Songs of Blood and Sword Page 3

  ‘Do you regret your life?’ I asked Papa after we returned home from his sombre birthday dinner at the Avari Hotel. He was sitting on his green chair, his legs crossed and his elbows resting on the arms of the chair. He paused for a moment, stroking the crown of his head as he often did when he was lost in thought. ‘No.’ Papa leaned forward towards me. ‘I fought the government that killed my father and brother and I’m proud of that. What we failed in, we failed in, but we didn’t take the coup lying down. We resisted. I’d do it all again,’ he said and leaned back into his chair. We had, my parents and I, been having a light-hearted conversation – escaping briefly from the day’s madness into our own private world of late-night jokes and memories. Papa was teasing Mummy and she was giggling back at Papa; they had been flirting absent-mindedly until my question brought us back to the dangerous present.

  ‘You should write a book,’ I said. Papa laughed loudly and threw his hands up in the air. ‘I can’t write a book while I’m alive. They’d never let me come out into the open with the things I know.’ ‘What do you mean? You have to do it – write a book about your life, Papa, it would be so interesting.’ But he just laughed again, this time more quietly. ‘No, I can’t. You’ll do it for me. You can write the book on my life.’

  He smiled at me. Papa had the most beautiful spirit of any grown-up I had ever encountered. No matter that his life was often fraught with uncertainty and danger, he never let anything cloud his smile. I picked up a pen and a scrap of paper from the table, ready to take preliminary notes. ‘Not now,’ Papa said. ‘You can write it after I’m dead.’ ‘Why when you die?’ I felt my mood dropping and the anxiety of the past few days returning to the pit of my stomach. ‘It’s too dangerous before then,’ he said, looking at me. Papa’s eyes were sad. I don’t know if he felt it too, the uncertainty of what was ahead, the growing nervousness that had rumbled inside me for days. I think he did.

  20 September was a Saturday.

  By the evening my father would be dead.

  In the morning there was a flurry of activity in our house – bearers were rushing to prepare the meals and Mummy was planning a belated party for my brother Zulfikar’s sixth birthday the following day. We had planned to hold his birthday party at a children’s amusement park, Sinbad. It was ten minutes away from our house and had been built in the 1970s as a casino but was now an Islamically acceptable games centre. With its kitsch, windowless architecture Sinbad lorded it over Sea View, staring out at the grey sand on Clifton Beach and the Arabian Sea beyond.

  My room was being redecorated, being made my own after two years of living in the bedroom my two aunts had shared as angsty teenagers in the 1970s, so Papa came upstairs to the TV room, used as a makeshift bomb shelter during the 1965 war and where I now slept, to wake me up. After I’d got dressed we walked over to take a look at the renovations. My parents had waged a mini-war over who was going to decorate my new bedroom. The problem was that Papa had no taste at all when it came to décor. He tried to woo me with the promise of a disco ball in the centre of the room. It almost worked. Otherwise, his plans were wholly embarrassing. While Mummy knew that I wanted light green walls and a girly flowery look, Papa hadn’t a clue. He still thought of me as an eight-year-old tomboy. ‘We can put in Western-style swinging saloon doors like the ones in the old movies.’ No, Papa, we can’t. ‘OK, well how about rounded windows like in a submarine?’ No. The glittering disco ball was his finest moment.

  We walked into my freshly painted room. It was all white – only the base coat had been applied – and empty except for the wrought iron bed, which was pushed to one side of the room along with two side tables that hugged each other at another corner. The room looked clinical, like a hospital. ‘Nice,’ smirked Papa. ‘I bet you’re really happy you went with Mummy’s design.’ He laughed. Khe khe khe. Papa sounded like a naughty schoolboy when he laughed like that, his eyes wrinkling at the corners and his cheeks widening with each khe. Papa had brought back some panes of traditional stained glass from the interior of Sindh a while earlier. They were orange, blue and green. They were, in truth, repellent, but Mummy had vetoed putting them anywhere else in the house so I sided with Papa and insisted they were gorgeous. My reward was a set of my own Sindhi glass windows. They had already been installed and with the sun so bright that day and the room so white, their colours bounced across the room. ‘Good windows though,’ Papa murmured as we walked out of the room and down the stairs.

  At two that afternoon my father held a press conference. Journalists from various local papers and television crews were assembled in the press hall in 71 Clifton, an open room with windows facing towards the garden. Papa entered the room and sat at a long wooden table facing the press. Next to him sat Ashiq Jatoi, the president of the Sindh chapter of the party, and Malik Sarwar Bagh, an elderly gentleman who was PPP (SB)’s Karachi division president. Papa was wearing a midnight-blue shalwar kameez that day, so dark it seemed almost black, and at his neck he wore the two-pointed sword of Hazrat Ali, the courageous disciple of the Prophet who became the first Imam of Shia Islam. Papa was not a religious man but he revered the warrior who fought for the struggling Muslims in the days when they were outnumbered and under threat. The sword, small and golden, had the words la illah ill allah, there is no god but Allah, with small crisscrossed etchings finely imprinted around its curved shape. It hung on a black thread around Papa’s neck. He almost never wore jewellery, only a watch given to him by his father on his left wrist.

  Before coming in to speak to the press, Papa called Yar Mohammad and Sajjad over to speak to him privately. The young men were his two bodyguards. They were political workers too, but once my father was released from jail they rarely ever left his side. They protected him as if he was their own father, never moving too far from him. He had information from the police, Papa explained. He asked Yar Mohammad and Sajjad to leave Karachi. ‘Go where you want, it doesn’t matter where, but I don’t want you or your families nearby. We don’t know what they’ve done to Sonara and I want you safe until we find out.’ Yar Mohammad and Sajjad were not to accompany Papa to his public meeting in Surjani Town after the press conference; he made it clear that he would not risk their lives. The men protested, without effect. Things were just too dangerous to take a chance. They didn’t ask where the information about their lives came from or what it meant. But Papa was insistent. They were to leave him today and get out of the city, end of discussion.

  When Papa started the press conference, there was a weighty silence in the room. The papers had been full of stories, some falsely titillating, some accurate, about Papa’s midnight visits to the police centres two nights earlier. On 18 September, General Naserullah Babar, Benazir’s powerful Interior Minister who would proudly herald the Taliban in next-door Afghanistan as ‘my boys’, had taken to the floor of the National Assembly in Islamabad. General Babar announced that there were going to be, according to his top-level information, two bomb blasts in Karachi as a protest against the arrest of the terrorist Ali Sonara. He informed the assembly members and the press that the perpetrators of the violence were going to be from the MQM party or the Shaheed Bhutto party. Sure enough, there were ‘blasts’, and the government was quick to blame my father’s party. The journalists at the press conference on 20 September were eager to hear what Murtaza Bhutto had to say about all this. General Babar’s clairvoyance was making for serious copy in all the papers.

  Papa began his statement. ‘There is a plot against me, formulated by the most criminal elements within the police force, such as Wajid Durrani and Shahbaig Suddle.’ Papa named two notorious police officers. Rumour had it that they had achieved high rank owing to their close personal friendship with Benazir’s husband, Zardari, and also to their well-documented penchant for violence. Suddle was the District Inspector-General of Karachi and Wajid Durrani was the Senior Superintendent of the Police, heading one of the police stations my father visited on the night of the 17th. But Papa mispronounced one o
f their names; it wasn’t Shahbaig Suddle, it was Shoaib Suddle. We wouldn’t forget Shoaib Suddle’s name again, not ever.

  ‘These men,’ my father continued, ‘under the supervision of Abdullah Shah, the Chief Minister of Sindh, want to kill me. My life is in danger today. I’m giving this press conference to tell the government that my bags are ready. Bring a warrant for whatever it is you are accusing me and my party workers of and I’ll come myself and sit in your car.’ In fact, Papa’s packed briefcase had been sitting by the side of his bed since the night of the 17th.

  ‘I want to answer the allegations the government has made about my visits to several police stations. Regarding this, let me remind you that I am an elected official, an MPA, and it is my right to enter government offices.’At this Papa held up a picture of Ali Sonara. It is a photograph of one of Benazir’s jalsas, her political rallies; she is standing up with her head and shoulders poking out of the sunroof of a jeep, and waving at a crowd swarming around her. Several men stand behind her, eyes fierce, shielding her from every side; they are her bodyguards. Sonara is circled in the picture. ‘This is the man taken by the government,’ Papa said and pointed to Sonara. ‘Naseerullah Babar, the Minister of the Interior, said on the floor of the National Assembly that there would be blasts after Sonara’s “arrest” and that the MQM or SB would be behind it. If he had this information what did he do to avert any danger of the blasts actually going off? Nothing. There was nothing to do. This is a crackdown on the Pakistan People’s Party (Shaheed Bhutto). The Interior Minister knew about these supposed blasts because it is his office that planted them. I want to tell the government that we are a political party and we will resist these illegal, warrantless arrests and extra-judicial killings politically . . . We will not go into hiding. We are ready. It is not my style – in times of trouble – to hide behind my workers for protection. I stand on the frontline, they are behind me.’

  We ate lunch at home in 70 Clifton while Papa was giving the press conference next door, and left afterwards for Sea View, to continue the preparations for Zulfi’s party. As Mummy and I returned home, we ran into Papa, who came striding across the lobby. He was on his way out. The press conference was over. Ashiq Jatoi was waiting for him in the car outside on our driveway. I ran over to talk to my father but he was in a hurry and looked tense. ‘I’m late. I have to go,’ he said, stroking my back, as he moved towards the heavy wooden door. ‘Papa, wait,’ I said. ‘Let me change, I’ll come with you.’ I had only climbed one or two stairs, bounding towards my bombshelter bedroom, when Papa gently caught my elbow, stopping me in my tracks. ‘No, Fati, you can’t come,’ he said. ‘Things aren’t safe right now. Stay here, I’ll be back soon.’ I stood on the stairs and watched him walk out of the door, pulling it shut on his way out.

  As Papa walked towards the car he spotted Yar Mohammad and Sajjad. He walked over to them, visibly upset. ‘I told you both not to come with us today.’ The threats against the two men were serious. They were very close to my father and he depended on them greatly. ‘How can we leave you now?’ Yar Mohammad asked. ‘If things are as dangerous as you believe them to be,’ continued Sajjad, ‘then our place is not at home, but by your side.’ They would not be dissuaded. Papa called the other guards forward, there were seven men that day. ‘If the police try to arrest us on the way to the jalsa, surrender peacefully. Don’t try to protect me, I’ll be fine. Let them produce the warrants and we’ll go with them.’ The men nodded, they understood.

  Four cars set off from 70 Clifton that Friday. Papa sat in the passenger seat of a blue Land Cruiser belonging to Ashiq Jatoi, who was driving the car. Yar Mohammad sat in the back, behind Papa, along with Asif Jatoi, Ashiq’s family driver, and Asghar, a bearer from our house who often joined my father on his trips. Ahead of them was a red double-cabin pick-up truck carrying six people. Mahmood, Qaisar, Sattar Rajpar, Rahim Brohi – my father’s guards – and two others. A small white Alto car, matchbox shaped and compact, drove alongside Papa’s. It was carrying three people, two men who came along that day for the jalsa, and Sajjad. It was at Sajjad’s request that the Alto drove next to my father’s car, so it could act as a buffer in case anything happened. The last car was a white Pajero jeep belonging to a gentleman who had also decided to tag along to the public meeting; he was not a political worker but a well-wisher of sorts.Wajahat Jokio, the last of my father’s seven guards, sat with the Pajero owner and another passenger.

  The drive to Surjani Town, a suburb outside Karachi, is a long one, more than an hour in Karachi’s traffic. But it’s an opportunity to pass through most of our hectic city, caught unawares on a weekend afternoon. Papa’s small convoy drove towards Surjani Town on the road that leads towards Las Bela in Balochistan. Passing Clifton, they travelled north past the monument of the three swords, or teen talwar, emblazoned with the motto ‘Unity, Faith, Discipline’ on each of the large white marble swords pointing skywards. They would have driven through Saddar and its various markets – Zainab market where women’s clothing and children’s romper suits hang on wires outside storefronts, towards Gentila Men’s Tailors near the cooperative market and close to Karachi’s central post office, past the electronics market full of buzzing mobile phones and gadgets sold at half price. My father’s last journey was almost a beautiful one. He drove by Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah’s mazaar, or tomb, past the young hawkers preying on children and tourists with their cages containing small orange-beaked birds for sale. Further north, their convoy, having now grown to around thirty-five cars, sailed past Guru Mandar, an area named for an old Hindu temple but now known for its cluttered bus terminals, ferrying passengers in and out of the city.

  It must have been nearly 6 p.m. by the time my father’s car passed the gaudy marriage halls that mark the beginning of Surjani Town, whose boundary begins at a small police chowki or kiosk at a dusty roundabout. Circling inwards towards the small suburb, one leaves behind the big city’s flyovers and huge concrete bridges. There are no more fast food outlets or large cars parked outside fruit stalls and shopping malls. No, there’s none of that in Surjani Town.

  It’s a town marked only by weedy shrubs growing on the sides of the road, festooned with plastic bags that get punctured and caught as they float by. Papa was travelling to Youseff Goth, a small Katchi Abadi or slum within Surjani Town limits. He would be speaking to the poorest inhabitants of the area. Many party workers tried to dissuade Papa from even going to Surjani Town. ‘He’d had a very large meeting in Lyari in August,’2 Malik Sarwar Bagh remembers, speaking with such resignation that it is almost difficult to make out the words. ‘Everyone told Mir Sahib, don’t do the Surjani Town jalsa – you had such a reception in Lyari! Just like your father’s! Why bother with a small place like Surjani?’ But Papa refused to cancel. He had given his word to Maqbool Channa, a dedicated supporter from Youseff Goth. Bashir Daood, another party worker who had come from nearby Goli Mar, remembers my father insisting that the plan to visit Surjani Town and open a party office for religious minorities in the community was set in stone. He would not cancel.

  A huge crowd of about 2,000 people had gathered on a large stretch of land bordered on two sides by arbitrary manmade ditches full of sewage and rubbish. Papa got out of the car and saw that the police had come out in force too. They had parked their battered cars on the outskirts of the neighbourhood. The police, Qaisar and Mahmood remember, had close to thirty mobile units along with several large trucks commonly used to transport prisoners. There were close to a thousand officers in Surjani Town that September evening and they were visible everywhere. They stood behind the makeshift stage erected for the jalsa on the edges of the crowd, with their arms folded and their walkie-talkies beeping with static. But they did nothing. The police just stood by and watched, trying to intimidate the thousands who had come out to see my father.

  Papa first walked with a Christian party worker, Yousef Gill, to the new PPP (SB) office for minorities that Gill had opened in the slum. Papa and Gill ta
lked as they walked, followed by enthusiastic supporters chanting slogans. ‘Aiya, Aiya, Bhutto Aiya,’ they shouted. ‘He’s come, he’s come. Bhutto has come.’ ‘Mazdoor ka leader, Murtaza!’ ‘The leader of the workers, Murtaza!’ ‘Hari ka leader, Murtaza! Gharib ka leader, Murtaza!’ ‘The leader of the peasants, of the poor, Murtaza!’ After opening the office by cutting a ribbon and taking a brief tour of the one-roomed office, Papa hoisted a party flag on a grey metal post outside before moving on. As Papa walked over to the stage, which faced east and was made of wood, he stopped. The azan was sounding, it was time for the evening prayers and the sun was beginning to set. It wasn’t the call of the muezzin that stopped Papa though, it was the light of dusk. He called Siddiqe, a jolly fellow who worked as the party photographer, and asked him to take a picture of the horizon. It was beautiful and he wanted to remember it, Papa said, as he moved towards the crowds of people waiting for him.

  He climbed slowly onto the stage, waving at the people gathered before him. As he moved towards the sofa that had been placed at the centre of the stage, a group of women approached him with rose and jasmine garlands. Papa bowed his head and received the ladies, two at a time, as the garlands were placed on his neck. Behind him Ashiq Jatoi, who had only recently been elected as the Sindh president of the party, was shaking hands with several workers who came to offer him their congratulations.

  Papa was still standing, meeting a new group of women who had come forward to introduce themselves and their children. One of them carried a young girl dressed in shiny blue-and-silver fabric with two pointy pigtails tied tightly on the top of her head, and after being lifted up to place a garland around my father’s neck she presented him with a bouquet of roses. The bouquet was sheathed in plastic and folded into a diamond shape. It was trimmed with red ribbons and had small staples holding it together. When my father and Ashiq Jatoi sat down, guarded by Yar Mohammad, who was dressed in black and standing behind them, the bouquet rested on the sofa between Papa and Ashiq.