Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  As the crow flies, the distance between my father and me had never been much, but the land had been marked by history for a unique division, of which I had inherited both broken pieces. My journey to seek out my father, and through him, his country, was a way for me to make my peace with that history. And it had not been without its rewards. My deep connection to the land that is Pakistan had been renewed. I felt lucky to have both countries; I felt that I’d been given what Partition had denied many. For me it meant the possibility of a different education, of embracing the three-tier history of India whole, perhaps an intellectual troika of Sanskrit, Urdu and English. These mismatches were the lot of people with garbled histories, but I preferred them to violent purities. The world is richer in its hybrids.

  But then there was the futility of the empty room, rupture on rupture, for which I could find no consolation except that my father’s existence, so ghostly all my life, had at last acquired a gram of material weight. And, if not for that, who knows what sterile obsessions might still have held me fast?

  Postscript: Distrust

  A year later, in a Lahore shoe shop full of bulbs and mirrors and the smell of leather, the shopkeeper swivelled round to turn off a small television before he took my money. But I had seen something and so had a few bejewelled ladies standing next to me, so we asked him what had happened. His thick dyed moustache, clamped shut over his mouth and his expression grew dark. He muttered, ‘Benazir Bhutto has expired.’

  He was aware of what happens when a demagogue dies on the sub-continent. ‘When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake,’ Rajiv Gandhi had said, when violence broke out against the Sikhs after his mother, Indira Gandhi, was killed. And violence was my first thought when I stepped out of the shop’s bright lights and mirrors on to a cold, smoky Liberty Market, swiftly waking up to the fact that Benazir Bhutto was dead.

  That name – Benazir Bhutto – already filled with music, a name that was more like a chant, a carryover from the greatness of the father, a name perhaps bigger than the person to whom it belonged, now linked with death, which brought drama to ordinary names, had alarmed the shopkeeper. Benazir Bhutto is dead. It was too much. We were in a city of slogans and the Lahore shopkeeper, who would have heard that name turned to slogan on so many memorable occasions and so often in relation to long life, knew that he had said something he would only ever say once in a lifetime. It began the last rite in the life of a demagogue, that one moment when the indestructible icon of the people, the person who replaced institutions, who herself was an echo of her name, was human, cut down and sacrificed, before becoming immortal again, her spirit passed to the heir on the back of a sympathy vote.

  Benazir Bhutto is dead! Long live Benazir Bhutto!

  There was to have been an election.

  The year had been full of events. In the summer, there was the siege and storming of the Red Mosque in Islamabad where more than a hundred people were killed. In the autumn, the country’s major political leaders tried to return from exile to take charge of their parties. Nawaz Sharif, allowed by the Supreme Court to return, was deported on arrival. Benazir Bhutto, as part of a deal with the Americans, returned in October and narrowly escaped a bomb blast at her welcome rally. In November, the General put an end to his year-long battle with the Supreme Court and declared a state of emergency, rescinding press freedom, imprisoning his opposition and sacking over sixty judges. By the end of the month, he had removed his uniform and installed himself as a civilian president in preparation for the election. And all the time the bombs had continued, and parts of the country that were once holiday destinations were in the hands of extremists. The demand for more literal Islam, so long in the background and often absorbed electorally, had turned renegade and become the country’s main battle. By the time December came round and the emergency was lifted, it was difficult to trust that anything as positive as a genuine election could occur in this climate of extremism and extra-legality.

  Interwoven in these national dramas was a personal surprise for me. Watching Musharraf swear in his caretaker government on television in November, I noticed my father’s brother-in-law in the audience. And in the next bulletin I saw, in the foreground, that my father, the lifelong PPP man and the once close ally of Benazir Bhutto, was being sworn in as a minister to the ex-general’s new cabinet.

  Though I congratulated him, his elevation ensured that when I arrived in Lahore a few weeks later to cover the elections, I wouldn’t stay with him. His political aspirations had been the reason for our original distance. I felt that staying with him now that he was in an official position, and especially after the ill feeling that had arisen between us, would cause embarrassment. So I asked my uncle Yusuf, with the rambling house in the old city where my grandfather grew up, if I could stay with him. ‘On the condition you don’t write anything about your father or Pakistan,’ he pleaded. I half agreed.

  And when I arrived there was not much to write about. Lahore was full of Christmas and New Year parties and election posters – white bicycles on green backgrounds, promoting the pro-Musharraf alliance, lined the city’s canals. But there was a general air of malaise and distrust. People talked of rigging and pre-decided elections. After a few days of watching the atmosphere in the old city, usually the nerve centre of election excitement, my uncle declared, ‘Such a cold election I never saw. At least a few gunshots should have gone off.’

  We sat on low beds in the courtyard of his house near the Royal Mosque. There was much about the haveli that I missed in my earlier visits: frangipani trees and the lamp-lit shadows of their long leaves; semi-circular transoms in green, red and orange glass, particularly beautiful in the evenings; chocolate-coloured screens of varying size, bringing harmony to the mismatch of whitewashed buildings. I had recently begun to read and understand my grandfather’s poetry, and it was a source of wonder to inherit and slowly decipher a book in a new script from a dead, unseen grandfather. Yusuf was keen that I try to make contact with my father, and at his behest I did, but after a few unsuccessful attempts, unreturned calls and messages, I gave up.

  Shortly after I arrived, Yusuf left to spend New Year in India. The election was still ‘cold’ when he left. Looking back at the year of protest, and how it had been subdued – the emergency that was like an act of irritation on the General’s part at having to deal with real constitutional constraints – it didn’t seem as if the election would ever warm up or become more than an ornament in the General’s make-believe democracy.

  And yet Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, whatever their sins, were not part of this world of cosmetic democracy. The sight of a giant billboard of Benazir at the edge of the old city, pictured in blue against a vast crowd holding red, black and green People’s Party flags, was enough to renew my faith in a genuine fight, if not a genuine election. The reason in part was that Benazir’s fight, the fight my father had been part of, was the truest fight Pakistan had known against its inner demons, military dictatorship and fundamentalism. And though it had not fulfilled its promise, Benazir still seemed to have so much fight in her.

  Benazir, unlike the general, didn’t have to say she was liberal; people knew she was liberal. She was also one other thing that no one in the race could stake claim to: she was the only national politician, with support in all four provinces, in a country threatened with dissolution. So I felt that, despite talk of deals with the Americans and with Musharraf himself, if Benazir was in the race she would bring the ‘noise and chaos’ of democracy that her father had once written kept India in one piece.

  But now, like her father, Benazir Bhutto was dead.

  My thoughts went to my father. I knew he would be devastated. He’d fought General Zia alongside Benazir througout the eighties, been jailed for their shared cause, seen her triumphant return and electoral victory in 1988, been her party spokesman and travelled with her. And there was also the special pain he would feel of being estranged at death from someone he’d known and loved. But though my
heart went out to him, the distrust that had grown between us in the past year made me feel that if I went to see him he would think I had come in bad faith.

  I stood now, alone for a moment in the crowded market, naked bulbs coming on and evening traffic clogging the narrow street. I saw my brother’s friend waiting for him to bring out the car and told him what I’d heard in the shop. He took in the information greedily, leant into the car as soon as it pulled up and told the others.

  Before we had left the market, phone calls were coming in, telling us to get off the streets. We flicked through radio stations, hoping for more information, but the news had either been suppressed or the radio stations hadn’t picked it up because they were leading with electoral stories. And what election could there be now? My brother wondered if there would still be a New Year’s Eve ball. He wasn’t being callous: he had paid a lot of money for the ticket and we were in an enclosed setting, with no perspective from TV or radio, trying to link the world as we’d just known it to the news that seemed to alter it so profoundly.

  I called Nuscie, my mother’s friend with whom I had stayed when I first came to Pakistan. She was sobbing and saying again and again, ‘I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe they killed her.’ The news rebounding, forming webs, made real what was fantastical in the car’s sealed environment. Then the mobile phones jammed, a sure sign of the city, so indifferent moments ago, becoming aware that Benazir Bhutto was dead.

  The night was changing fast as we drove to my father’s house. The street- and traffic-lights stopped working; there was a power cut of sorts; the traffic became more frantic and police barricades appeared.

  When we reached my father’s house, no one was sure whether or not I should go in to see him. ‘This is the worst time,’ my brother kept saying. My sister said she would go and see how he was taking the news before advising whether I should go in or not. In the meantime my mother called, also on the verge of tears. She had covered Pakistan for decades. In November 1988 she was in Lahore for Benazir’s arrival. She wrote:

  I arrived in Lahore on the night of Nawaz Sharif ’s last rally of the campaign. The night before it had been Benazir’s turn and everyone was still talking about the unbelievable welcome she had received. The city waited till dawn to hear her speak. It took all night for her to drive in from Gujranwala because of the thousands who lined the route. They lay down in front of her Pajero [a Japanese Land Rover that has become a political status symbol since she started using one], they danced in the streets, and when she finally spoke many wept. ‘Lahore,’ she said, ‘is a city of lights,’ quoting Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous poem. ‘Lahore is a city of people whose hearts are alive. Lahore is Benazir Bhutto’s city.’

  ‘It’s too awful,’ my mother wept. ‘I first saw her when I was with your father. We were in Islamabad and he said, “That’s Benazir Bhutto.” She was so young, so pretty. She had no business dying. Whatever her faults she didn’t deserve to die like this.’ My mother had witnessed the death of the great Indian demagogues, Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv. She understood demagoguery. She knew that in countries like ours, more so in Pakistan, where institutions are weak, where the state is threatened, these seemingly indestructible icons thrown up by the people bring a kind of solidity to the political landscape: they make it impossible to imagine the world without them.

  I was still wavering when my father’s brother-in-law entered the room. He had just been with my father and seemed to reflect the heaviness of his mood. ‘Go in and see your father,’ he said.

  I began to say I wasn’t sure that this was the right time.

  ‘He’s your father,’ he said firmly. And then an old courage sprang up in me. I thought, I’ve met him in circumstances far more strained than these. How can I stand in the same house dithering over whether or not I should go in and see him?

  I grabbed my little brother and walked into my father’s house, past the pencil portrait of him, the courtyard, through the corridors that always smelt of food, and into the television room where we had parted on bad terms a year before. My father sat in his blue cotton nightsuit with his legs up on the sofa. He looked in my direction, a glimmer of surprise passing over his face, but didn’t say a word. ‘Abba,’ I managed quietly. His gaze returned to the television, but he was haggard, his shock and grief written into the droop of his face and the dullness of his eyes. For forty minutes we sat in silence, our eyes following an Urdu/English news cycle of the bomb scene, riots spreading through the country, the PPP spokesman breaking the news, then breaking down. My father watched with two lenses: in one lens he was the lifelong PPP man, shaken to his core at seeing his leader cut down. He knew whose car she travelled in; he recognised all the people around her; as the one-time spokesman of the PPP, he had been in those situations so many times. In the other lens, he was a minister in Musharraf ’s caretaker government, fearful of what this could mean for it.

  In that silence, I wondered why I was there. How despite our distances and unforeseen plans had the small works of Fate brought me to my father on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed? What was I to understand of the man – what was I to offer him? – on that cold and tense night, in a country that was noticeably more desolate, and by degrees, more violent?

  When his shock subsided enough for him to speak, he said that the terrorists deliberately sought to rid the political landscape of its heroes. The men who wanted the faith to triumph knew that the country had to be destabilised, the robust society made bleaker. The ideologue in Karachi was right: the faith encouraged essence, and form was unimportant. But it also encouraged a dismantling of existing forms. Intellectual life, student unions, film industries and, eventually, judiciaries and constitutions were swept away; the cricket team began to focus on prayer; and, as the landscape became more desolate, the religious vision grew clearer, the anticipation of it more urgent. With every cycle, the conditions for faith were increased and the world was gradually undone till only the essence, of which the ideologue had spoken, remained.

  I didn’t need to be Pakistani to understand what my father meant, only perhaps the degree to which he meant it. The death of the demagogue would demoralise the population. But in a country with few national leaders, removing Benazir made the very idea of the federation less viable. ‘And now you’ll see the disintegration of the PPP,’ my father said.

  That disintegration was part of the Pakistani story. Just that year, Musharraf had hobbled the judiciary, and that institution, once one of the better ones in Pakistan, would not recover. My father now spoke of the country’s biggest political party disintegrating.

  But there was something else: no one believed the regime when they said the Taleban and al-Qaeda killed Benazir. The great majority of people believed some combination of the agencies, Musharraf and his allied party killed her. It was witnessing this distrust that made me understand what it meant to live in a state that had been discredited. And at a time when the regime claimed to be fighting the gravest threat to the state’s existence!

  My father’s mind, with its double vision, fastened on a conundrum: on the one hand, elections couldn’t be held in the present environment; on the other, the nation was in need of release, in need of legitimacy. Perhaps sensing his own mortality, he said, ‘You can’t have a caretaker government go on and on.’

  Then images of the coffin flashed on the screen. Party workers handled it and beat their heads on it; the camera panned to a glass aperture on it its lid through which a white sheet was visible. My father’s face turned to horror; he sucked his teeth and pressed his folded hands against the bridge of his nose. It was the same gesture Benazir had made when she stepped off the plane in Karachi a few months before, unspeakably moving, a gesture of fighting emotion in public.

  ‘Like her brother,’ my father said, ‘shot in the neck.’ He referred to Murtaza Bhutto, who was gunned down outside his house in 1996 when Benazir was prime minister.

  ‘And in the same place as her father,’ my brother
-in-law added.

  ‘What?’ my father said, a flicker of his normal, energetic manner returning to him.

  ‘Bhutto was executed in Rawalpindi,’ my brother-in-law clarified. My father nodded and sank into silence.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had, in a way, also died from a wound to the neck. That had been the beginning of my father’s political fight. The person we watched taken away in a simple coffin, now with no fight left in her, was his leader when that career came to fruition. It could be said that all my father’s idealism – his jail time, the small success and the great disappointment, the years when he struggled for democracy in his country – were flanked by this father and daughter who both died of fatal wounds to the neck. And running parallel to these futile threads, with which my father could string his life together, were the generals, one whom he had fought and the other in whose cabinet he was now a minister.

  For it to be possible for men to live with such disconnect, for my father to live so many lives, the past had to be swept away each time. The original break with history that Pakistan made to realise the impulses of the faith, and which gave it the rootlessness it knew today, had to be repeated. Like the year of events, which had ended in trauma, all that could be wished for was the distraction of the next event. But in these small interims when the past could be seen as a whole, when my father could cast painful bridges over history, I felt a great sympathy as I watched the man I had judged so harshly, for not facing his past when it came to me, muse on the pain of history in his country. And maybe this was all that the gods had wished me to see, the grimace on my father’s face, and for us, both in our own ways strangers to history, to be together on the night that Benazir Bhutto was killed.