A legacy of love

Sunday, January 06, 2008
Bhuttos die young, they are killed much before their time but they never leave us, not entirely. Bhuttos die only through the body, never through the soul.

Two stories: They say that in the late 1970s a powerful landlord in Jhelum went to his peasants to ask for their vote in the coming elections. He gathered them on a small patch of land and lobbied. 'What did Zulfikar Ali Bhutto give you?' he asked them 'You're not any better off than you were before -- you're still peasants, you're still poor, what did he do for you?' They say that one of the haris stood up and spoke to the landlord 'I'll tell you what he gave us. Before Zulfikar Ali Bhutto you used to summon us to your bungalow and tell us who to vote for. Now you come to us and ask us to vote to for you. That's what he did for us'.

There are so many myths surrounding the Bhuttos, so many fantasies and fables built around them that it is difficult to surmise which parts are fact and which parts are fiction. But there are myths, so many myths, and they envelope the mythologized like a shroud of butterflies, casting a light and a flutter around their beloved.

It is love ultimately that keeps them alive. It is love that refuses to surrender them to the beyond. I remember being eight years old and sitting on a flight from Karachi to Moenjodaro. A man sat in the aisle across from me and waited patiently for the flight to take off. He was a poor man of meagre means. He was on the flight for the same reason as I was -- to attend my grandfather's January 5th birthday celebrations in Larkana -- but he didn't know me then. He didn't know who I was till the plane landed and I was met by my Joonam, my grandmother, outside. After the plane reached cruising altitude, the man bent down and pulled a plastic bag from under his seat. It was his only piece of carry on luggage. I remember it as being yellow, but I'm not sure. Through the passage of time I have also mythologized the man on that Fokker flight to Moenjodaro.

He folded out his food tray and opened the plastic bag. He took out an apple, which he had brought to eat not knowing, I suppose, that PIA would provide him with a boxed luncheon of buttered sandwiches on the flight, and then a photograph frame which he first wiped clean with his handkerchief and then placed tenderly on his tray. The photograph was a beautiful one of my grandfather, wearing a Mao cap and smiling. The man kept the frame in front of him on his tray as he ate and as he napped, tucking it away only as the plane began to descend.

That's the kind of love I mean.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto used to say that his mind was Western and his soul Eastern. By Western he meant he was a student of Bertrand Russel and Antonio Gramsci, among other great theorists and writers. But by Eastern, I believe he meant something different. The concept of love is paramount to Sufi philosophy. Without love, there is no path to the lord who seeks his followers as a lover seeks a companion. Sufis believe that the only way to achieve union with God is through the heart.

It was through his heart that we knew him and loved him.

He was flawed and he was human. There is not one of us who can cast the first stone. But that heart? At its purest, it was so beautiful.

A revolutionary poet, Tupac (Our generation has its own poets and sometimes they happen to be rappers) drew on Reverend King's counsel and sang 'It's time for us as a people to start making some changes/let's change the way we eat/let's change the way we live/and let's change the way we treat each other/you see the old way wasn't working/and now it's on us to do what we have to do to survive'

Yesterday was my grandfather's 80th birthday. It would have been, rather. While we usually celebrate it with joy, this year we could not. There was no joy to draw upon, there was only solemnity and remembrance of those whom we have loved and lost and loved and lost too many times. I know my grandfather could not have lived to see his children die the deaths they did, how could he have bared such cruelty? For his not knowing and not having witnessed, we are lucky.

For his not seeing his dream in tatters and in shame, we are lucky.

How do you own a legacy? How do you possess brave men's imaginations after them? You do not, you cannot.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto does not have one rightful heir, or two, or three, or four or five. He was a larger man than that. He has millions of children who will inherit his political legacy. His legacy belongs not just to those of us who love him, but to those whom he loved. To the people, the masses of men and women whose lives he sought to better, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ultimately belongs to them. They have been waiting for him for many years, they eulogized him even though they did not wish to believe he was really gone, it is to them that he returns and where he will forever remain.

Source: Daily News