Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (18 page)

A story often repeated in my family, and used to defend if not explain Zulfikar’s decision to promote the army general who later had him killed, went like this: Zulfikar had called his army chief to the Prime Minister’s office for a word. Zia arrived on time, early even, and was taken into the office, where he sat down nervously, shaking his feet and twitching his legs. He had begun to smoke, a habit he indulged in to calm his nerves, when the Prime Minister walked in. Zia, various family members would exclaim, jumped up deferentially and shoved the lit cigarette into his pocket. It began to burn through the fabric of his jacker. Smoke came billowing out of Zia’s uniformed
military jacket, but he was so anxious around Zulfikar that he was too embarrassed to admit he had been smoking – hardly a crime – and too polite to put out the fire.

But the quiet and unassuming general would not have to wait long. His designs on the presidency were already in motion, even as his pocket linings burned. ‘I know the bloodhounds are after my blood,’
⁵
Zulfikar raged publicly, in one of his last sessions before parliament. He could feel it coming.

Despite the political turmoil of these years, Zulfikar still found time to stay in close touch with Murtaza. When Murtaza first arrived at Harvard, Zulfikar wrote him a letter, the first to his son at college, on official stationery.

In the beginning you will be homesick and anxiously expect to hear from your parents, your brother and sister . . . but the more you settle down you will not get as excited in the future as you will get now in getting news from home. This does not mean that you will lose interest in what is happening in your country but that intense eagerness will lose its flavour. Most probably, I am writing to you all the things I wrote to Pinky in my first letter. Now this is natural because I am the same person, writing with the same sentiments and values to my son instead of my daughter under exactly the same circumstances. The thoughts and the feelings will be approximately the same. I could have well written: ‘Hullo, Mir, how are you? Please read the first letter I wrote to Pinky when she went to Radcliffe. If she has not cared to preserve it, I will send you a photostat copy. Goodbye son, I am very busy, I have some important work to attend to. Do well and look after yourself.’ But I am not made of that kind of wood. I have great love and affection for you although I rarely gave over demonstration of my affection for you. There are many reasons for this reticence. I tried to explain them to you when
you were here, ever since you were young. In the first place, you are my eldest son and it is essential for me to see that you are not spoilt. I must make sure you grow up in this cruel world as a hard and a brave man. By hard I do not mean cruel, because all of us have a great deal of art in us. By hard I mean tough enough to face the bad side of life as a man. As my eldest son, more than the other children of mine, you personify me and the family. That is why it is necessary to deal with you differently. I would like you to grow up to be an immaculate individual, sharp in intelligence and smart in appearance. You have the making of such a man. With hard work and diligence I am certain you will do well, very well I hope. A person can be jealous of others but he can never be jealous of his own children. This is what my father told me again and again. And this is what I tell you. I will be the happiest man in the world if you come back with a first-class education and with all the right ideas to do better than I have done. I have succeeded in some respects but I have also failed in a way. I do not want you to fail in any way. There is no substitute for hard work. A hardworking mediocre is less of a curse than a lazy genius. Hard work does not kill anybody. Time passes and the temptations of life pass faster. They go by with the flash of the moment. God has created the world and given it unparalleled beauty. In the whole of this beauty there is nothing more beautiful than the human body and nothing more creative than the human mind. What we make of this body and mind is for us to determine. It will be for you to finally determine what you want to make of your life. You will have to take the decision. You will have to decide if you want to leave behind a good name or a bad name.

Zulfikar wrote his children letters that he must have known would have a place in history. He spent hours crafting them, taking the time to write them on aeroplanes, in base camps, in various state offices around the country, until they were ready to be typed up by his aide-de-camp. The letters are sometimes funny, sometimes casual with a
joke here or there, but mainly they are tutorials: instructional and conscientious. Papa kept all his father’s letters in their original envelopes, stamps untouched, seals unbroken. He would delicately remove each letter as if performing open-heart surgery, careful not to destroy any part of the envelope. After Papa read them, he placed all the letters in a blue plastic folder. He had left them, a great big pile of envelopes, in Karachi but he spoke about them often. After we returned to Karachi and Papa came home, one of the first things we did together at 70 Clifton was look for the folder of letters. It was the one thing that had not been touched or aged by time, the one artefact, more precious than any others, that no one had removed and claimed as their own; the folder was where Papa had left it, on a shelf in his father’s library.

As if Zulfikar was certain that the time he had with his children was not going to be nearly enough to tutor them in the lessons of his world, he wrote:

You do not get excited easily and this is a good thing. You have received all the political education necessary to do well in the subjects you have decided to take. You have travelled a great deal, you have been to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, you have seen politics and diplomacy from close range and in reality. You have learnt your politics not from thick books but from being close to me. I took you with me to the Soviet Union and to China with a marked purpose. I sent you again to China with the same purpose. [Murtaza spent a summer travelling around China, his father sent him to see more of the country and to learn about the history of socialism on the footpaths of Chinese cities and villages.] In the study of your field you have advantages which others would envy. Make full use of your previous experiences.

This letter, in particular, is the most tender Zulfikar wrote. His lesson-giving is brief. Here he adopts a helpful tone, explaining issues his young son cannot possibly know, but should.

Americans tend to be argumentative. They like to quote from books. They get so involved in details that they fail to fathom the main points. They do so much shadow boxing that they do not grasp the central issue. They have so many prejudices, they postulate so many theories and notions that they lose the essential factors. Ironically, the essential factors are quite straightforward and simple. The Americans like to make problems complicated. Their egos get involved. They place far too much reliance on the machine, the gadgets they have made. They have become the creature of their own creation. Partly for this reason they get bogged down in detail. They do not visualize the broad horizon. They do not go over the rainbow. To show their wisdom they will ask you to read a number of books. They will ask you to write many papers. They will use impressive expressions without fully comprehending the thinking behind them. They find it difficult to go straight to the heart of the problem and it is the heart, my son, that you must touch and hold.

Zulfikar reminds his son, once more, to study hard. He warns him against the futility of memory as an educational tool, arguing that a refined mind is infinitely more valuable than a photographic one. He tells him he has both capabilities and reminds Murtaza that he is his father’s son. That is why this letter is so important for him to write.

Mir, my son, take things in their normal course, in their stride. Do not get depressed by a setback and do not get exalted by success. Have your feet always on the ground. Never lose heart. Always learn a lesson from a setback, always be humble in success. Speak with confidence, maintain your point of view courageously but not obstinately. Keep an open and objective mind, always be anxious to learn from others to acquire knowledge. Maintain a sense of balance. Above all, at no time should you be ashamed of your background or your culture. In upholding your rich heritage you do not have to be offensive. Be natural and normal. Do not lose the strength of your conviction either by prejudice
or by complex. Do not get provoked. Good or bad, your roots are here in a history coming from a thousand years. I think they are good roots. A manifestation of national pride does not mean the demonstration of chauvinism or arrogance. You do not have to prove that Pakistan is good by proving that America is bad . . . Never be ashamed of your culture, never be ashamed of your background, never apologize for the conditions in Asia. Never be afraid of upholding honourable principles. Europe brought about the miserable conditions of Asia and we are trying to remove them. Remember that despite all the advances of science and technology, Islam is the last message of God. Try to keep in touch with your religion as much as possible . . .

Like any father, Zulfikar digresses into a ‘just say no’ discussion. He talks to his son about the myriad of human failings, of vice and of other ‘soul-destroying habits’. He asks him not to smoke cigarettes, but says it is better that he does that than drink. Then anxiously points out that cigarettes cause cancer and he should probably not do that either. Zulfikar warns Murtaza that many students in America take drugs. He does not realize that many students in Pakistan take them too. But he nervously, you can tell, tells his son that those students out there will tell you, ‘Why don’t you take a puff?’ It’s innocent-sounding enough, but BAM. Your life will be over, you will have lost your soul to drugs. Destroying your life destroys mine, he pleads. Don’t do it, son, don’t, he beseeches.

Before concluding, let me again assure you that my thoughts are always with you. I would request you to overlook the day I slapped you in the Clifton House on Sunny’s [Sanam, his younger sister] false complaint in 1962. We look forward to your visit to your home in the coming summer. The winter winds will pass and you will be happy to be back with us for your holidays. Till then look after yourself, be careful of the cold, study hard and remember us. God bless you!

The letter is signed in blue ink, ‘Your loving Papa, Zulfikar’.

Murtaza walked into his dorm room at Winthrop House in the autumn of 1972. His roommate was a young man with a rich baritone voice from the frontier of Texas. His name was Bill White and he had requested a roommate from Asia, someone preferably with an interest in politics. Bill recognized the name Bhutto on their door, he knew the name was from Pakistan, he was a keen student of all things political, but he didn’t realize that his Bhutto roommate would be the son of the premier who made the name sound familiar. Both Bill and Murtaza were from warm countries, both had scarcely experienced snow. They were both fuelled by their fascination with politics. Bill didn’t care much for the bust of Lenin that Murtaza kept in the room or the requisite posters of Che Guevara and Chou En-lai, but Murtaza wasn’t crazy about Bill’s country music either. They became fast friends.

I had already graduated from college in New York and was midway through studying for my master’s in London when I felt brave enough to begin the search through my father’s past. The first step, I reasoned, would have to be the college years. I was in the throes of finding my own independence and remembered how Papa had spoken of his time at university as uncomplicated and beautiful and so decided, in a preemptively nostalgic strike of my own, to visit the Harvard Alumni Association online. I wrote to the 1976 class officers cautiously explaining my situation and trying not to frighten them with the details of my father’s life since college or with my intention to move backwards through time so that I could be with my father again. My request, tame as it was, was ignored by three of the four Class of ’76 representatives, but then, a reply. Nancy emailed me and threw herself into my search and would become a formidable ally in my time-travelling. She sent emails, SOSs for information on my father, updates to the newsletter; Nancy regularly posted my plea for help and worked as though she felt phantom pains, as if she understood how important it
was to me and my journey to start at the one place that seemed the hardest to manoeuvre in.