Songs of Blood and Sword Read online

  The solution Zulfikar envisioned was not a class war or some sort of global battle for power, but simply the redistribution of economic wealth and the creation of a Third World summit that would open up the space for those underdeveloped nations to speak. This was progressive Zulfikar at his best. Those critics that expend all their energy attempting to denigrate the man’s politics (by either their antipathy or their supposed allegience to the PPP and Zulfikar’s legacy) wilfully ignore the visionary quality of Zulfikar’s political philosophy. The Third World, Zulfikar maintained, did not want charity; it only wanted its fair share. ‘We are trying to create an environment of opportunity, an ethos of dignity and hope for the underprivileged majority of our peoples. We cheerfully undertake the toil and sweat for a better life for our masses; we accept the denial of immediate comforts.’65 If the Third World did not act immediately and purposefully there was the inevitable danger that ‘our collective capacities will then remain immobilized and we will have failed to translate the abstract into the concrete, poetry into politics and romance into reality’.66

  The fourth and last session of the founding convention of the party opened at three in the afternoon on 1 December and dealt with the basics of the party. The convention adopted a document on the necessity for such a new political forum and then moved to decide upon a name for the as yet untitled party. Names such as the Socialist Party of Pakistan and the People’s Progressive Party were bandied about and sampled until rejected as the convention collectively voted to call itself the Pakistan People’s Party.

  The convention unanimously passed the interim constitution of the party and moved to elect a chairman. The delegates all shouted out Zulfikar’s name and refused to propose any other candidates. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was unanimously elected, after which he addressed the delegates in Urdu and promised to serve the party, the peasants, the working class and the nation of Pakistan with all of his being.

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  Mir Murtaza Ghulam Bhutto was born on 18 September 1954. The first son welcomed by Zulfikar and Nusrat, he was born a year after his sister Benazir and arrived just as 70 Clifton, the family’s house, had been completed. The family, four in all now, moved into an upstairs section of the house that they shared with Sir Shahnawaz and his wife, Begum Khurshid. Murtaza, named after his great-grandfather, was a sunny child with a warm disposition. Photographs show him playing in the garden as a young child, dragging a bicycle by its handlebars and sticking his small feet into the garden pond.

  As a boy, Murtaza, who was soon joined by a younger sister, Sanam, and a baby brother, Shahnawaz, four years his junior, enjoyed all that his world offered him. He would yearn to go hunting with his father and his uncles in Larkana, shooting wild boar and deer. His foray into the world of shikars was brief, however, as Zulfikar, then a young minister in Ayub’s cabinet, was shifted to Rawalpindi, where the children were raised outside the parameters of a laissez-faire landed elite. A Swiss governess, Noreen, was hired to look after Zulfikar and Nusrat’s boisterous children as they began to travel, both inside Pakistan and abroad, more often. The children delighted in torturing their prim nanny and years later Papa still chuckled, his khe khe khe laugh spreading light across his face, when he recounted poor Noreen’s attempts at discipline. For one, she would insist the young Bhutto children finish their spinach, their daily hated vegetable, before they were excused from the dining table. Soon the children found an ingenious way of disposing of four large servings of the leafy vegetable – they would take turns chucking their spinach to the pet dog, who obediently waited for each dish under the table (he eventually got sick). Murtaza, Sanam and Shah – nicknamed Gugail, or Gogi for short, by the family – mischieviously tormented Noreen on as regular a basis as they could muster. Benazir was less naughty, often siding with the nanny and abiding by her strict codes, soon becoming her favourite in the house. Her siblings, meanwhile, were less inclined to ‘apple polish’ as the boys would say, and invented new ways to circumvent Noreen at every turn – spitting out their daily vitamins as soon as she’d turned her back was one such small act of resistance – in the hope that she would volunteer her resignation.

  ‘We were in Pindi by force of circumstance because my father was a minister,’ explained Murtaza in an interview with a Karachi magazine a few months before he was killed, ‘so our exposure to the feudal set-up was kind of limited. And even when we did visit the village, there were strict checks on us to see that we didn’t get up to any mischief. And because we were expected to concentrate on studying, we didn’t have time to run off for shikar and things like that – which is generally what kids in feudal families grow up with.’1

  ‘We were never brought up as the children of a typical feudal family,’ continued Murtaza.

  My father always said to us that everything can be taken from you, but your mind and thoughts cannot . . . He placed a lot of emphasis on education as did his father before him. I remember that as kids when we used to go to the village, we already knew that when somebody bows down to touch your feet, you should stop him before he gets there. So, no, we were not raised as the kids of a feudal family.2

  Murtaza began riding classes. His mother Nusrat framed a photograph of him standing perfectly upright in riding jodhpurs and a grey leather jacket. Murtaza’s hair is gelled impeccably, parted on the right, and he is smiling broadly, holding a riding crop in his gloved hands.

  Later on he remarked that while he enjoyed hunting and riding, ‘these were not the things I did night and day. It wasn’t a lifestyle.’3

  When it came time for Murtaza to begin his schooling, he went first to Aitchison College in Lahore, a colonial institution built to educate the country’s young sons in a conservative and archaic environment and atmosphere. Murtaza lasted only a few months at Aitchison – which has since become internationally infamous for educating Omar Sheikh, the alleged murderer of the American journalist Daniel Pearl – before begging his parents to free him and bring him back home to Karachi. The college, a boys’ school, ‘encouraged what I would for lack of a better term describe as feudal traits’, remembered Murtaza. ‘The pagris (turbans), the riding, the personal servants – all these things are the surface indications of a feudal lifestyle.’4 Students at Aitchison were required to attend Friday prayers at the school’s mosque every week. Cricket was the school’s crowning glory, cricket, cricket and more cricket. ‘They promote this image of a rigorous public school kind of atmosphere,’ continued Murtaza in the interview, ‘you know, the cold showers and all that, and yet there is this odd paradox because you are made to feel like you’re some sort of chota sahib (little master).’5

  After leaving Aitchison, Murtaza attended Karachi Grammar School, the city’s elite Jesuit school set up by monks and Freemasons during the colonial days of the Raj. ‘It was a more liberal kind of place,’ he recalled. ‘There was a much better mix of people there. True, everyone was largely well-to-do, but their backgrounds were varied: there were kids of land-owning families but there were also children of writers and professionals.’6 He made friends with many such children but it was Gudu, who hailed from an intellectual and media-oriented Lahori family and was several years older than Mir, who was his best friend. Murtaza excelled in school, but managed to fail spectacularly in mathematics, something of a family trait. When my turn came to bomb at maths, no matter what grade I was in or how adept my teachers were, Papa was both reassuring – ‘Don’t worry, it’s genetic’ (it is) – and supportive – ‘You’ll never have to use it later on in life’ (I did). His blue Grammar School maths notebooks are covered with his doodles and practised signatures. ‘Maths is a boaring subject,’ Murtaza scribbled confidently on his geometry notebook.

  Murtaza’s Grammar School report cards were bound together in a black leather book, a sign of the school’s status. Murtaza’s report for his eighth year is written in carefully marked spaces in blue fountain pen. Under the subject religious knowledge his teacher has written, ‘Must show more interest’. Tha
t remark is echoed in the report book every term, until somewhere around tenth grade, where the remarks change, begrudgingly almost, to ‘has improved’. The general remarks, which noted that Murtaza was absent only once that term, sound especially Victorian. ‘Young Bhutto has taken to his studies very seriously and I do hope he perseveres during the next scholastic year . . . Mir is a well-behaved lad, obedient and exemplary.’ The report is signed by Nusrat, though previous terms show the name P. Bhutto under the signature of a parent or guardian. Pinky, his sister Benazir.

  While Benazir tended to treat Murtaza with the distance elder children precociously reserve for their subordinates, Murtaza adored his oldest sister. He teased her for her aloofness while protectively fussing over her and making sure she was treated as seriously as she wished to be – when they were young children, at least. An old family friend of Zulfikar’s, who often spent time at 70 Clifton with the Bhuttos and later with Mir and his siblings when they were adults, spoke to me about his obversations of the rivalry among the children. ‘Benazir always kept a keen eye on Mir. If he had a new tricycle, she wanted one too. It didn’t matter that her parents told her that boys had separate toys from girls or that her own play area was well stocked with dolls and the like. It must have been hard on her, because her brothers were so instantly likeable and charming and she was shy and introverted, so that she felt like an outsider when forced to compete with her male siblings.’ After double-checking that I would shield his identity the family friend said that he had been an official guest of Benazir’s prisons during her second term and did not fancy his chances of remaining a free man in the current environment. ‘Whenever Zulfi and Nusrat came home from state trips or official visits, there would often be a separate suitcase with gifts for the children, books that Zulfi – an avid reader – had bought on his travels and various mementoes given by their hosts. One time, I had been to the airport to welcome Zulfi and Nusrat and was at the house in 70 Clifton when their luggage arrived. All the children were giddy with excitement, they were all looking forward to seeing what treats their parents had brought for them, but Benazir parked herself on top of the suitcase in question and demanded that she receive her presents first, since she was the eldest child and in her eyes the most important one.’ I laughed at the story. People would tell me the strangest things when I told them I was writing a book, bizarre anecdotes and tales that I had never heard before. I thought it appropriate to break the ice with a joke. How old was Wadi, I asked, fifteen? The family friend thought quietly for a minute, ignoring my attempt at humour, and then turned his head to the side, as if mystified by the answer. ‘Yes,’ he replied with no sign that he was joking.

  The dynamic between the four children had been established early on in their lives. Sanam, who was spoilt rotten by her brothers and allowed to roughhouse with them and hang out with their friends because she was considered cool enough to be one of the boys, divided her time between her brothers and her sister, who engaged in no such roughhousing and recoiled at the thought of hanging out with the boys and their friends. Sanam was the sister they could count on to join in their bawdy jokes and naughty pranks; she was always up for a good time. Benazir was more formal, more distant, except with regard to her sister whom she treated like a lady-in-waiting. The two sisters shared a room, arranged to have the walls painted black and the curtains finished with striped white and black cloth that looked like fabric prison bars, and smoked secretly in their dressing room, wearing leather gloves on their hands and wet towels on their heads so the smell of smoke would not stain their nails or get stuck in their poker-straight hair. They sounded so rebellious and impossibly cool to me when I heard the stories as a child; I was always desperate to hear more stories of my aunts’ renegade teenage years, imagining that one day I too would learn to smoke cigarettes in dressing rooms with such laid-back nonchalance, though since punks were big when I was young, I imagined myself forgoing the towel for a pink Mohican. Papa would make angry faces at me when I expressed delight at hearing of my naughty aunts’ antics and I would collapse in laughter and tell him, no, no I was only kidding, I didn’t want to smoke cigarettes with leather gloves on! How silly that must look . . .

  Murtaza and Shahnawaz shared a room across from their sisters, until they moved into the annexe outside the main 70 Clifton house that had been built for their two uncles, Imdad and Sikandar. The boys painted their room ‘communist red’ and covered their walls with posters of Kiss and the Beatles, fabric wall hangings of Lenin that their father brought back from the Soviet Union for his sons and a large red and blue painting of Che Guevara. As Murtaza and Shah got older, and lazier when it came to the rigours of school and alarm bells, they would stay up late at night talking and bouncing around their room, dress for school sometime around 2 a.m. and then hop into bed and try to sleep in perfectly still positions so their school uniforms wouldn’t crease too much. Murtaza, ever obsessive-compulsive when it came to his appearance, would still wake up with enough time to brush his hair and shave what few stray bristles there were around what he hoped would be a fine moustache. Shah, meanwhile, would shuffle out of bed with minutes to spare, brush his teeth, fill the sink to the brim with cold water and dunk his head in before racing down the stairs to get into the waiting car. Later, both boys would develop a demanding sartorial regimen they would call ‘suiting and booting’.

  In eleventh grade, under the remarks for Chemistry, a teacher with a pink pen has written: ‘It would be a prudent move to drop Chemistry altogether.’ By his junior year in high school, Murtaza’s standing academically had improved significantly. Religious knowledge education had been completed, he dropped Chemistry and managed an almost miraculous ‘excellent effort’ in Algebra. A different class master, as Grammar School insisted on calling its teachers, wrote: ‘Murtaza’s improvement in most subjects and his dropping of science has made a great difference – this is splendid.’ He graduated second in his entire class.

  Murtaza managed good grades in his A levels, the British equivalent of twelfth grade, but didn’t put as much effort into those exams – he had applied to college on the strength of his O-level results – tenth and eleventh grades – and spent his time towards the end of her school career in pursuit of other knowledge. Murtaza was part of the tae kwon do association of Karachi, becoming a black belt. He got himself certified in first aid through the St John’s Ambulance Association of Pakistan for two years in a row, and received several Duke of Edinburgh awards.

  Together with his brother Shah, Murtaza enjoyed an idyllic childhood amidst the uncertainty of Pakistan’s fragile new nationhood. As the 1965 war raged on, bringing the sounds of air-raid sirens and emergency warnings to Karachi, Murtaza dreamt of becoming a fighter pilot. He confessed, ‘I was fascinated with fighter jets . . . I guess it was because at that time the war had broken out and I used to watch the planes take off and land – it was a fairly impressionable age.’7

  It was during these early childhood years that Murtaza and Shah developed the bond that would carry them through adulthood. Naturally close and protective of each other, both boys, but especially Murtaza as he was the first-born son, were treated strictly by their father, who kept them on a tight leash. Murtaza and Shahnawaz received an allowance of fifty rupees a month, meaning that the brothers had to pool their funds if they ever wanted to live it up or splurge on something special. ‘Two governments before,’ Murtaza’s best friend in adulthood, Suhail Sethi, explains politely, wriggling around Zulfikar’s apparent stinginess, ‘Ayub Khan’s sons ran wild with the bounty their father’s excesses in government provided them with. ZAB was very determined to avoid the same thing happening to his family and was determined to keep his children on the straight and narrow.’8 Suhail and I sit quietly for a minute. Urm, I venture, all his children? ‘You know, he directed it at his sons who in those days were the representations of your family’ Suhail says. ‘In his first speech on television, after he assumed the presidency, ZAB said very clearly: this governm
ent will be different, there will be no nepotism under my regime.’ I’ve seen the speech Suhail is referring to. It’s Zulfikar at his best, at his most upfront. He wears his thick black-framed glasses and speaks from notes, which he shows the cameras at some point, telling them these are only notes, he’s speaking from the heart. Zulfikar speaks in English, apologetically telling his audience that it pains him to do so – that he often speaks in Urdu, though small children laugh at his mistakes in the language – but that the world’s eyes are watching Pakistan after the break-up of its eastern province, so he speaks in a language that everyone can understand. He says there will be no nepotism, no corruption from within his family, he swears it. ‘I have a talented cousin,’ Zulfikar says as an aside, referring to Mumtaz Bhutto who was a founding member of the PPP and later Chief Minister of Sindh, and says that he would like his assistance in government. But that’s it, he promises. That’s the extent of it. Zulfikar saw it as his duty to groom his sons from an early age, toughen them up and turn them into men, even though they were only young boys. Zulfikar was neither as lenient nor as relaxed with his sons as he was with his daughters; he demanded nothing short of perfection from his sons and wasted no time mollycoddling them or playing around with them. On a trip to Larkana, the two boys went hunting with their cousin Bhao – who, having lived the feudal life Zulfikar allowed his sons only sparingly, was prone to reckless chota sahib behaviour. As the boys sat at the dining table in the family room waiting for their lunch, Bhao picked up his hunting rifle and jumped on his chair, aiming at his male cousins as if they were hunting marks. He stomped his feet on his chair, making Bollywood-style dshoom dshoom shooting noises, all the while thoughtlessly keeping his finger on the trigger. At some point in Bhao’s stupid game, a shot was fired, hitting Murtaza in the back, above his shoulder blade. Murtaza slumped forward onto the table and Bhao and the girls giggled, thinking Mir was pulling one of his famous pranks. Then Shah, who watched over his brother with a concern unique among the siblings, noticed that there was blood seeping through Murtaza’s shalwar kameez. Shah shoved Bhao off his chair and didn’t leave his brother’s side until he had been taken to the hospital and the bullet had been safely removed.