sound of drums and wooden sticks. Women singing. Ululations of greeting

from my relatives. The groom’s procession arrived at 70 Clifton on December 17, for the Mehndi, Asif’s relatives bearing a platter of

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henna carved in the shape of a peacock, complete with real tail feathers. My female relatives placed garlands of roses around the necks of the Zardari entourage as they moved into the garden. Asif was in the middle of the procession, his sisters holding a shawl over his head. I was relieved that he had arrived on foot. He had threatened to ride in on his polo pony.

We sat together on a bench with a mirrored back and inlaid with mother-of-pearl at the top of the steps to 71 Clifton. I looked out through my veil at my family and friends clustered below me on one side of the carpeted steps, and Asif’s family on the other. I doubt anyone had heard the likes of the lyrics from my side as the singing began. Asif must look after the children while I am out campaigning and not prevent me from going to jail, Yasmin, Sanam, Laleh and other friends sang. ’You must agree that Benazir will serve the nation,’ they warbled in Urdu, then responded for Asif: ’That is all right with me, for I will serve the nation by serving my wife.’

The guests, two hundred of our closest friends, clapped and talked under the colourful tent set up in the garden before moving on to the buffet tables. I saw tears on Mummy’s face. I didn’t know whether they were tears of happiness or frustration over the number of foreign photogra-phers who had somehow got past the security men and were crowding around Asif and me. The Mehndi was supposed to be a family affair, but the press billing of the two-day celebration as the wedding of the century on the sub-continent had brought press from the Arab states, Germany, France, India, the United States, and England as well as the wire services and, of course, members of the local press.

I so wished my brother Mir could be with us when we gathered in the garden the next night for the Nikah, the wedding ceremony. He hadn’t been able to come to Sanarri s wedding either, nor had any of our family been able to attend his wedding in Afghanistan. Mir had threatened to sneak into Pakistan for my wedding, in spite of the dangers of being caught by the regime and arrested. But my mother had forbidden him to take the risk.
’Don’t walk so fast. You’re not late for a public meeting,’ Sunny whispered to me through the pink veil covering my face as she and Mummy led me to the wedding stage in the garden.

’Brides walk sedately,’ echoed Auntie Behjat as she held the Holy Quran over my head and tried to keep up.

I tried to look demurely down at the ground as I took my place on the wedding dais.

My cousin Shad came up, smiling.

’What’s taking the men so long?’ I asked, wondering what was hap-
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pening on Asif’s side, where the maulai from our family mosque was reading the marriage vows.

’Manzoor ah-hay? Do you accept?’ Shad asked me in Sindhi. I thought he was jokingly asking me if I was ready.

Ah-hay,’ I replied. ’Yes. But where are they?’

He only smiled and asked me the question twice more. Ah-hay. Ah-hay,’ I repeated. Before I realised it, I had said the customary ’yes’ three times to the male witness, and was a married woman.

Seven items beginning with the letter ’s’ surrounded me, as well as plates of sweetmeats, nuts dipped in silver and gold, silver candles in silver candelabra. Thousands of white lights spangled the garden, the light dancing off the silver tinsel encrusting the dais. My female relatives held a green and gold diaphanous shawl over my head when Asif joined me. Together, we looked into the mirror placed in front of us, seeing each other as partners for the first time. Ululations filled the air as my mother and aunts ground sugar cones over our heads so that our lives together would be sweet, then knocked our heads together to signify our union.
Karachi went wild with celebration that night. Thousands pressed together outside 70 Clifton for a glimpse of Asif and me when we moved to Clifton Gardens for the private reception just a block away. PPP volunteer guards had to struggle to keep a path open for our guests who walked the few hundred yards from 70 Clifton. When we left for the Awami reception in Lyari an hour later, the streets on the way were just as crowded with well-wishers, jeeps blasting out the wedding songs which had popped up all over Pakistan to commemorate our marriage. There were strings of PPP lights everywhere, festooning the centre of the roundabout where so many had been tear-gassed the year before, and draped from buildings along the route.

The crowds at Kakri Ground swelled to over two hundred thousand, spilling into the streets. This was Asif’s first taste of the love and support of the masses for the PPP and he looked worried as the security guards urged the crowds to open a passageway for the Pajero. There wasn’t an inch of space on the sports field, nor room for one other person on the balconies on the buildings that rimmed the field. For days women members of the PPP had been wrapping wedding sweets into PPP-coloured boxes to distribute among the crowd at Lyari. Forty thousand were gone in an hour.

Jiye, Bhutto! Jiye, Bhutto! Folk music floated out over the crowd. People danced, cheered. Miniature hot-air balloons

were released, trailing stream-ers of fire. A display of fireworks sent rockets soaring into the night air, while fountains of silver and gold erupted on the ground. I waved to the

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crowd. They waved back. It made no difference to their hopes and dreams whether I was married or single.

Zia’s intelligence agents, I’m sure, were among the crowd at Lyari, hoping to be able to tell him that my marriage had diminished my support. But the regime’s hopes were dashed. ’Now Zia won’t call elections until Benazir starts a family,’ Samiya joked with my relatives when we returned to 70 Clifton for a late-night supper. Everybody had a good laugh. Though Asif wanted a large family, we had decided to wait. We wanted the time to adjust to married life, and to each other. And my political priorities had not changed.

’Today, on an occasion so personal and solemn for me, I want to reaffirm my public pledge to the people of Pakistan, and restate my most solemn vow to devote my life towards the welfare of each citizen and the freedom of this great nation of ours from dictatorship,’ I’d written in a statement released the morning of the wedding. ’I will not hesitate to make any sacrifice, be it large or small, as in the past. I will work shoulder to shoulder with my brothers and sisters - the people of Pakistan - to create an egalitarian society that is free from tyranny, from corruption and from violent tensions. This was my goal yesterday, this is the dream I share with you, and this will remain our unwavering commitment for-ever.’

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POSTSCRIPT
On May 29, 1988, General Zia abruptly dissolved Parliament, dismissed his hand-picked Prime Minister, and called for elections. I was in a meeting at 70 Clifton with party members from Larkana when the startling message was passed to me. ’You must be mistaken,’ I said. ’General Zia avoids elections. He doesn’t hold them.’ Even when the party official assured me that Zia had made the announcement at 7.15 pm on the radio and tele-vision, I still couldn’t believe it. ’You must have confused it with some other country,’ I said.

The congratulatory phone calls flooding into 70 Clifton and the clamour-ing of the press at the gate confirmed Zia’s totally unexpected move. To some, the timing was suspect. Four days before, a Karachi newspaper had announced I was to become a mother. ’I told you if you started a family Zia would hold elections,’ Samiya said triumphantly after I spoke with the press. Whether or not Zia’s announcement was influenced by my condition I do not know, but it did follow the news confirming for the first time that I was expecting. Though Asif

and I had wanted to wait before starting a family, we had been delighted with the unexpected news. Now with Zia’s melodramatic announcement, 1988 promised to be a year for un-expected happenings all around.

No one knew of Zia’s intent beforehand, including Prime Minister Junejo who had just returned from a trip to the Far East and at 6.00 pm was holding a press conference. Less than an hour later, a Junejo aide who had listened to Zia’s broadcast informed Zia’s prime minister that he had been sacked. Four reasons were given for the dissolution of the govern-ment: the failure of Prime Minister Junejo’s government to introduce Islamic Law quickly enough; the mishandling of the investigation into the devastating Ojri munitions depot explosion in April which launched mis-siles and bombs into the civilian population; corruption in the administra-tion, and the breakdown of law and order throughout the country.

Though I had little truck with Zia’s hand-picked Prime Minister, I felt sorry for the petty manner in which Mr Junejo was dismissed. Junejo had served Zia well, rubber-stamping the Zia Constitution, indemnifying all actions of Martial Law, confirming Zia as President and Chief-of-Army-
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Staff until 1990. But I quickly found that there was no echo of sympathy for him. ’When you lie with dogs, you get bitten,’ ran one of the harsh responses. Junejo’s epitaph, I heard several people remark, should read: ’the man who tumbled into history and tumbled out of it.’

Regardless, the mood throughout the country following Zia’s announce-ment was ebullient. Zia’s own constitution called for elections within ninety days of the dissolution of the government and to many, victory seemed near. ’No one can stop the PPP now,’ said one supporter after another. I tried, unsuccessfully, to plead caution. Though publicly I issued a conditional positive response to the promise of elections - ’If fair, free and impartial party-based elections are held within ninety days, we will welcome it’ - privately I had my doubts.

Free, fair elections meant the return of the PPP and the Bhuttos. Zia was already on record as saying he would ’not return power to those he had taken it from’. If he had found it difficult to co-habit with Mr Junejo, his own creation, how could he accept as Prime Minister the daughter of the man he had ordered to be executed? ’Zia hasn’t dismissed Junejo to permit the PPP to capture Parliament,’ I tempered the enthusiasm of our exultant supporters. Unfortunately but inevitably, Zia’s subsequent actions confirmed my worst suspicions.

On June 15, Zia announced the installation of Shariah, or Islamic

law as the supreme law of the land. Zia didn’t define what it was or was not in his television address, and nobody was sure what it meant. Did this mean that currency notes with representations of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, would be withdrawn because some Islamic schools consider the portrayal of the human face unIslamic? Did this mean that government bonds, which carry a fixed rate of interest, would be declared usurious? No guidelines were offered. What it boiled down to was that any citizen could now challenge an existing law as ’unIslamic’ before the High Courts. If the court found the law to be contrary to Islam, the judges could strike it down. But why had Zia waited until 1988 to imple-ment Shariah?