Stranger to History (41 page)
In that silence, I wondered why I was there. How despite our distances and unforeseen plans had the small works of Fate brought me to my father on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed? What was I to understand of the man – what was I to offer him? – on that cold and tense night, in a country that was noticeably more desolate, and by degrees, more violent?
When his shock subsided enough for him to speak, he said that the terrorists deliberately sought to rid the political landscape of its heroes. The men who wanted the faith to triumph knew that the country had to be destabilised, the robust society made bleaker. The ideologue in Karachi was right: the faith encouraged essence, and form was unimportant. But it also encouraged a dismantling of existing forms. Intellectual life, student unions, film industries and, eventually, judiciaries and constitutions were swept away; the cricket team began to focus on prayer; and, as the landscape became more desolate, the religious vision grew clearer, the anticipation of it more urgent. With every cycle, the conditions for faith were increased and the world was gradually undone till only the essence, of which the ideologue had spoken, remained.
I didn’t need to be Pakistani to understand what my father meant, only perhaps the degree to which he meant it. The death of the demagogue would demoralise the population. But in a country with few national leaders, removing Benazir made the very idea of the federation less viable. ‘And now you’ll see the disintegration of the PPP,’ my father said.
That disintegration was part of the Pakistani story. Just that year, Musharraf had hobbled the judiciary, and that institution, once one of the better ones in Pakistan, would not recover. My father now spoke of the country’s biggest political party disintegrating.
But there was something else: no one believed the regime when they said the Taleban and al-Qaeda killed Benazir. The great majority of people believed some combination of the agencies, Musharraf and his allied party killed her. It was witnessing this distrust that made me understand what it meant to live in a state that had been discredited. And at a time when the regime claimed to be fighting the gravest threat to the state’s existence!
My father’s mind, with its double vision, fastened on a conundrum: on the one hand, elections couldn’t be held in the present environment; on the other, the nation was in need of release, in need of legitimacy. Perhaps sensing his own mortality, he said, ‘You can’t have a caretaker government go on and on.’
Then images of the coffin flashed on the screen. Party workers handled it and beat their heads on it; the camera panned to a glass aperture on it its lid through which a white sheet was visible. My father’s face turned to horror; he sucked his teeth and pressed his folded hands against the bridge of his nose. It was the same gesture Benazir had made when she stepped off the plane in Karachi a few months before, unspeakably moving, a gesture of fighting emotion in public.
‘Like her brother,’ my father said, ‘shot in the neck.’ He referred to Murtaza Bhutto, who was gunned down outside his house in 1996 when Benazir was prime minister.
‘And in the same place as her father,’ my brother-in-law added.
‘What?’ my father said, a flicker of his normal, energetic manner returning to him.
‘Bhutto was executed in Rawalpindi,’ my brother-in-law clarified. My father nodded and sank into silence.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had, in a way, also died from a wound to the neck. That had been the beginning of my father’s political fight. The person we watched taken away in a simple coffin, now with no fight left in her, was his leader when that career came to fruition. It could be said that all my father’s idealism – his jail time, the small success and the great disappointment, the years when he struggled for democracy in his country – were flanked by this father and daughter who both died of fatal wounds to the neck. And running parallel to these futile threads, with which my father could string his life together, were the generals, one whom he had fought and the other in whose cabinet he was now a minister.
For it to be possible for men to live with such disconnect, for my father to live so many lives, the past had to be swept away each time. The original break with history that Pakistan made to realise the impulses of the faith, and which gave it the rootlessness it knew today, had to be repeated. Like the year of events, which had ended in trauma, all that could be wished for was the distraction of the next event. But in these small interims when the past could be seen as a whole, when my father could cast painful bridges over history, I felt a great sympathy as I watched the man I had judged so harshly, for not facing his past when it came to me, muse on the pain of history in his country. And maybe this was all that the gods had wished me to see, the grimace on my father’s face, and for us, both in our own ways strangers to history, to be together on the night that Benazir Bhutto was killed.
The journey I made for this book was longer than the text suggests. It began in Venice and ended in Delhi. There were countries like Jordan, Yemen and Oman that I travelled in, but was unable to write about. In eight months of travel, many more people helped than I can remember here. In some cases, I’ve had to leave out people because of the nature of the regimes they live in. For the same reason, certain names in the text have been changed. There are a few people whose generosity stands out, but I must emphasise it can only be attributed to the best traditions of warmth and hospitality, and is not an endorsement of what I have written, for which I am solely responsible. In Turkey: Eyup Ozer; Ömer Koç; Cigdem Simavi; Ömer Karacan. In Syria: Chad Sherif-Pasha; Even Nord. In Saudi Arabia: Fady Jameel; Salman bin Laden; Hisham Attar; Kareem Idriss. In Iran: Jack Gelardi. In Pakistan: Salmaan and Aamna Taseer; Shaan Taseer; Nuscie Jamil; Hameed Haroon; Yusuf Salahuddin.
I would like also to thank Claire Paterson, Andrew Kidd, Andy Miller, Anya Serota, Chiki Sarkar, Nick Davies.
Ajit Gulabchand, for his belief in me, and his unfaltering support.
And Ella Windsor, whose love and friendship run silently through each of these pages.
