Staying clear of her country's complicated politics, she has now carved an identity for herself. One that goes beyond power politics. Famously quipping that the comparisons between her aunt and her were largely cosmetic and going on to add, "In terms of political ideology, what we read, how we think, we are very different. I don't think that I'm anything like her."
Quite true, considering the fact that she is openly vocal about her dislike of the political and military elite that has ruled Pakistan for over six decades. In the 2007-2008 elections she chose to campaign door to door, educating women about their voting rights, visiting almost 300 homes a day, working from morning till at least 10 at night.
She says that it was the most 'oddly' liberating experience for her. "I was there mainly to drive home the point that they had to vote. That if they didn't, someone else would cast a vote in their name and that they had a responsibility to ensure that rigging didn't happen on their names." It was also during this time that she was exposed to the incredible dispossession that women, more than almost anyone else, face in Pakistan.
During one such election campaign at the time, news broke of Benazir's assassination, Fatima went home and wrote a column for The News, a bittersweet farewell that started with the words, "My aunt and I had a complicated relationship. That is the sad truth," and ended with the hope that "In death, perhaps there is a moment to call for calm. To say enough…We cannot, and will not, take this madness any more."
A sentiment that comes across in almost all of her prose. An outcry against the existing system and an urgency for change. Insisting on the fact that there are more than three choices that Pakistan has- more than the PPP (Pakistan's Peoples Party), the PML (Pakistan Muslim League) and the army-she says hers is the voice of a new generation of Pakistanis.
"It's a voice that is not just secular, but moderate, anti-the war on ter ror and has yet to live through a period where Pakistan is in control over its sovereignty and its foreign policy." She fears that if the next generation is not given a chance to take part in the country, "then we are closing a door to them, a door that they will eventually abandon. They will leave and go to other countries," she says. It is perhaps this need for a new order that is keeping this young Bhutto away from formally being part of the public system.
Having done her bachelors in Middle Eastern studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, USA, and an MA in South Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, politics has always been a key area of interest, but it is writing that she is truly passionate about.
Her first book was a collection of poems, titled Whispers of the Desert, written at the precocious age of 15. But it was only when she wrote her second book 8:50 a.m. 8 October, a collection of stories about the 2005 earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Kashmir and North West Frontier Province, did she finally enter the writer-activist mode.
The shift from poetry to non-fiction is quite drastic, but she insists that poetry started as a school project. "There is a lot of fear and violence in those poems and I think this has carried through to what I write currently. This awareness of fear, thus the shift to prose or non-fiction wasn't much of a transit for me," she says.
Fear is a feeling that she is familiar with. It is perhaps what she felt when her father did not return home in 1996 to continue the basketball game he had challenged her to. It is the feeling of being abandoned by family. Of being told at school that there is a woman outside claiming to be your mother, while you lock yourself in the nurse's room trying to avoid the media and wondering how can you trust a stranger when the only mother you know is waiting for you at home-the woman who brought her up like her own. The woman was Ghinwa Bhutto, her father's second wife, whom he married while in exile in Syria.
Her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir, is a tribute to her father and tells the story of the Bhutto family, and her father's life and death. It's set in the context of the whole canvas of Pakistan's history from Partition in 1947 onward. Her book begins with its central event, her father's "encounter" outside the iconic Bhutto mansion, 70 Clifton in Karachi, where Fatima and her family still reside.
The story revolves around the tragic split within the Bhutto family after the 1979 assassination of its patriarch, the charismatic social reformer Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was Pakistan's first democratically elected leader. His murder by General Zia ul-Haq, who subsequently took power, ultimately pitted his eldest child, Benazir Bhutto, against his eldest son, Mir Murtaza.
She says her reasons for writing this book were more than personal. "Our history in Pakistan is written either by foreigners or by the establishment. There really isn't another layer, another transcript," she says, continuing, "What I hoped to do with this book was to write about that hidden transcript, the way people live, the way violence affects people, written by someone who watched it rather than by someone who perpetrated it," she says.
It is inherent patriotism that pushes her. "I talk and write about very serious issues that plague our country or the larger region-it's always been my choice to do so. I don't do it because I am someone's daughter. At some point, however, people suddenly realised that, I was a Bhutto and it meant something at that point," she says.
But the love for her country is something that she attributes to her father. "Even while we were living in exile in Syria, my father would constantly have Bollywood movies on and even though he did not particularly like them, they just gave a sense of being home. Sindhi music was another strong influence," she says.
She admits that she could not understand her father's choking emotion for Pakistan initially. "We were in a limbo, we believed and inhabited a middle place. I didn't know for a long time, what he meant when his eyes would tear up, when he would talk about Karachi, his home. But when I went to Pakistan at the age of seven, the missing- him choking up-all made sense. I feel it now, especially since the book came about, I spend so much time travelling," she says with a smile and adds that her next book is all about Karachi.
Short on time because Rahul Gandhi has asked for an appointment, she is in a rush and while she is on her way out, Aitzaz Ahsan, former President of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan, walks in, looks her in the eye and says, "Who you have here is the very best of our country, our future." Only time will tell if people's expectations will finally win her over, enough to cross over to the other side. Till then, she is happy to write about, rather than inherit, her political dynasty.
With inputs from Olina Banerji.
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