Reading Fatima Bhutto in Bombay

Sunday, April 11, 2010
By Aakar Patel
Fatima Bhutto was in Bombay this week, and she was magnificent.

She was here to promote her book, Songs of Blood and Sword. She began her tour to India with a reading in Delhi, where she was interviewed by the star reporters of television channels, like NDTV's Barkha Dutt, and then another in Bangalore before coming to Bombay.

The event in Bombay was at a bookstore. I have been to readings at that particular bookstore before but it hasn't been as packed as it was for her. About 150 people were present. We sat on a little stage. She was to read a couple of pages, then I was to have a discussion with her, and then the audience would ask questions. There were a dozen photographers to our right and a half dozen television cameras facing us, behind the audience. Other writers had also come, and I saw Gregory David Roberts, who wrote Shantaram, the book on his life in Bombay.

Fatima read from the chapter on her father's killing, with which she opens the book. The most interesting part of the chapter is the end when she describes the evening of September 20, 1996. After she hears gunshots outside, and cannot locate her father, the 14-year-old Fatima telephones Benazir, her Wadi Bua, at the prime minister's house.

"The music on the other end of the line was soon interrupted by a click and a silence. 'Hello? Wadi?' I said, calling my aunt the name only I used for her. 'No, she can't come to the phone right now.' It was Zardari. It was no secret that none of us in the family liked Asif Zardari, my aunt's oleaginous husband. On the few social occasions where I saw him, we shared nothing other than a cursory hello. 'I need to speak to my aunt,' I said tersely, not wanting to speak to Zardari. 'You can't,' he replied, equally brusque. 'It's very important, I need to speak with her now.' 'She can't come to the phone right now,' Zardari replied. 'It's very important and I don't want to talk to you, I need to talk to her,' I insisted, my voice quickening. I had wasted enough time on this phone call already. 'She can't speak, she's hysterical,' Zardari replied. As if on cue, there was a loud wailing sound in the background.

It had been quiet before, with no indication that anyone was in the room with Zardari, and all of a sudden there was an almost desperate crying shattering the silence. 'What? No, I have to speak with her, please put her on the phone,' I continued, growing confused at what seemed like a theatrical attempt to keep me from talking to the one person who was in charge.

'Oh, don't you know?' Zardari responded. 'Your father's been shot.'''

Fatima read evenly, in her American accent, and by the time she ended, the audience was hers. I noticed the faces turn sympathetic as she read, and they remained so. During our discussion, when I suggested that it wasn't fully clear who was responsible for her father's killing, one woman in the front row made a disapproving noise.

I asked her a few questions: on the charisma of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on the two sides of his personality, on her father and her aunt. Fatima is exquisite to look at, beautiful and slender as only the very rich can be. She is 28, and I cannot remember having met someone else of that age who has been as confident in their carriage and as clear about their view. I think some of the things she believes quite strongly today, she will review over time. One is the notion that America is responsible for most of Pakistan's problems. Another is that the army's dominance of Pakistan is linked to a universal problem that poor countries like Lanka and Bangladesh also have.

The questioning from the audience was quite good, which is unusual for India.

In Delhi, where she was in conversation with the writer William Dalrymple, Fatima said she was asked for her thoughts on Shoaib Malik and Sania Mirza. She scolded us for our obsession with trivial things, and rightly.

The first question in Bombay was why the cover of her book was so deliberately gruesome. The book is black, with writing in red that advertises its author as: 'Granddaughter to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, executed 1979; niece to Shahnawaz Bhutto, murdered 1985; daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, assassinated 1996; niece of Benazir Bhutto, assassinated 2007'. What was the need to make it so sensational, she was asked.

Fatima admitted the cover was disturbing, and added she had to live with not just the cover but the facts on the cover. I thought it was an excellent answer. Other questions she was asked were on dynasty and politics; on her father's terror group Al Zulfikar; and on Benazir choosing to wear a dupatta over her head (which Fatima thinks is a sign of her hypocrisy).

As a writer, Fatima is quite good and her book is a very easy read despite its heavy material. She can nail a person with a couple of lines. She tells us Benazir had her 70, Clifton bedroom painted black and its shelves were full of Mills and Boon romances.

She disliked her aunt, because Benazir robbed Murtaza of his inheritance, but there are lines through which Fatima also associates with Benzair. One is about Fatima keeping a bottle of her father's perfume, Shalimar. Benazir also writes about Shalimar in Daughter of the East, because it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's favourite perfume too. It is strange that the Bhutto men should have used it, because Shalimar, made by the French firm Guerlain, is a perfume for women.

As the writer Nadeem F Paracha has noted, Fatima's book is quite partisan. She makes her father out to be perfect, which he may not have been. She alludes to conspiracies against him, writing that Murtaza's friend Suhail Sethi and his college friends in America appear to know some secrets about people wishing to harm him. Fatima says they hint at dark things, but choose not to tell her. But the impression a reader might get is that nothing happened.

She speaks of "they" trying to get the Bhuttos, but we do not know whom she means. She says Benazir created a "saprophytic culture". That means feeding off the dead. But Fatima makes much of the fact that she and her brother Zulfi are the only living Bhuttos, which is also living off the name. She delegitimises Benazir's inheritance, by alluding to her being a Zardari. But it is a fact that after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto died, his charisma transferred to his daughter and not his sons. It struck me a couple of days after reading the book that I had not come across a mention of her cousin Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the PPP's co-chairman and Benazir's son. I went back to the book's index to check, and he's been excluded.

Fatima Bhutto is intelligent and energetic and she says she's disinterested in politics. I do not think that is true, but if so it is a shame, because she is charismatic and crowds will love her. If someone had shouted "Jivey Bhutto!" at her Bombay reading, we would have responded. She wants to bring change through her writing, she says, but that is not going to be possible. Fatima says her father taught her neither Urdu nor Sindhi.

I do not think it's possible for Indians and Pakistanis to understand their country without being immersed in their languages. I do not mean the ability to read Urdu, Hindi or Gujarati, knowledge of which most English speakers acquire at school. I mean actually reading and writing in the language regularly. One reason this doesn't happen is that the vocabulary of corporate governance is in English, and people use Hindi or Urdu only for emotional expression, such as music or entertainment.

It will be impossible for Fatima to connect with Pakistanis without being able to understand what they are saying or writing. The problems of her book also arise from this lack of literacy, which might get corrected over time. She is a classic third-world liberal, with a reflex against America. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto studied in California, Benazir in Radcliffe, Sanam and Murtaza in Harvard and Fatima in Columbia. The Bhuttos rely on America to educate them, but then decide to hate it after they come back.


Source:
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=233721