Songs of Blood and Sword Read online

  Then there was Ghulam Mir Murtaza Bhutto, my father’s great-grandfather and the man after whom he was named, the forebear of the Garhi Khuda Bux Bhuttos. They say he was a handsome man, dashing and charismatic. They also say he was having an affair with the white wife of a British emissary. Some debate remains over whether the woman was indeed a hundred per cent white or Anglo-Indian (‘they acted even whiter than the whites,’ Uncle Ashiq insists), but regardless it was a torrid affair. It was said in our family that the woman’s husband found out about the illicit dalliance and one afternoon invited Ghulam Murtaza to his house, where he offered him some refreshments. Ghulam Murtaza, not one to refuse the hospitality of a host, even a host whose wife he was planning to run away with, accepted graciously. He died shortly after the meeting; poisoned to death, legend has it.

  Bhuttos very rarely, even then, died natural deaths. Many of them died violently and before reaching middle age. My father used to tell me the story of one Bhutto, a powerful local landlord. He felt that he had begun to lose favour with the locals he lorded over, but wasn’t sure whose continued loyalty he could count on and whose he could not. So he faked his own death. His family was forced into announcing his funeral and made to stand around his very undead body wailing and grieving. He lay there, on a small charpai or cot, shrouded in white, and kept very still. He peeked when he could but assigned a servant to make a note of who came to pay their respects and who didn’t. Everyone who failed to show up for the funeral was summarily punished. It was typical Bhutto shock and awe. When this Bhutto finally died, there was no seating space at his funeral to be found. The entire village turned out to pay their respects, just in case.

  In 1935 the India Act created councils within the various provinces in the Raj and elections were held in October 1937. In those days there were no political parties in Sindh, so it was an election that was open to very few – the powerful – and no one else. Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, son of the poisoned Ghulam Murtaza and controversially knighted by the British occupiers, stood for election from Larkana, his home town. He was a large landowner, a respected man and a local of great influence. But he lost. A complete unknown, Sheikh Abdul Majeed Sindhi, defeated Sir Shahnawaz at the polls. Sindhi was not a resident of the district; he was an outsider with no reputation to fall back on. It was rumoured at the time that Sindhi was brought in and backed by a section of the Bhuttos themselves who were desperate to relieve Sir Shahnawaz of his local power.

  ‘Politics is like building a temple, a house,’ Zulfikar remembered his father telling him, ‘or else he said it was like writing music, or poetry and he mentioned Brahms, Michelangelo.’2 Sir Shahnawaz was an old-fashioned man. He felt betrayed by the loss of what should have been an automatic win, but did not push the issue further. He simply packed up his family and left Sindh.

  By 1938, the Bhuttos were in Bombay, including Zulfikar who was preparing for his foray into college. Sir Shahnawaz had three sons, Imdad, Sikandar and the youngest, Zulfikar Ali. He had three daughters, Benazir, who died as a young girl, Manna and Mumtaz. Zulfikar’s brothers were many years older than him and were noted Lotharios.

  Imdad was the most handsome. He wore three-piece suits and always carried himself with an air of purpose and grace. His younger brother, Sikandar, idolized him and copied his style of dress and mannerisms. Sikandar was once reprimanded by their father, who admonished him for being directionless in life. ‘Why don’t you comb your hair properly and get your act together?’ his father said. Sikandar wore the same three-piece suits as his brother did but let his hair go wild, never slicking it back. He told his father, quite bravely, that he was an artist. He wrote poetry and wore his hair in the manner befitting a poet. Most zamindar’’s sons in pre-Partition India were not artists. They were landowners or military men or politicians. Even business was out of the question, it was a low-caste job, kept for Hindu moneylenders and traders. Both the elder sons did as they fancied. Elegantly dressed and big drinkers, they were popular with all the young society women. They were playboys and they lived their lives freely, always followed by a gaggle of admirers. Both men, Imdad and Sikandar, died young. Their health gave out, owing to the demands of their lifestyle. They were in their early thirties and left behind young families. Imdad and Sikandar went out of the world as easily as they came in.

  In Bombay, Sir Shahnawaz took up the post of the Chairman of the Sindh Public Service Commission. He was offered the chairmanship by Sindh’s first Chief Minister, Allahbux Soomro, and found that a life of simple bureaucracy suited him, especially after the fickleness of local politics had cost him his home seat. Some years later, the Nawab of Gunaghar, a friend of Sir Shahnawaz, fell ill and was about to set sail to Europe for treatment. Things in India had become politically precarious for the princes, with all the rumblings of Independence and sovereignty, and the Nawab wanted to leave the running of his state in the hands of a trusted well-wisher. He asked his friend, Shahnawaz, to come and administer the Chief Ministership of Gunaghar in his absence. And so, with Partition on the horizon, Sir Shanawaz moved his family to Gunaghar. He remained there until India split, when with the Nawab and his family and the prince’s twenty pet dogs (people who were obviously not dog lovers said the dogs were either Dalmatians or Great Danes), the Bhuttos moved back into what was now Pakistan.

  Zulfikar spent his adolescence between two Sindhs: Larkana, in what was later to be Pakistan, and Bombay, the capital of Sindh in India. He was an athletic young boy, spending his time playing cricket and going on shikars or hunts with his elder brothers. When he was thirteen years old, the issue of land and his feudal stature first affected the young Bhutto. Amed Khan, of the Naudero Bhuttos, was by far the largest landowner in the Bhutto tribe. He was the only son of Rasool Bux Bhutto and cursedly bore three young daughters and no male heirs.

  Sir Shahnawaz and Amed Khan came together one afternoon to arrange a mutually beneficial arrangement between their two families. Amed Khan had three daughters to marry off but wanted to keep his share of fertile agricultural land in the family. His eldest daughter, who had been abducted by a neighbouring tribe in a land dispute, was married to a Bhutto who was a local teacher. His second daughter married Imdad, Zulfikar’s elder and dashing brother, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn.

  Amed Khan’s third daughter, Ameer, or Shireen as she was known among the young cousins, was a petite young woman of twenty-three when she was finally married. Zulfikar was ten years younger than his bride when their wedding was arranged. He was a thirteen-year-old boy – though some stories make Zulfikar as old as sixteen when he was bribed into the feudal marriage. If he went through with it, his family told him, they would buy him a new cricket bat. Zulfikar, barely a teenager, had been offered a deal he could not refuse. So he married Ameer. He was too young to understand what was expected of him and it would be years before he visited Ameer Begum as a man visits a wife. His cousin, Ashiq, remembers Zulfikar laughing about the story of the cricket bat years later, amused by his own innocence. Some say the marriage was never consummated; certainly no heirs were ever produced. The only thing gained by the union was a sizable amount of land in Naudero, land the family still owns to this day. It was land that made the Bhuttos’ fortune and it was, for many years, a vast and intimidating fortune. At their feudal height, the Bhuttos were among Sindh’s largest landowners, making them one of the wealthiest families in the developing province.

  By the time the Bhuttos moved to Bombay, Zulfikar complained to friends that he had fallen in love with a girl named Soraya Karimbhoy and he had proposed to her family, only to be shot down by Soraya and her parents when they learned their daughter would be Zulfikar’s second wife. Sir Shahnawaz paid little attention to his youngest son’s heartache. Zulfikar was going abroad to study, a cachet few young men could boast of in those days, so his father urged him to concentrate on his future and waste no more time moping over his lost lady friend.

  India was still one country when Zulfikar le
ft to begin his undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley. There was no talk of Pakistan or of Partition. The country Zulfikar left would be broken by the time of his return, and some of his detractors would later insist that he was still legally an Indian citizen. But Zulfikar’s identity was constantly shaped by the shifting boundaries that surrounded him. It was in Bombay, on the eve of his departure to California, that he first read Marx. His privileged existence faced its first challenge. He was a feudal master, a large zamindar, but he never imagined himself as the perpetrator of capitalist aggression. He later said that it was his reading of Marx that stirred a shift in his thinking and in his attitudes towards the feudalism that those of his generation – and many still – took for granted. Decades later, when speaking of his government’s land reforms, in which Zulfikar surrendered his own land (mainly the land in Jacobabad, fought for and won by Doda Khan), he said, ‘I’ll lose still more, my children will lose still more . . . I’ve felt no fear of giving up what I own ever since the day I read Marx.’3

  At Berkeley he studied Bertrand Russell and Carl Jung and was haunted by the words of his mother, Khurshid, who was born into great poverty. Her poor origins led to the rumours that she was a Hindu and therefore from a lower social stratum than her husband, an aristocratic landowner she married out of love. Khurshid always reminded her favourite son that ‘the paradise of politics lies under the feet of the people’.4 He would be nothing without this truth at the forefront of his mind, she insisted. His potential was enormous – even as a child he was considered brilliant – but never forget, she reminded him, you come from a poor land.

  Events in the US further radicalized Zulfikar. It was in San Diego during his Berkeley days that he was refused a hotel room because of his olive skin and because the employee at reception told him he ‘looked like a Mexican’.5 Zulfikar wasn’t a zamindar any more, nor the son of Sindh’s most notable bureaucrat. He was a nobody in California and the isolation and alienation he felt there followed him throughout his political career. It was after the humiliation in San Diego that Zulfikar would leave the old-boy confines of Berkeley and go down to Maxwell Street to get away. He would sit for hours with the African-Americans who lived in the rundown neighbourhood, because they ‘felt real’6 to him.

  He was a contradiction in so many ways and often used to say of himself after his sojourn in California, and later Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn in England, that his mind was Western but his soul Eastern. He later told his children, only half jokingly, that they were not to apply to university in California because its beautiful weather would distract them from their studies, but perhaps it was because he feared they would not weather the brutal jolt to their sense of self as successfully as he had. Zulfikar’s children would attend Harvard, where selfrealization would be fleeting and inconvenient among students from the world’s elite.

  In a letter he wrote to his son Murtaza, when he was about to graduate from Harvard, Zulfikar, by then Prime Minister, wrote:

  You are halfway through your academic career. I am sure that the other half will be equally exciting and inspiring. And that you will remember the obligation of the people of your country. America is a great country. It has attained formidable power on the strength of its learning and technology. The American is full of vitality. His curiosity remains with him up to the end of his life. He is always on the move – learning, observing, and building. He is the great builder. Look at what he has done to his country. The average American does not have a penetrating mind, he does not possess the sophistication of the genuine Eastern intellectual whose brain cells go back centuries and whose contours are shaped by the old civilization.’7

  He continued the letter with some personal advice, a haunting reminder of the courtesies he had been refused in the West while a student himself:

  I am sure you will make good friends at Oxford. On my part, I consciously broke most of the links I developed with the friends I made in England and America, of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking, I thought my re-integration in the setting of our country would be speedier if I broke those links because I never wanted to feel nostalgic about America and England when I returned to the village of Naudero.8

  Zulfikar’s childhood friend, Ilahi Bux Soomro, whose father had offered Sir Shahnawaz his bureaucratic posting in Bombay, remembers Zulfikar coming to visit him in New York, where he was studying at Columbia University. Soomro is a sprightly eighty-year-old whose political roots go back as far as the Bhuttos. He called Zulfikar ‘Zulfi’ as many of his friends did and Zulfi in turn called him ‘Iloo’. ‘We would be sitting in the International House on Riverside Drive, near Harlem, and would be engaged in discussions on foreign affairs with these students from across the world, but Zulfi always came out the best. He was brilliant.’9 It was with Iloo that Zulfikar stayed in New York on his way to embark on graduate studies in England.

  When he returned to Pakistan, a new nation, Zulfikar came as a barrister. He had few friends in the new country, some cousins – including Mumtaz and Ashiq, who remembers Zulfikar calling his house on the telephone and putting on a shrill girl’s voice to ask for ‘Ash-tec’ in order to irk his mother – and Iloo. He began work at Dingomal Ramchandani’s law firm. His office was on Bandar Road, in old Karachi, near the current Sessions Court and quite close to the Palace Hotel, where the Bhuttos were staying until their house in Clifton was built.

  As his reputation as a barrister grew, Zulfikar shifted to the offices of A. K. Brohi, another respected Sindhi lawyer. One day, Iloo remembers, Zulfi mentioned that Brohi had given him a legal draft to vet. As they drove around the city in Iloo’s car, Zulfikar mentioned that it was a big step in his career and he’d have to spend proper time going through the document. The next day, as he often did, Iloo picked his friend up from his law office, which was near Mohammad Ali Jinnah or Quaid-e-Azam’s tomb. ‘How did it go with the draft?’ Iloo asked, since Zulfikar hadn’t mentioned it. Zulfikar smiled. ‘I changed every line of it. I thought Brohi would go mad, but he accepted it.’ Iloo knew his friend only too well. ‘Zulfi,’ he cautioned, ‘you shouldn’t do these things deliberately.’ Zulfi continued smiling at his friend. ‘I wanted him to know I know more than he does,’ he replied and laughed, not joking in the least.

  While his career was creating ripples in legal circles and his adjustment to life in a new country was going well, socially things in Karachi were slightly dry. After so many years abroad, in California and London, Zulfikar didn’t know too many people in Karachi. He loved to go out to restaurants and nightclubs, but hadn’t managed to find a suitable partner to accompany him. Sindhi families are notoriously conserva-tive; men didn’t take their wives out to social functions, let alone their daughters. It was by chance that one evening, at a wedding, Zulfikar came across a beautiful Iranian who had moved with her family to Karachi from Bombay after Partition. Nusrat was tall and slender with chiselled cheekbones and dark auburn hair. She was new to the city too and had only learned English a short while before. She had a gaggle of sisters, but none of them was of any importance when she was in the room. They all faded into the background like shadows when Nusrat was present.

  Nusrat and Zulfi made an attractive couple. They were both elegant and lively, both rebellious and charming. Soon Zulfikar had fallen in love. He approached his parents to ask if he could have their permission to send a proposal to Nusrat’s family, but they were not amused by their son’s suggestion. Khurshid Begum put up the strongest opposition to the notion of Zulfikar marrying an outsider. Nusrat was not Sindhi; she was entirely foreign. She came from a religious Shiite family and the Bhuttos were Sunni. She wasn’t even a zamindar’s daughter. Her father was a soap maker who had owned a factory in Bombay – even their name bore the mark of their profession, Saboonchi, the one who makes soap. He was a businessman, the lowest of professions in the feudal Bhuttos’ eyes. Khurshid Begaum put her foot down; her son was not going to marry Nusrat. Besides, she reasoned, he wa
s already married.

  But Zulfikar was as headstrong as his mother. Early one afternoon in 1951, Zulfikar drove to his friend Iloo’s house, near Quaid-e-Azam’s dome-shaped marble mazaar and honked his car as a signal for Iloo to come outside. He was sitting calmly in the car when Iloo walked out of his door. ‘Do you have any money on you?’ Iloo nodded. ‘Get in the car, we have to go now.’ ‘Go where?’ asked Iloo, still confused over the surprise visit. ‘I’m going to get married. To Nusrat. Today.’ Iloo reminded him that under Islam he would need two witnesses, and he was just one person. He suggested they pick up a friend of his, Karimdad Junejo, a young fellow from another one of Sindh’s prominent families. They sped towards Karimdad’s house and yanked him into the car. ‘Hurry,’ Iloo told him, ‘Zulfi’s going to get married.’ ‘To whom?’ Karimdad asked, astonished that he had been picked up to help Zulfi elope. ‘Nusrat,’ Iloo replied. ‘Nusrat? That lambhi?’ That tall girl? Karimdad laughed clucking his tongue, ‘She’s too tall!’