BHUTTO HARDLY EVER wanted to sleep; he would go for days without his face or body betraying weariness, without a crumple in his impeccably tailored English suit. But that night I saw hurt and disappointment in his eyes; what was left of the white hair on his head was wildly awry. ‘Do I drink the blood of the people?’ he asked, and sipped again at the heavy crystal whisky tumbler clutched in his left hand.
Zia, silent, ran his fingers along his thin, waxed moustache.
Had Ghulam Mustafa Khar been there, he would have known how to lift the master’s spirits by echoing without a trace of irony another of the many sayings of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and the pair would have laughed uproariously. But the Lion of the Punjab had been promoted and purged one too many times, and, though he had stood at Bhutto’s side since the heady days of 1968 when the scent of revolution was as persistent and undeniable in Karachi and Lahore as in Berkeley and London, had decided enough was enough.
Instead, Bhutto was alone in the room with his ‘bandar general’ Zia ul-Haq, chosen by him, as all-powerful head of state, over six more senior generals to be his army chief of staff. He used to like mocking Zia. In front of visiting leaders and ambassadors, he’d pull on an imaginary string to bring his monkey general close. ‘See how my monkey obeys me?’ he’d say to his astonished guests. ‘He can do any trick I ask for.’ And clapping a hand on Zia’s shoulder, he’d say, ‘Go on, show us your tricks.’ Zia would fold his hands over his stomach and, bending at the waist, execute a deep bow and smile, revealing his hideous teeth and sending shivers down the spines of those present. ‘So kind of you, sir, so kind of you, all these attentions, so many attentions.’
The prime minister of Pakistan no longer mocked Zia.
‘Do I drink the blood of the people?’ he asked.
* * *
He takes the first four lashes well, eyes fixed on a point in space in front of him, teeth set in a clench, only the corners of his mouth quivering each time the whip cuts into the flesh of his back with a sharp crack. The flogger, a huge man, probably an award-winning pehlwan in the wrestling ring not too many years ago, wipes his brow with the back of his wrist and takes several deep measured breaths. His face is devoid of expression. Clearly, he wields the whip for work, not pleasure, though I have seen floggers relish the pain they inflict, even playing to the crowd that roars its approval each time the whip is brought down, flexing their muscles theatrically between blows, accepting a bottle of Vimto or some sweet paan from the front row as they focus their strength on the next lash.
The flogger knows the importance of the next lash, though the fifth lash is almost identical to the four that have come before. The prisoner’s composure breaks and he cries out, as if releasing a lifetime’s anger, frustration, sadness, and misery. The crowd is silent as the man’s agonies echo around the stadium.
Would my master have broken? Would my patron, my benefactor, my murshid, who had dragged me out of the filth of fatalism to believe in the power of a single man to change history, have surrendered his dignity to the fifth lash? I tremble at what it would have been like to hear the fateful cry of the man who contained within himself the powers and failings of a hundred million people, who was the living personification of all that his nation had become in the course of its sins and mercies.
There is arguably little to be gained by the next five lashes, except to finish off the prescribed punishment. The prisoner, having absorbed the finality of his fall, cries out freely as the last lashes are delivered with measured force.
Red Crescent officers watch from the side of the platform, on hand to revive the prisoner should he lapse into unconsciousness before the sentence is complete. From the stadium they will take the man, his back forever scarred, to Civil Hospital, where, amid the rats and roaches and the darkness into which the electricity-starved facility is so often plunged, he will live or die.
I have seen many floggings in the past couple of years and no longer wonder why they don’t move me to forget my own sorrows for the sake of the condemned man. I try not to be bothered by the delirium on the faces of many in the hot, sweaty, troubled crowd jostling for a view of the tamasha. I am no longer surprised that there are women here, too, more than one might imagine, and the occasional child who might otherwise have been left unattended. Certain state functionaries are required to attend floggings, but the rest, and there must be ten thousand here today, are from the lower classes. Public interest in these spectacles is rising, which may be attributed to the absence of other forms of mass entertainment: foreign films are now banned, tame low-budget romances from Lahore shown in their place, and peddlers of video porn are aggressively prosecuted.
There has been talk in the Urdu papers of the floggings, and hangings, being nationally televised, but the Minister for Religious Affairs – a controversial portfolio, every minister believing his own, too, touches on religious matters – is blocking such a move on the grounds that those who wish to be educated by the beneficial aspects of the Islamic punishments ought to be able to find their way to the nearest flogging venue without the government having to bring it live into their homes. It amuses me how he cleverly sidesteps the question of whether watching television is itself haram.
The blood of any man, no matter how anaemic, is always the richest red, the brightest in nature, as if God is emphasising its preciousness. The flogged prisoner, the dhoti at his loins turned a deep crimson, hangs limp across the five blocks of once-white stone that support his torso. Neither hands nor feet are bound, the only restraint being his own recognition that life as he knew it has come to an end. He is a former activist for the Pakistan People’s Party, and violated martial law by engaging in political activity, namely, the alleged distribution of a leaflet of sayings by Chairman Bhutto to fellow workers during lunch hour at the Pakistan Steel Mill in Pipri – the very one that Bhutto founded in 1973. There are other prisoners in line to be flogged this afternoon, on varied charges of disturbance of law and order, theft of government office supplies, consumption of contraband goods, failure to observe the prohibition against public eating and drinking during Ramadan. Their names and occupations will be published in tomorrow’s newspapers. I must confess that I have yet to witness public amputation for theft – the right hand for a left-handed man, and the left for a right-handed man – though I have been told the punishment has proved popular in Quetta and Peshawar, and is coming soon to Karachi and Lahore. The public will be pleased. During the delivery of the final lashes across the raw and pulpy back of the prisoner, a young man not far from where I stand calls out, ‘Kill him! Kill the haramzada. Fahhash! Qatil! Mardood!’ I turn, hoping my face delivers a stern rebuke, while others shuffle away from the lout, silently unsure how to react.
‘Chup kar!’ the flogger yells, glaring at the man, which only serves to incite the crowd, and a chant spreads through the stadium, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’
The police cordon tenses, skull-breaking lathi raised to the ready, tear gas canisters at hand, and it pushes the pressing crowd back a half-pace. The police all wear the same mask, the unmistakable look of utter contempt.
Having concluded the punishment, the flogger, assuming the posture of the pehlwan he most surely is, signals the end of the show. The crowd moans. Those other condemned, aware now of what awaits them, must endure another night in terrible anticipation of their punishment for crimes against the regime.
I am glad to be a free man. I’m at best a lowly protégé of limited gifts and means, not a stoic Hercules like my master, refusing until the very end to bend to the tyrants. You may have loved him, you may have hated him, but it is hard not to admire his courage when faced with men determined to kill him.
I used to be with Bhutto when he stopped by this very stadium for half an hour or so during cricket matches against England or the West Indies. Bhutto was not a fan of cricket, he cared little for sports, and he made no secret of it, unlike Zia, who makes every cricket match against India a national event. None of the rabble here today in the National Stadium are allowed anywhere near the VIP enclosures, which I can see are empty, the chairs not dusted in a long while, the shamianas becoming tattered by the loo, the hot wind that blows in from the Sind desert and deadens mind and spirit.
I am at a loss for why the people of Pakistan, many of whom now have to fight tooth and nail with the flood of Afghan refugees for precious menial jobs, approve of this and other new tamashas.
America and Pakistan have banded together to liberate Afghanistan from the Soviet infiltrators with their godless ways and disrespect for the fundamental beliefs of the tribesmen, and their alliance promises an eternity of misery.
I have made a bargain with Zia’s people to save my own flesh. Self-preservation, I tell myself, is not the same as betraying my master. Would he have wanted me to act in any other way? There is almost nothing I can tell the Inter-Services Intelligence or the Federal Investigation Agency that they don’t already know. What they want is my abject compliance, which, I am both proud and ashamed to say, I have given them in full measure.
Twenty years ago, on the same boulevards I now walk from the stadium, I was thrilled to watch the transformation of Pakistanis, the women putting away their saris for skirts and dresses, their long lush hair sheared into tough western perms. Then ten years ago, a new style of their own, at once modest and aggressive, innocent and knowing. Today, well, one doesn’t see women in public anymore, certainly not from the middle class, except where they are needed for teaching or nursing. Working-class women hide themselves from the public gaze in the burqa. Only the truly rich and the truly poor are beyond the constraints of veiled modesty. I find it unsettling how half of the country’s population has simply disappeared overnight.
* * *
When the master challenged the adoring masses in Karachi, Pindi, or Lahore – ‘Do I drink the blood of the people?’ – they would return a roaring ‘No!’, and he would reward them with his signal gesture, tearing open his shirt and baring his chest, bellowing, ‘Is there anyone who dares to shoot me? Then shoot me! I am ready to die for Pakistan’, and he would win the people all over again.
But we weren’t at a rally, like the one he staged after bringing home the 93,000 prisoners of war from India in 1973, or when he greeted ‘my brother’, Muammar Qadhafi, after the 1974 Islamic summit at Lahore – Bhutto was a giant, then. We weren’t at a siasi jalsa, either, tens of thousands of PPP supporters bussed in to show public approval for the declaration of yet another thousand-year war with India to defend Pakistan, or to hear his memorable words to Henry Kissinger that Pakistan would get the bomb even if it meant having to eat grass. We felt like a great people, then.
No. It was just Bhutto, in his living room. It was an auspicious night in January 1977, and he had summoned Zia to tell him there would be elections two months hence. The prospect of long-promised elections filled him with dread, I knew, but this night he seemed giddy with joy.
‘We’re going to have elections in sixty days,’ Bhutto told Zia. ‘That ragtag bunch of opposition parties, led by traitors and idiots – let’s see what they come up with.’
‘At your service, sir,’ Zia said, and smiled. I flinched at his obsequiousness, the dark circles around his eyes the murkiest I had ever seen. He bowed his head, showing the knife-edge parting down the middle of his thickly pomaded hair. At that moment, I realised Zia was no man’s servant, so unlike myself who was destined always to be of service to even the most unlikely of masters.
‘Asghar,’ Bhutto summoned me to his side. ‘Bring me the files.’
I hastened to his bedroom where, on the Louis Quatorze bureau, I knew was stacked a neat pile of dossiers compiled by his internal security advisers on every one of his enemies and allies. Numerous sources had revealed numerous secrets, some voluntarily, others less willingly.
I had been directly in the service of the Bhutto family since the age of fourteen. I was born in the same year as Zulfiqar Ali – 1928. But his was a powerful wadero family of Sind, ranked alongside if not above the Khuhros, the Soomros and the Jatois, whereas I was born in a humble peasant household on the lands of Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, his illustrious and handsome father, a much-decorated freedom fighter who had worked side by side with Muhammad Ali Jinnah to win independence from the British.
A tall, muscular boy with a presentable appearance and alert nature, I was picked in 1942 from many others to accompany Sir Shahnawaz on hunts with the British when they visited his lands. ‘Listen, but do not speak,’ my father instructed me as I began my new life. On these hunts, I gathered that with the world war engulfing Europe and East Asia, Britain was fighting for its own survival and would find it impossible to hold on to India for too many more years. It was never clear to me, in those ambiguous years of war, with whom lay the upper hand, the Indians or the British, and both sides always had to tread carefully. I learned from both Sir Shahnawaz and his British guests the manifold arts of deference.
Sir Shahnawaz was my first Bhutto benefactor. I was sent to school in Bombay for a while, and then Hyderabad and Lahore after Partition, returning to the ancestral lands in Larkana, where, with a pat on the head, I was presented to Zulfiqar Ali’s mother, Lakhi Bai. Sir Shahnawaz said, ‘Among the humble of the earth, walk the truly proud.’
Lakhi Bai used to be a seductive Hindu dancer before converting to Islam. She was Sir Shahnawaz’s second wife, he having early on been betrothed to an older woman in a ‘political’ marriage, an alliance between two powerful families to consolidate lands. For similar reasons, Zulfiqar Ali was ‘married’ to Shireen, a twelve-year-old who brought with her tens of thousands of acres of fine land. He would tell his second wife, the beautiful Iranian debutante Nusrat, that he never loved Shireen, nor ever slept with her, but I know that Shireen visited him at Al-Murtaza in Larkana, and I am also certain there was a daughter, the existence of whom has never officially been confirmed.
I had the full run of the Bhutto library in Larkana and spent there what time I could get. My reading helped me to better follow the many meetings involving the founders of Pakistan as they deliberated over a constitution, even if they were never able to resolve their fundamental differences. It took Zulfiqar Ali’s own miracle of constitution-making in 1973 to achieve this goal, while also balancing the country strategically against the imperialist aims of India, China, the Soviet Union, and America.
When Zulfiqar Ali returned from Berkeley and Oxford and became a barrister at the prestigious law firm of Dingomal in Karachi, defending his friends against criminal charges, I made the new capital of the new country my home, in fact and at heart, and gained the master’s trust as he quickly acquired a reputation as a man who was going places. At the Sind Club, Bhutto spoke often of Sind becoming the Indian subcontinent’s California, which at the time, despite the similarity in climate, seemed beyond comprehension. It was a sign of Bhutto’s charisma that he could convincingly compare Karachi to Los Angeles before Karachi even had suburbs.
I knocked gently on the bedroom door and Begum Nusrat Bhutto, still beautiful and graceful though approaching fifty, said politely, ‘Come in.’
She knew, of course, that it was me. Bhutto himself never knocked on any door. No night owl like Bhutto, she would still manage to be awake when he finally came to bed, even at five or six in the morning. She lay sprawled on the bed now, amid unrumpled white silk sheets, going through picture albums of the children again – Pinkie and Sunny, Mir and Shah.
‘My children grew to be as beautiful as they were when they were young,’ she said. Begum Bhutto was making a habit of nostalgia, and it worried me.
‘Yes, Begum sahiba. They all grew up beautiful.’
‘Is that Zia still with Zulfi?’
I nodded yes.
‘I’ve never seen a more repulsive man,’ she said, and fell silent.
If she was afraid of Zia – and Begum Bhutto was herself a formidable woman – she let it show that night. Pakistan had typically been run by the military, even when a civilian administrator took the official reins for a while. The army chief of staff was as powerful as one could legitimately become without having to face an election.
It was disconcerting to see her unsettled, but she quickly recovered. ‘If it’s true that the ugliness on the outside reflects the ugliness inside …’ She didn’t finish the thought. ‘Come, look at this picture of Pinkie picking roses in the garden.’
The photo had been taken at 70 Clifton a few years after the dashing Bhuttos – Zulfi and Nusratam – built their sprawling mansion to complement their growing social reputation in the Karachi of the 1950s. I made appreciative comments before assuming a more formal posture.
‘Begum sahiba, I came to get some files.’
‘Of course,’ she said, and the light went out of her eyes. The photo album slid limply from her hands as she sank back. ‘This has been a long night.’
I was about to leave the room when she said, ‘Asghar, I want you to remain the eyes and ears of this family. Listen to Zia carefully when he thinks you’re not being attentive. Bring the information straight to me if he ever slips up.’
‘Yes, Begum sahiba,’ I said.
‘And wire Pinkie to come home from Oxford for the elections. Tell her I said so. Zulfi needs her.’
Perhaps, but I would have to check with Bhutto first.
Glancing through the names on the files as I headed back to the living room, I was impressed by their scope. Bhutto’s Federal Security Force chief, Masood Mahmood, and his internal security adviser, Rao Rashid, had clearly identified the potential security challenges of the coming election campaign. I noted there were also reports by the chief ministers and governors of all four provinces – I eased one of them open – building on information from police inspectors and intelligence operatives. The election could easily degenerate into chaos; the opposition parties smelled blood.
Zia had not relaxed his stiff posture; his eyes were shining as if viewing God. Bhutto sat untidily, almost in a slouch. I thought again that had Khar, the Lion of the Punjab, been in the room – or even JA Rahim, Hanif Ramay, Malik Meraj Khalid, or Mubashir Hasan – he would have been able to draw on his energy and in turn feed his stature. But Zia seemed to suck the very life force from him.
‘Sir!’ I said loudly, wishing to break this unpleasant spell.
‘Thank you, Asghar,’ Bhutto said, taking the files. ‘And Asghar … you may go to bed now.’ In all my years with him, he had never once suggested that I sleep before he himself was ready to do so.
So long as Zia was there, I wanted to stay, but I daren’t disobey. Perhaps their next topic of conversation was too classified even for me – and I have heard the most sensitive of secrets conveyed to the leader.
* * *
The Landhi jail hadn’t been much on the map of my imagination until I started going there every Thursday to pump information from JA Rahim, my favourite among the PPP founders.
Landhi is nothing compared with the fortress-like Kot Lakhpat prison in Lahore, where Bhutto underwent his farcical trial for allegedly ordering his Federal Security Force to murder Ahmad Raza Kasuri’s father. Nor does it compare to the prison near Pindi, where Bhutto was hanged. I spent a few days behind bars in Kot Lakhpat. I am familiar too with incarceration in the various lesser prisons of Punjab and Sind. Suffice it to say that the British left behind a most efficient system of administration and justice by combining in one office the functions of judge, jury and executioner, as well as administrator and tax collector. Jinnah and Ayub and Bhutto and Zia all found the machinery useful, not least the prisons: solid, well-built, architecturally imposing, terrifying to contemplate, their foreboding façades rising on busy thoroughfares to instil fear in the population.
I like Rahim sahib. He was the one who, when Mubashir Hasan advocated including in the party’s motto ‘Islam is our faith’ – along with ‘democracy is our polity’ and ‘socialism is our economy’ – spoke against such a proclamation, calling it a slippery slope.
Waiting for me in the visiting room is an Inter-Services Intelligence agent I only know by the pseudonym of ‘Talib’, a round, bald and blotchy man who cares little about his appearance. He lights a cigarette and offers me one. I haven’t smoked since 1967, the year the PPP was founded and I decided to do away with all my addictions and temptations. Talib is a private man, though he did once tell me his niece had been accepted at a college in Surrey to study animal husbandry.
Today he looks at me with particular intent. ‘Something’s afoot,’ he says, making smoke rings and watching them rise toward the ceiling, ‘some conspiracy to overthrow the regime, some movement to bring the crowds out on the streets. As if we haven’t had enough of crowds to last until the next century. Do you know anything about it?’
‘I’m an informant,’ I say, ‘not the visionary leader of the opposition. I can’t take you where they haven’t gone yet.’ Talib looks affronted.
The flogging has left me annoyed – even more than the flogging, the rebel in the crowd and the reek of the minibus I took to Landhi, human sweat and excretion that reminded me of Kot Lakhpat. The Pathan conductor, noting where I had alighted, pestered me for details of the ‘phansi’ even when I told him it was a flogging, not a hanging, insisting on knowing whether the man’s eyes had popped out.
‘We make the rules now, you understand,’ says Talib. ‘If we say you have to do something, you do it. If we say you do something else, you do that. You’re like a human camera, making instant Polaroids of what goes on inside the rotted skulls of your great leaders. Once we have the snapshot, we decide if we’ll shit on it, or preserve it for the gallery of rogues we’re assembling at the presidential palace.’
Whatever the regime, chameleons like Talib will be with it one hundred per cent; the minute the other side is in, they switch colours, as if they’ve never believed anything else. They move from certainty to certainty without the least discomfort.
‘I’ll tell you if Rahim sahib says anything important. He’s a peculiarly quiet man. He wasn’t always, but now he is.’
Over my shoulder, Talib sees something and yells, ‘If it isn’t Ghulam Mustafa Khar, the Lion of the Punjab himself!’
Turning, I am face-to-face with the former governor and chief minister of Punjab, second only to Bhutto in the charismatic pantheon that used to be. Khar looks composed, but I detect a hint of vexation, as if he’s just finished a disagreeable late-afternoon meal with a touchy subordinate. I cannot tell if he is still with the party, or turned informant, or worse. He engulfs me with a hug of greeting.
So Khar is also visiting Rahim sahib, evidence enough for the truly suspicious that there was indeed something afoot inside Landhi jail, though I could easily assure them that Rahim sahib would be the least likely suspect. It was he who repeatedly told Bhutto and the rest of us that the PPP was not a party of ‘dogmatic fanatics’, and he was furious when Bhutto announced plans to nationalise the cotton-ginning and rice-husking mills so the poor farmers could get a fair share of the profit taken by corrupt middlemen. It was he who warned that further nationalisation would serve only to alienate the middle class once and for all.
I’m increasingly convinced that the regime has lost its head, seeing conspiracies where none exist. Since Zia rejected Jimmy Carter’s offer of 400 million dollars in aid to the Afghan jihad as ‘peanuts’, he has been pursuing ghosts and spirits rather than confronting real dangers.
‘Be strong,’ Khar whispers to me.
‘Enough with the sentimentality,’ Talib hisses. ‘You guys are lucky we’re not the FSF.’
Indeed we were. It was the 20,000-strong Federal Security Force, which Bhutto set up at the urging of Zhou Enlai, his own People’s Army, that helped kill the PPP. Even Rahim sahib, having insulted Bhutto in front of others once too often, was paid a visit late one night at his home by the FSF and ‘seriously injured in a scuffle’.
‘Be careful,’ Talib says as we reach Rahim sahib’s cell. Talib’s tone makes it sound as if my deal with the regime could be off.
The cell has been recently cleaned. The stinking hole in the corner has been scrubbed; a fresh sheet is on the wooden charpoy, itself a step up from the iron beds in worse prisons.
Rahim sahib gets up from the charpoy. ‘Ghaddar! So you’re here too! You’ve joined the gang of hypocrites. Khar, Pirzada, Jatoi, Mumtaz, they’ve all been here this week. I’m telling you straight up, I don’t know anything about a conspiracy. I’m from the awami wing of the party, not the fascist wing.’
‘I know that, Rahim sahib.’ Surely the cell is bugged. I feel like an actor in some old radio drama.
He collapses back on the charpoy. ‘Sit,’ he says. There is nowhere to sit, so I settle on the floor near his feet.
For a long time, we are quiet. My ears strain for something and I realise the constant buzz of the flies hovering over the shit and stink is today absent from the cell. The space measures just ten feet by twelve, a small, barred window in the upper corner of one wall letting in a tantalising stream of sunshine and just enough noise from the outside – the shouts of the rehriwallas, the screeches of speeding minibuses, and the wails of police cars – to make you do anything to get out.
‘Tell Rehana to make you some of your favourite kheer,’ Rahim sahib mutters.
‘Sir …?’ Rehana, Rahim sahib’s pretty, loyal wife, is under house arrest in the Karachi suburb of Nazimabad. A double MA herself, she was a star pupil when she met Rahim sahib at his lectures at Punjab University. Rehana begum has been trying to hitch me up with a succession of her nieces since the days I first got to know them. Is Rahim sahib hallucinating?
He is suddenly aware that his mind is wandering and shakes his head, sitting up straight. ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ he says. ‘It’s not Khar and Pirzada and Jatoi, those morons full of hot air, they have to worry about. Come closer, and I’ll whisper in your ear.’ I obey him. ‘Zulfiqar,’ he says softly, ‘Al-Zulfiqar.’
Rahim sahib still has his wits. He’s talking about Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who left Oxford after his father’s arrest in 1977, and four years later reportedly heads a terrorist organisation formed to avenge the hanging. He’s said to have been in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Afghanistan, even Germany, plotting revenge.
‘There’ll be something big in the news soon,’ Rahim sahib says. ‘I’ll tell you more.’ But when I move closer he boxes me on the ear, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to sting.
‘Ghaddar,’ he says, ‘you’ve joined them. Bloody traitor.’
‘Sir, for what it’s worth, I think what they’re doing to you is wrong. You shouldn’t be here. This place is for criminals. You should be teaching at some respectable place, under any regime, under any political system. Your mind shouldn’t be wasted.’
‘So that’s what you think? And what about the party? Who’s going to take care of the party?’
‘The party’s over, sir,’ I say firmly, because I know it to be true. When you put away the bandar ki topi and the dug-dugi, the masses move on, restless to find something to be amused by or someone to hurt. ‘The party’s over, sir,’ I repeat, ‘good and done. Finished.’
‘You liar,’ he shouts.
Rahim sahib needs psychiatric attention and I make a silent promise to press the issue again with the warden. Rahim sahib knows little that might be of any use about the PPP’s inner circle, and they know everything anyway, but he refuses to submit to the regime and so is punished.
I can’t decide if there is any truth to the Al-Zulfiqar plot, or whether Rahim sahib is playing a joke on his jailers.
* * *
I wouldn’t exactly have called it a dismissal, more a suspension, yes, laced with choice words, which was only to be expected after my momentary slip of class, my lapse of judgment. Mir and Shah and Sanam, I could handle, but there was something about Pinkie. She was inflexible. Like Khar, she had latched on to politics as a latecomer, rather than from conviction.
I’d disagreed with her before when her father sought her counsel, but that morning in April 1977 at 70 Clifton, I miscalculated. To me, she always sounded like a naïve undergraduate at a western university who has recently read John Stuart Mill for the first time, and that was fine when she was nineteen and at Radcliffe, and accompanied Bhutto and his entourage, the lone woman among ninety-one men, to the Simla negotiations with Indira Gandhi in 1972. But a twenty-five-year-old graduate student at Oxford studying international diplomacy should have been capable of more than the same old inanities.
‘Tell me, should I call fresh elections?’ Bhutto had asked her.
The opposition, the Pakistan National Alliance, a motley bunch of mostly fundamentalist and ethnic parties, was alleging that the March elections had been fixed – the PPP had won sixty per cent of the vote and seventy-five per cent of the seats in parliament – and was organising protest rallies. We would have won the 1977 elections regardless, but Bhutto wanted a two-thirds majority in parliament so he could amend the constitution and vest more powers in the prime minister – that is, himself. Yes, some of the races were probably fixed, but by no means as many as the PNA would have it. Not that it mattered; borrowing an old tactic used against the Raj, the opposition aimed to bring the country to a standstill with a pahyya jam hartal that coming Friday.
I knew the poll was rigged when I saw the absurd margin of victory in Punjab, which would have gone to the PPP in any case. Bhutto’s reaction was worse than it had been to the debacle of East Pakistan. ‘What have these foolish people done, Asghar?’ he said, dismissing his advisers so he could drink whisky until the early hours of the morning, aware he was facing a new threat now that accusations of fraud would cost him dearly in support among the military, the landlords, and the capitalists.
‘If you make concessions now …’ Pinkie began, her British accent more pronounced and cultivated during her years at Oxford, ‘they’ll ask for more and more. Don’t call new elections. Let them come around to accepting the results.’
‘Ah, Pinkie,’ smiled Bhutto, ‘if only it were that easy.’
Pinkie was undeterred. Having got herself elected president of the Oxford Union debating society, she was becoming a skilful rhetorician and as such knew a little about a lot, but not enough about any one thing to be of practical use for counsel. The list of topics she’d told me
they debated sounded juvenile: Is the British Commonwealth a viable entity?; Should drug addicts be allowed to satisfy their compulsions in prison?; Does the US or Britain have the more idealistic foreign policy? Begum Nusrat Bhutto couldn’t brag enough about Pinkie’s own presidency and all but skipped like a happy sparrow now that Pinkie had returned home, pleading with Bhutto to take her on the campaign trail – but only after she’d been fed and fattened up again. There was no doubt in my mind that Pinkie had become anorexic, though she took pains to hide that fact from her parents and her sister. I wished she would surrender to doubt, as her father would sometimes do in private, but she never did.
‘Papa, the awam count on you to be steady under pressure. Don’t give in, or they’ll sense weakness and lose trust in you.’ That wasn’t the point; the awam’s support was never in doubt.
I was losing my patience with Pinkie and Bhutto noticed. ‘Asghar?’
‘Sir, if I may, I think we have to bend to the new political reality. We made a mistake. The overeager party functionaries in Punjab made a huge blunder. Now we have a chance to correct it by being humble and apologetic to steal the wind from the opposition’s sails.’ I surprised myself with my own forcefulness. I was not one of his political advisers and decades of service had taught me my station and to keep my own counsel, but I could not resist. ‘Miss Bhutto is wrong.’
The silence was electric.
‘Bravo!’ cried Bhutto, putting aside the Morning News and clapping a short applause. ‘Pinkie, here is a man who would offer you some competition at the Oxford Union.’
But I knew I was doomed as I watched Pinkie struggle to maintain her outward composure. She seethed with anger, her skin turning from rose-pink to crimson. ‘Papa, this is an outrage! The Bhuttos set their own destiny. Their hearts tell them what to do. They don’t stick a finger in the wind and … and … take cues from the gutless and obedient.’
Bhutto laughed uproariously, opening an avenue of escape for me, but I missed it.
Instead, I argued that Asghar Khan of Tehrik-e-Istiqlal, the most secular member of the PNA, should not be dismissed because he expressed the wish of the people to be free of tyranny in ways Bhutto had not yet managed, and that Maulana Mufti Mahmood and the other leaders of the religious parties, reprehensible as their aspirations to take the country back to the seventh century might be, represented a genuine aspiration of the people for spiritual as well as material solace. I must have gone on for quite a bit, because Pinkie tapped a spoon against the side of her china teacup. ‘Asghar, I think your time is up.’
Bhutto’s eyes did not leave me throughout my little tirade, his long, graceful fingers fiddling with the pipe he had lately taken up and which he now clamped between his teeth. He struck a match and lit the pipe, puffing in the silence that followed before delivering his judgement.
‘Pinkie is like my friend Qaddafi. They get inspiration from beyond the horizon, whatever motivated Bulleh Shah and Shahbaz Qalandar.’ These frequent comparisons of Pinkie to luminaries beyond her ken annoyed me. In truth, we are all incomparable – although only Pinkie’s name, Benazir, literally means without compare. ‘You and I, Asghar, are like …’
‘Like what, Papa?’ Pinkie asked pointedly.
Bhutto did not finish because Zia, his knobbly hands clasped in front of his private parts, was bowing and scraping his way to the breakfast table. Zia was in the habit of giving me a bigger smile than he had for others, displaying each and every one of his sharp, straight teeth, but I could never understand whether he was revealing to me, a servant, his inner compassion or his deeply rooted cruelty.
I once shared an awkward few hours with Zia soon after his unexpected promotion to army chief of staff as he was made to wait in the outer office while Bhutto met with his political advisers. He started talking about the difficult time soldiers had in keeping their heads above water on their abysmal salaries. But he wasn’t complaining. He just didn’t know how to take temptation away from soldiers who saw corrupt civil servants getting ahead without penalty, sending their kids to study in England and their wives to shop in Dubai.
‘Asghar, the human soul is infinitely corruptible,’ Zia said. ‘Every power in the hands of the authorities needs to be exerted to keep corruption in check. We’re inherently fallible.’
‘But that’s what politics is for,’ I said, feeling emboldened by his lack of nobility, ‘the exchange of ideas in the marketplace, so that truth wins out.’
Zia’s smile was one of tolerance. ‘As often as not, politics leads to dissension. The unchecked ego can play havoc with the fragile minds of the people.’
He talked some more about the lives of the soldiers in the cantonments, and he brought me to an understanding of what their daily struggles were like. He knew of them first-hand, which was more than I could say about the latter-day socialists, the student and union leaders, who’d jumped on the PPP bandwagon.
* * *
I began to wonder if Pinkie lacked a soul. I don’t know what compelled me to enter her private rooms the afternoon after our ‘debate’ to go through the drawers and look under the bed. Was I looking for something incriminating to drive a wedge between father and daughter? Or was I just protecting my master from possible danger? My ostensible excuse, that I was looking for some misplaced files, didn’t convince me either. Bhutto took me aside and suggested I take some time off, go to al-Murtaza to clear my head, have a well-earned break from his ceaseless demands. I knew I should be at his side during these most critical manoeuvres, but I could also appreciate the extent of Pinkie’s wrath and my master’s need to at least symbolically put me in my place. I was on the Larkana train that night.
In those two weeks the country went up in flames. Hundreds of people were dead as anti-Bhutto protesters and the FSF clashed in all the major cities. It seemed that everyone outside the PPP apparatus had a single goal in mind: my master gone, at any cost. As if that would solve the country’s problems in a single stroke. Bhutto asked Zia for martial law in Karachi, Hyderabad and Lahore.
For five years I had listened to Bhutto and his ministers talk, day and night, about solving Pakistan’s complex and intractable problems, both domestic and foreign. Squeezing us were America and Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, China, and always India; the treasury was in constant crisis due to the incompetence of the state-run enterprises and the out-and-out thuggery of the business class; provincial politicians in the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan threatened secession with every small acknowledgment of their right to self-determination. It was all Bhutto could do to hold the country together. But the opposition acted as though the country had become an advanced democracy in the five years since the last election, the first since Partition. If that wasn’t enough, Khar was behaving like a spoiled child and so, despite their greater wisdom, were the PPP founders, with the exception of Rahim sahib, in wanting Bhutto to go faster and farther with reform than the people were prepared to accept. Pinkie seemed to think that if you repeated certain words, over and over, they would magically come true. I was worried about Begum Bhutto, who was unnaturally happy in the midst of this end-of-the-world turmoil.
The rallies through May and June of 1977 grew monotonous and taxing and, back at his side, I could see my master wilting under the pressure, more even than during the 1971 civil war. As Bhutto conceded ground, the opposition demanded more, smelling blood. It wasn’t confirmation that Pinkie had been right about sticking to our guns. The problem was that Bhutto’s rapid-fire concessions had taken on a life of their own, becoming haphazard and triggering yet more concessions, which could easily be branded opportunistic by the opposition – a logic that was difficult to refute. And with each new concession the air of desperation grew. Bhutto’s strength had always been to appear to be one step ahead of everyone else. Now it seemed he was a step behind.
We were at a large jalsa at Lahore’s Minar-e-Pakistan when Bhutto dropped the bombshell. ‘Mere aziz bhaiyo, behno, hamwatano, kisano, talibo, mazdooro, assalamu-alaikum.’ He began by directly addressing the peasants, workers, and students as he’d always done in his speeches since 1967.
Lahore had been good to him. It was here only a few months earlier that he’d announced new land reforms going beyond those of 1972; though everyone knew that signing a piece of legislation did not actually give land to the landless, we had to start somewhere. The towns and villages around Lahore had over the years heard Bhutto call on landlords and peasants to talk to each other in open kutcheries – modern-day durbars – to air their grievances in front of the PPP’s local and provincial administrators, who would immediately take note of the problems. Bhutto was at his best among the poor and hopeless, acting as if he were born one of them, their blood in his veins.
With a hundred thousand people hanging on his every word, Bhutto launched into a peroration on Pakistan’s very identity as an Islamic nation. Hoping to undermine the political aspirations of the militant Islamic parties, he reminded the crowd that his 1973 constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic, and that he had branded the Qadiani sect kafir, depriving them of their rights of citizenship under an Islamic state.
Bhutto said he was going to outlaw alcohol, gambling, horse racing, nightclubs, discos, all forms of blight on the purity of Pakistan, and declare Friday, instead of Sunday, the day of rest and worship. My mind was numb. Bhutto did not end his speech by tearing open his shirt and inviting the assassin’s bullet.
Bhutto asked Zia at 70 Clifton during each of their meetings in the days leading up to the final collapse on July 5 whether he’d gone far enough with his reforms.
‘As far as you can go, sir,’ Zia would reply. He knew he was coming into his own and I began to view the man with new admiration, and fear.
Pinkie never attended her father’s speeches. Her mother said that she was right to worry about the possibility of sunstroke in the heat, and the risk of heart palpitations brought on by the crushing crowds.
* * *
Talib declines my offers of tea and cookies, even the few leftover samosas I have from last night. Intelligence people must always be suspicious of poisoning and other conspiracies. He has brought two other ISI officers with him, one, he says, to take notes. He assigns no role to the other, a giant of a man, who would be useful should the need for hand-to-hand combat arise. Talib relaxes in my rattan chair, the note-taker fiddles with pen and paper, and the wrestler pokes around my room without so much as permission or apology.
‘I’ve never been inside your place,’ Talib says, blowing smoke rings. I don’t believe him, but remain silent. ‘You must have had nice rooms at 70 Clifton? I hear Bhutto had you in charge of some of the most secret dossiers compiled by the FSF. You had one on Zia, didn’t you?’
That is true, and I confirm it. ‘The file said Zia was the most loyal of generals. He had his finger on the pulse of the jawans, to whom he only reacted in a very conservative fashion. The chances of Zia calling on the army to take over, even under turbulent conditions, were said to be nil.’
‘Intelligence people do have their blind spots,’ Talib said. He was being friendly with me. Perhaps he empathised with my position as someone just doing his job at the bidding of others, a messenger conveying information from one stubborn party to another. ‘You know, for a couple of years after the 1971 debacle, I continued to believe that Bhutto had saved the country’s honour, salvaged what little could be kept of Pakistan. I honoured him for bringing back the POWs, for pressuring Mujib not to put those hundred and ninety-five soldiers on trial for so-called war crimes, for getting back the five thousand square miles of territory taken by India. Then I realised that the bastard brought about the East Pakistan tragedy in the first place. I have my problems with democracy, but Mujib had won fair and square and deserved a chance. Bhutto would rather break up the country than live with the results. Personal ambition, Asghar, my dear fellow, pure personal ambition, run amok.’
‘Is Zia less motivated by personal ambition?’ I ask with measured calm.
Talib is surprised by my boldness. No one asks such questions anymore, at last not in public. ‘Zia’s motivation is the greater good of Pakistan. Never forget that.’ He remembers whom he serves and slips back behind the bureaucratic screen.
I try to draw him back out. ‘What do you think of jailing and stoning women for adultery if they bring forth complaints of rape? What do you think of cutting off the hands of people for petty thefts?’
‘You think that is the sum of his reforms? Why do you PPP fellows always latch on to the most sensational of the other guy’s actions, always look for the most vulnerable spot to strike? Zia is a humble man who genuinely cares for the downtrodden. Besides, no one’s hands have actually been cut off yet.’
‘I see. You’d rather have the Mughal durbar, the Raj kutchery, the arbitrary exercise of compassion, than the rule of law applied equally to all.’ Talib lets me speak, sensing that I’m letting off steam before some major act of betrayal. The other two are at ease. I must have missed Talib’s signal: the note-taker has stopped scribbling despite the opportunity to record my wild accusations about the regime’s intentions.
‘We’re very suspicious of people who never get married,’ Talib says when I finally stop talking.
He looks slowly around my bare apartment. I’ve removed everything that might in any way be considered compromising, even tossing out books on literary theory by obscure Romanians and Hungarians translated into bad English. I doubt Talib is up to reading more than newspapers, but he’s surely imagining how many books were removed from the sparsely populated shelves. He would not understand Faiz, the socialist poet, who always seems to be the first arrested under martial law.
‘You don’t have any perversions, do you?’ Talib asks.
‘If I did, you’d already know.’
‘Be that as it may … Getting down to business, what’s the big news you have to share?’ He darts a quick look in the direction of the note-taker, who now holds his pen at the ready.
I marshal my thoughts, having taken Rahim sahib’s hints at things ‘afoot’ to pry information out of the party hierarchy, corralling those at the top as well as the lesser lights. Something is indeed ‘up’. The Bhutto family isn’t down and out, yet.
Pinkie is in detention at Sukkur jail, in very bad shape from what I hear, having lost a lot of weight. Begum Bhutto is said to have been diagnosed with lung cancer, but Zia won’t give her permission to travel abroad for medical treatment. He says there is ‘nothing the matter with Begum Bhutto’, but she is free to travel – if ‘she wants to do some sightseeing’. Mir and Shahnawaz, married to Afghan sisters Fauzia and Rehana, are in Europe and beyond the reach of Zia’s enforcers, even as they organise terrorist actions. Indeed, scarcely a week goes by that Mir and Shahnawaz do not appear on European television claiming responsibility for acts of terrorism. Europeans pay them more attention than the exhausted Pakistani public. From what I gather, they plan to hijack a Pakistan International Airlines passenger jet from Lahore, fly it to Kabul, and demand the release of scores of political prisoners. I got this not from Khar or the other PPP officials, but from low-level supporters of Mir and Shah’s Al-Zulfiqar organisation in the PPP stronghold of Lyari, where it’s being talked about in the backrooms of paan shops and restaurants, as if a bunch of ten-year-olds were planning a prank on some quiet residential street. I was taken to meet one of the so-called leaders, who goes by the name of Abdul Karim Baloch. He confirmed the plan and asked me to convey a message of allegiance to Pinkie, believing that I’m still in touch with her and loyal to the old PPP structure. He wanted to know how she thinks the party apparatus should proceed once the regime gives in to the hijackers.
I seriously doubt I’m telling Talib anything the ISI doesn’t already know. Since it absorbed Bhutto’s FSF it’s not like the plodding ISI of old, cut off from reality. Those FSF people are damn good – I’ve read their reports, and they were on to things long before they happened. It was a pity they so alienated my master from the party.
No, I have other, more complex reasons for drawing attention to the activities of Al-Zulfiqar. If it succeeds with its plans, my informants say the next step will be something on a catastrophic scale, so big that Zia will have to release Pinkie and Begum Bhutto and exile himself to Saudi Arabia or a Gulf sheikhdom. Pinkie is ten times more feudal than Bhutto ever was and she’ll embark on an unprecedented vendetta, cleansing everyone who had anything to do with her father’s ‘judicial murder’, as she always refers to that travesty of a trial and execution. No one will be spared. If her father didn’t have something like the East Pakistan bloodbath in mind to deal with the 1977 PNA agitation, I wouldn’t put it past her to take the country down such a path. Bhutto didn’t have that remorseless streak of brutality. He earned his power through charisma and sincerity, no matter how confused and cruel he may have been at times. When he called out the army to deal with Baluchistan and the NWFP, it was to put down secessionist movements. There was no way he could have countenanced a replay of Bangladesh.
‘Can we fully trust you, Asghar?’ Talib finally says when I’m done reciting the details of the plot as far as I’ve been able to piece it together, and given him the names and locations of several key PPP activists – potential terrorists, if you will – that the ISI may not be on to yet. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I want all this to stop. I want the cycle of violence and counter-violence to come to an end; anything to bring a halt to this viciousness.’
‘Anything?’ says Talib. ‘A few selective floggings to put the fear of Allah in the hearts of the people?’
I look at him, defeated. ‘I only meant the goondas.’
Talib smiles. So do his two companions. Benevolence is in the air, and I must admit it feels good after four years of terror.
‘I’ll see what I can do about your petition to travel abroad,’ Talib says when he leaves. ‘Thank you, my friend. You’ve been of invaluable service to the state. You won’t regret your actions. I’ll pass the word about your loyalty to my superiors all the way up the chain.’
‘My loyalty?’
‘Loyalty,’ Talib repeats. ‘Come on, fellows.’
The note-taker clicks off his pen and inserts his notes in an envelope, which he licks and seals.
‘Los Angeles or London?’ Talib asks.
‘Excuse me?’ Then I realise he’s talking about my preferred place of exile. ‘Los Angeles,’ I mutter, without much thought – Bhutto’s sunny California, where he first imbibed his radical ideas, even if Rahim sahib claims to have ignited them. London is a hive of PPP activists; whenever Mir and Shahnawaz declare a terrorist victory, the BBC and the Guardian treat them as heroes. I would have thought that killing innocent people was grounds for their arrest and prosecution by whatever judicial system they were hiding behind. And they pale in comparison to what I’m afraid of from Pinkie.
I look around my desolate room, as if already a stranger to this misery. Somewhere in the city – perhaps in Baldia or Korangi – no doubt a tiny rebellion is being put down by the guns of the regime. Lives are being lost in vain. Some are fighting for Bhutto, some for Mufti Mahmood and the other mullahs. Who knows what any of us is really fighting for?
* * *
Husna, Bhutto’s Bengali beauty, lived in a large house built for her across the street from 70 Clifton. I never saw the master get as angry with Husna as he might have, given her flirtatious ways with men. In times of political crisis, Bhutto would have her move to an annexe he had added to 70 Clifton, from which she knew better than to wander. Begum Bhutto never acknowledged the annexe or Husna’s presence there, not to me or anyone else, and even if she had, there was nothing she could do about it.
The attraction for Bhutto, apart from Husna’s undeniable physical charms and seductive dark looks, was her intelligence. She could hold up her end of a nuanced political discussion for hours at a time, something Begum Bhutto could never have matched.
On that last evening of our freedom, Husna stalked the annexe while the rest of 70 Clifton was in an uproar. Zia was due to arrive at any minute. There was supposed to be a deal in place with the PNA, cancelling the results of the previous elections and calling fresh ones to satisfy the opposition. But something was wrong. I had a sense of dread. Rao Rashid, Bhutto’s most trusted intelligence and security aide, with a finger in every unpalatable Pakistani pie, had assured him that the opposition would soon fracture and said more than once that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was the only national leader. I had lately come to question Rao Rashid’s perennial optimism.
Husna called me to her room at nine o’clock. She wore only a silk slip, her heavy breasts mostly exposed, her thighs shifting around in the flimsy covering like pillars of solace. She caught me staring, which only made her more daring. She may have been amused; I was not, and asked how I might be of service to her. She wanted to make sure we found a replacement for one of Zulfi’s favourite pairs of black wingtips the next time we were in London. She had noticed a scratch on one of the shoes.
I did not like being dragged from Bhutto’s side at crucial moments like these for such trivial distractions, and I told Husna so. She came close to me, patted me on the cheek. ‘Asghar,’ she said, ‘you’re such a child.’ Then she turned and went into the bathroom. I could hear her crying. I took that as a dismissal and hastened back to the living room at 70 Clifton. It wasn’t true what they said about Husna’s preternatural calm: when her husband, a leading intellectual, was killed by the Pakistan Army in 1971 in Dacca, after she’d moved to Karachi to be near Bhutto, she was said not to have shed a tear. A lie.
I never knew Zia was a chain-smoker. I never saw him so much as touch a cigarette, even when cooling his heels for hours before a meeting with Bhutto. Tonight, the air was thick with smoke.
As I came in, Bhutto slipped me a note with instructions to get one of his new suits ready as soon as Zia was gone, and to make sure the press secretary passed the word to the television, radio and newspaper reporters that there would be a press conference at 70 Clinton at eleven-thirty that evening.
‘Sir, I can assure you the army will do its duty by the government in strict adherence to the constitution in all respects,’ Zia said in that squeaky, blatantly modest voice of his. ‘The jawans expect no less of me. You elevated me above six more senior officers. I’ll forever be grateful for your generosity, sir.’
Bhutto had been telling Zia how he needed martial law retained in Karachi, Lahore, and Hyderabad, and the army to keep its tight grip in Baluchistan and the NWFP, all through the campaign and elections, possibly in November. But he was saying nothing of his plans for later that night.
They talked then about the Shah of Iran, Bhutto’s fair-weather friend who’d pitched in with American planes and arms to help suppress the Baluch insurgency, but refused him 300 million dollars to bail him out of an economic crisis that year.
‘The fundamentalist threat is being exaggerated by the Shah to squeeze more aid out of the Americans,’ Zia said. ‘Iran’s is a sophisticated civilisation. The Shi’ite clerics have not an enlightened arrow in their quiver. The proud Persian civilisation would never go for clerics who propagate senseless rebellion from the holy shrines.’
‘That is not what my intelligence reports,’ Bhutto said. ‘Khomeini is a real threat.’
With some irritation, Zia said, ‘The Shi’ite clerics are so rigid, they wouldn’t forgive my poor daughter Zain for a mistake.’ Zia doted on Zain, his twenty-year-old mentally handicapped daughter; he’d shown me pictures of her once, and spoke of her with great fondness.
Agitated, Bhutto paced around the room. Zia lit another cigarette.
‘If anything happens to me, I expect Pinkie to continue my legacy,’ Bhutto said from nowhere. ‘I have groomed her well. I don’t expect to live more than another ten years anyway. Ten years, maximum. My heart, my liver, they’ll give out long before then.’
‘Children are the pride of dutiful parents, sir,’ Zia said, rubbing his long hands as if performing wudu before prayer.
The black mark on Zia’s forehead, of the kind acquired by diligent namazis after years of persistent head-banging while performing sajda, shone brighter than ever. It sat like an ugly beacon on his head, calling forth medieval demons, the legendary churayls and bhoots of the rural imagination. I had the sudden impulse to grab a heavy brass ornament from the mantelpiece, one of the gifts from the Shah of Iran to his ‘brother’, and bludgeon Zia to death in front of the master.
‘Anyway, it’s all over now,’ Bhutto said to Zia. ‘We’ve resolved all our differences, the opposition and I. You can go home and rest.’
‘The army, I can assure you, sir, will follow the constitution to the letter,’ Zia repeated. ‘It will never do anything to destabilise the country. The jawans are one hundred per cent behind me, sir.’
Bhutto had, at first, refused to negotiate altogether with the PNA; it had no ideology save his ouster. Secularists like Asghar Khan nakedly cohabited with hotheaded mullahs like Shah Ahmad Noorani, united in their hatred of Bhutto, resentful of the sway he still held over the awam. Bhutto tried to have his friends in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervene in the name of sanity and order. He gave the army a freer hand to quell protests.
A month ago, he had announced a deal with the PNA to hold new elections and left on yet another tour of the Middle East, denying the opposition any specifics. But last night he told Pirzada, Rao, Rashid, and his other deputies, that he would go along with each and every one of the opposition’s demands. The PPP leadership drank to the decision until six that morning. Husna joined them toward the end. Begum Bhutto was nowhere to be seen and I don’t think she waited up for him. Only Rahim sahib seemed intent on ruining Bhutto’s mood. ‘You’ve left it too late, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The army is emboldened. Dangerous precedents have been set. They think the constitution is a piece of paper they can toy with.’
Bhutto was enraged and I feared for Rahim sahib’s life. He was in his seventies and the FSF had long since become inured to the consequences of its actions.
Pirzada tried to defuse the situation. ‘Rahim-ji, as law minister I cannot allow any downer tonight. That would be … a crime against the state, yes, punishable by … five years’ rigorous imprisonment.’
And they all laughed, except Rahim sahib. I didn’t find it particularly funny either.
Bhutto wanted to drag the desperate opposition negotiators over the coals a bit more, let them imagine worst-case scenarios, before announcing his intentions and stripping them of every idea that might make them attractive to the voters. But in the meeting with Zia he must have found what he was looking for, something in the general’s manner to confirm his suspicion that time was running out – that it was now or never.
As soon as Zia left, Bhutto gave instructions to inform the PNA leadership that he agreed to every one of their demands.
‘We have concluded an historic deal with the opposition,’ Bhutto told the assembled media. ‘We’ll have a public ceremony tomorrow to sign the accord. This is unprecedented in Pakistan’s history. Politics is the art of give-and-take. If I play hardball, the other side is welcome to as well. The interest of the country, the legitimacy of the constitution, its preservation, comes first. I apologise to my brothers and sisters who’ve had to suffer through the nightmare of the last four months. We hope the return of stability will attract much-needed investment to the country. Pakistan is open for business again. Let there be an end to the strikes, the riots. Let politics, the supreme human art, take centre stage again. My thanks to the Shah of Iran, to King Khalid, to all those who lent their good offices to resolve these sticky matters.’
Bhutto took no questions and left the room to its understandable scepticism. How many times had they heard this before? Was this deal real?
Pakistan had been caught up in too much politics since 1967, when Bhutto started the first populist movement. Siyasat, siyasat, every step of the way. Bhutto loved it, it gave him life. Husna claimed to love it. I let it consume my life. But did the people love it, too? Or were they more like Begum Bhutto, their tolerance strained, leery of the prospect of yet more of it?
At two o’clock that morning, 70 Clifton was surrounded by the army. A military helicopter took Bhutto to the Murree rest house, and I went with him, part of the retinue of aides he was allowed to keep for three weeks. Zia was now in charge and at first he was inclined to allow Bhutto a degree of comfort during his detention. The soldiers sent to wake me seemed amused that the detained prime minister would want his servants with him. A colonel glanced briefly at the papers I collected from the file cabinets in my room and said, ‘You’ll be needing all of these, I suppose, to mount your defence. Take all the papers you want. Documentation is always good.’
I thanked him for his generosity.
* * *
More than a quarter century has passed. How do I feel, now that Pinkie is dead? I feel a sorrow I didn’t think possible, and I blame myself, I blame the legions of Asghars, loyal Pakistanis, loyal PPP men, who couldn’t save her, who couldn’t save any of them.
Chen, the only one of my neighbours with whom I have friendly contact, drops by to commiserate. His wife, older by fifteen years, is with him. ‘We’re very sorry to hear, Asghar,’ he says, his sympathy sincere. Chen’s wife says, ‘Will you be going to Pakistan? We know how close you were to her. Such a shame, a modern Islamic woman leader, gunned down by fanatics. They’ll never catch the perpetrators. It was the government. That’s how it always is.’ Other than the Chens, no one calls on me; no one else knows I’m from Pakistan.
In the Southern California suburb of West Covina, unfounded gossip has it that I recruited large numbers of men from the Arab world to fight the Afghan jihad in the 1980s and received a special commendation from President Reagan himself. Almost three decades on this street and my neighbours are as much strangers to me as I am to them. It’s easy for rumours to get started, about a single man who doesn’t seem to have any visible source of income. America is no different than Pakistan in so many ways. Until retirement, I used to do the accounts for numerous small businesses – travel agencies, restaurants, doctor’s offices, and the like. I have had the occasional fling – with an Afghan or Persian or Turkish divorcee or widow with a taste for the arts and music – but mostly I have kept to myself. The Bhuttos train their acolytes well and it’s impossible to spurn asceticism once it’s ingrained. Women understand I’m not the marrying kind.
Though I avoid news of Pakistan, so much in the limelight again, there is the rare exception, Pinkie’s assassination being one of them. I knew in my heart it would happen, sooner or later. That leaves just Sanam, who never wanted anything to do with politics. Shahnawaz was killed in the 1980s, by his wife, they say. Mir was gunned down in Karachi in the 1990s when Pinkie was in power. People claimed her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, orchestrated the murder, with Pinkie’s knowledge – as absurd an idea as I’ve ever heard. Begum Bhutto is as good as gone, her mind lost to dementia. I feel a sudden sadness that she has been robbed of even the faculty to lament. Rahim sahib is dead. So too are Rao Rashid and Maulana Noorani. Even beautiful Husna is dead. Asghar Khan lives, as does Khar, the Lion of the Punjab, who prospers still.
At UCLA in the 1980s, I met a scholar, perhaps the pre-eminent scholar, on Pakistan. He was very welcoming. He was writing what he called the authoritative biography of Bhutto, having made a name for himself with his book on Jinnah. He invited me to his office in Bunche Hall, offered me tea, and we sat and talked.
‘To meet someone who knew Bhutto so closely, almost a member of the family, now that is a stroke of fortune. It’s as good as being at 70 Clifton, digging around in the files,’ he said, brimming with enthusiasm. ‘The files are sealed, of course, as long as Zia stays in power, but you, my dear Asghar, are an open book. I hope to get many, many hours of useful information out of you.’
I was flattered. I had nothing better to do; the evenings and weekends made me depressed. Not even the Pacific Ocean could lift my spirits.
‘The Baluchistan insurgency …’ he began. ‘That was bad. The way it was crushed. A second genocide, you might say, so soon after the Bangladesh tragedy. How did Bhutto feel about the slaughter of innocent Baluchis?’
‘Genocide?’ I sputtered, aghast at such a reading of events. ‘What do you mean, genocide? It was an out-and-out insurgency, rebellion against state authority. It had to be put down, or Pakistan would have split into five pieces.’
The good professor seemed unperturbed by my outburst and our conversation continued until it turned to Islamisation. He clearly enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and I began to suspect that what he wanted from me was confirmation, my endorsement of his version of the truth.
‘In 1977, Bhutto started the first-ever wave of Islamisation in Pakistan. Friday as the holiday, banning drinking, gambling, what have you. That set the stage for Zia. Pakistan will find it hard, perhaps impossible, to ever escape that trap. Bhutto let the genie out of the bottle …’
I cut him off. ‘He didn’t let the genie out, as you call it. It was already out. He gave it a little air, released some pressure, but it was never his intention to make the country a haven for fanatics and crazies. A little economic prosperity, a little breathing room, and all would have been well. He was secular to the core, I tell you, just like Jinnah.’
‘Ah, Jinnah, yes, another great enigma. Always playing both sides of the game. Anyway, Asghar, what do you think of Bhutto’s role in the break-up of Pakistan? We know the history. Did he express any regret to you? About not letting Mujib become prime minister? I always thought the situation was salvageable until the very end.’
That did it. Nothing I would be able to say would change how he thought of Pakistan.
‘Good luck writing your biography, professor,’ I said, rising from my chair, ‘but please don’t use my name as a source anywhere in it. I don’t want to be associated in any way, shape, or form.’
When Pinkie became the first elected female Muslim leader after the death of Zia, I forgave her, wished her luck, and closed the door on my past.
But how does one put Pakistan out of one’s mind? I am healthy, live a soft life, have nothing to fear from the state or police. In this bizarre war on terror I am forgotten, a dated fossil; no one would think of enquiring after me. At one time, I was a prized political resource. Now, I’m mislaid, lost. In a few weeks, the turmoil over Pinkie’s death will pass. She is already buried in Larkana, next to the master. The Bhuttos will live on; the awam will never stint in their loyalty to the name. And nor, in the ways it most counts, will I. And if I mistake insipidity for loyalty, so be it.
