Touched by tragedy: Exclusive extracts from Fatima Bhutto's new book

Asif Zardari was on the phone. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said casually to me. ‘Your father’s been shot.’ I dropped the phone. My body went numb and cold and my heart beat so hard it drowned out everything around me. Mummy picked up the phone. She saw my face, I looked ashen. She must have known something was terribly wrong though I couldn’t get the words out to say anything or even look at her. She screamed. I don’t remember what she said. I was frozen to my chair, Papa’s green armchair.

It must be the arm, I kept telling myself. He must be hit in the arm; it can’t be serious, maybe the leg. Why would Zardari tell me, a fourteen-year-old girl, that my father had been shot if it had been serious? I couldn’t breathe. Mummy must have called for the car. The next thing I knew she was running towards the door. I got up and ran after her. ‘Stay here!’ she yelled. ‘No!’ I screamed back. ‘I’m coming with you!’ Zulfi (little brother) was
sitting in the lobby now, with Sofi, his nanny from when he was a baby. Sofi watched Mummy and me yelling at each other in the corridor by the door. She held Zulfi close to her and tried to distract him from our screaming.

‘Fati, it’s dangerous!’ Mummy shouted. But I wouldn’t let her leave without me. ‘He’s my father!’ I cried and grabbed her arm, pulling her with me to the car. She couldn’t stop me. Mummy held on to me as we drove out of the house. The roads were clean, empty. I remember looking out, searching the dark streets for some sign and seeing nothing, calming myself into believing that whatever had happened wasn’t serious. It must be the arm, I kept repeating to myself and to Mummy like a mantra I was desperate for us to believe....

I don’t remember how we got to Mideast Hospital or how we found ourselves in the large recovery room that Papa had been placed in. I remember walking in and seeing only my father’s legs. I thought I would collapse.

Mummy ran into the room and straight towards Papa, who was lying unconscious on a low hospital bed. I saw him and froze. I stood before my father, covered in blood, and wanted to scream but I couldn’t open my mouth. I was paralysed with shock. I just stood there.

Mummy ran straight to Papa’s side and began speaking to him, as if she hadn’t registered how frightening he looked, how much blood covered his face and his chest. ‘Wake up Mir! Wake up!’ she yelled. I went closer to him and crouched beside the bed. I touched Papa’s face but got blood on my fingers and got scared. His face was still
warm, the blood dark and wet. I stood up quickly and walked to the end of the room and sat down on a white metal chair. I couldn’t breathe.

Mummy sat with Papa as he was fitted with a heart monitor and as the hospital staff scrambled to find surgeons to operate on him — there were none on call, there never were at Mideast. People filtered into the room, coming in to watch, to have a look, to see Murtaza Bhutto die. I screamed at one of them, an odious magazine editor-turned-politician who behaved as if she had bought tickets to an event. ‘Why are you here?’ I screamed at her. ‘This isn’t a show! Get out!’ She moved away from me, but she didn’t leave. Others, friends and strangers, came. I couldn’t focus long enough to understand how dire things were, how we ended up in a hospital with not one surgeon to save my father’s life....

Idon’t know how we made it from the waiting room to the operating theatre. I think I was being supported and held. I think Mummy was holding me. Papa lay in the middle of the room, a thin white sheet pulled up to his collarbone. His face had been bandaged with white gauze, holding his jaw shut. His eyes were closed. There was dried blood congealing on his face and flecks of blood in his hair. Papa’s hair was always perfectly combed, the only time it ever looked that messy was when he woke up in the mornings. I kneeled on the floor next to his body. He wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be. There had to be some mistake. I kissed my father’s face, his cheeks, his lips, his nose, his chin, over and over again. I didn’t kiss his eyes; a Lebanese superstition says you will be separated from anyone whose eyelids your lips brush. I didn’t want to be separated from Papa....

Somewhere around three in the morning, while Mummy was still at the hospital waiting for the autopsy to be completed and for Papa’s body to be released so she could bring him home, the Prime Minister came to Mideast. Benazir flew from the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad to Karachi. She stopped at her home and then came to the hospital barefeet — a sign, people assumed, of her grief. She was accompanied by Wajid Durrani, one of the shooters that night who is seen saluting her in many of photographs taken of her arrival, and by Shoaib Suddle, another of the men who participated in her brother’s assassination. Abdullah Shah, the Chief Minister of Sindh, and another accused in the murder, would also be by Benazir’s side at Mideast. Benazir, my Wadi, would say, years later in an interview broadcast days before her own death, that it was Murtaza’s own fault that he was killed. She changed the facts about his injuries, rambling incoherently, claiming he was shot in the back by his own guards, that his guards opened fire on the police, that Murtaza had a death wish. I did not see Benazir until after Papa’s burial. Every time she tried to drive to Al Murtaza house where Papa’s funeral was held her car was attacked by Larkana locals, who pelted her car with stones and shoes.

The funeral in Larkana was intense and cities across the country marked a three-day mourning period in solidarity.....

Joonam (Nusrat Bhutto, Fatima’s grandmother) arrived from a foreign trip that day to find her second son murdered. No one had told Joonam, who was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s, that her beloved elder son had been killed. They told her only minutes before her car had pulled up at the 70 Clifton gates. In the helicopter ride to Larkana, Joonam beat her chest in the Shiia style of mourning and wailed uncontrollably. She never recovered. The day after the burial she walked up and down the corridors of Al Murtaza calling her son. ‘Tell Mir he should change his kaffan, his burial shroud, it’s full of blood.’

On the third day of mourning, Benazir came to Al Murtaza under cover of darkness to evade the protestors who had been attacking her motorcade. She said she wanted her mother to be with her for a few days and swept Joonam out of our house. We never saw our grandmother again. Joonam is now held incommunicado by the Zardaris in a garish house in Dubai.

Source:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/Touched-by-tragedy-Exclusive-extracts-from-Fatima-Bhuttos-new-book/articleshow/5733335.cms