Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (23 page)

Della did not accompany Murtaza on this visit; she was, officially, the enemy. She worried that the government would know about her and the young Pakistani and wondered whether it would affect the government’s handling of her husband and the other jailed junta leaders. But Della was nothing if not brave. In the end she figured it might even make her position in Greece slightly safer, making her look like less of a junta firebrand.

In 1978, Murtaza visited Greece around ten times, stopping over after trips to Turkey, Syria and within Europe. He came to Greece to meet and speak with politicians in the new government and travelled around the country with Della. They went to the island of Aegina, where General Roufogalis was jailed, and while Della visited her husband in prison, Murtaza read the newspaper at a local coffee shop. They went to Veria and Murtaza met Della’s mother and two sisters, Nana and Vou, and together they went sightseeing around Alexander the Great’s hometown. Nana took Della and Murtaza to Mount Parnassos, near Delphi, when the first snow of winter came. She was a good skier, Della not so much and Murtaza not at all. Typically Pakistani, Murtaza scarcely ever wore winter clothes, and he very rarely hit the slopes. As Della was struggling down a small hill she saw a figure with a shawl on his head waving at her from the bottom of the peak – it was Mir, he had written her name in large letters with twigs and leaves in the fresh snow.

Della often came to London and it was there that Murtaza gave
her a copy of
If I am Assassinated
and signed it ‘with best wishes to Della’. Shah, more effusive, signed below ‘with lots of love’. In London the brothers changed apartments regularly, Della didn’t know if it was to do with security but Murtaza always wrote the different numbers and addresses in her diary himself. She used a small deep purple Asprey diary and Murtaza’s slanted cursive handwriting fills several boxes – 42 Lowndes Square is one address, oddly close to the Pakistani embassy, and 72 Stanhope Mews was the last address he wrote. On his birthday, his twenty-fourth, Della joined him in London and they went back to Trader Vic’s to celebrate. He wore Azzaro cologne that year, Della remembers, switching to Gray Flannel the next – he would wear the Geoffrey Beene cologne for the rest of his life – and wore, Della insists, only Turnbull & Asser shirts and silk suits. She wore long gypsy dresses, in fashion at the time, and embroidered peasant blouses. Murtaza often smoked Romeo y Julieta cigars, Che’s favourite brand, and slipped the red cigar bands onto Della’s fingers. Together, they visited Oxford and met Murtaza’s tutors – he still had a master’s thesis that occupied him – and Della accompanied Murtaza to Parliament, where he gave a briefing on Pakistan to a gathering of MPs. Murtaza was shy, Della remembered; she thought it would take a few months before he became comfortable with this sort of thing. But it wasn’t the MPs, it was Della; Murtaza had grown up with crowds and had campaigned vigorously for his father, giving speeches and doing door-to-door from an early age. He was shy of her. He had never felt like this before. Neither had Della.

It was still early in General Zia ul Haq’s dictatorial rule. He promised to hold elections after ninety days in July 1977 but swiftly reneged on his promise on the grounds that he felt it more prudent to start an ‘accountability’ process in regard to politicians first, a vetting process that led to the filing of the White Papers against Bhutto. The veneer of Zia’s power seemed thin. Murtaza believed that General Zia would not kill his father. Most people thought of the religious army general with the slicked-down hair as an aberration – his reputation as a sycophant preceded him and most Pakistanis didn’t think Zia would dare kill Zulfikar in the face of the international uproar created by
Murtaza and Shahnawaz’s determined lobbying. The family’s lands were still safe; it wouldn’t have gone over well in traditional Sindh for the General to confiscate them, and it was the revenue from its combined land holdings that kept the family afloat during the frantic Save Bhutto years.

In October, just a month after his twenty-fourth birthday, Murtaza travelled alone to America and Canada to meet American statesmen for the first time. His old college roommate, Bobby Kennedy Jr, was at law school in Virginia and had been working hard to arrange for Murtaza to see top-level officials. He had written and published a number of editorials in the
Washington Post
, with information gleaned from Murtaza, about the state of martial law in Pakistan and the injustices of Bhutto’s case. Together, Bobby and Murtaza went to Washington to meet senators, including Bobby’s uncle, Ted Kennedy. ‘Mir’s diplomatic work was effective,’ recalls Bobby. ‘He worked hard and people wanted to help him.’
⁷

They travelled to Plains, Georgia, to see Lillian Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s mother, who had been in the Peace Corps in South Asia. She had an interest in India and Pakistan and, as Bobby remembers it, ‘Mrs Carter was delighted to meet Mir. She was very cordial but was worried that she wouldn’t be able to influence anything, though she genuinely tried to help us in every way she could.’
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Bobby spent a considerable amount of time with Murtaza helping him raise awareness of his father’s case. They travelled around the South together, going riding and raccoon hunting at night to unwind. ‘We went to a bootlegger named George Kelly, a large black man with one eye, in Lowns County, Alabama – a dry county. He had a small shack where he would play music on a jukebox and sell beer to the mainly black residents of the county, so we went down there with some raccoon we had caught because George Kelly was known for his barbecues too. We went there one night and ate and danced and spoke to people there.’
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In between flying over to New York to speak to members of the UN General Assembly or to Pakistani communities around the States, Murtaza tried to be with his college friends as much as possible.
It was too difficult a time to be alone. ‘I loved Mir,’ Bobby tells me when we are talking about that trip, and meeting for the first time, eighteen years later. ‘He was one of my closest friends because he had all these qualities we call virtues. He was honest, he was a loyal friend. He wanted to commit himself to people who did not have the advantages he had. He really was a populist, you know. He cared not just about wide swathes of people, he cared about individuals – he was curious and would question them. In Alabama he would talk to black people, very poor people who had never been out of Lowns County, he would talk to them about their lives.’
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Next Murtaza travelled to Canada to address a gathering of the Toronto chapter of the Save Bhutto Committee and to speak to the Canadian press and various politicians. Milbry, his Harvard friend, travelled with him around America and to Toronto and saw Murtaza in an entirely new light. ‘It was a very difficult time and he carried himself very maturely. He had a heavy burden but Mir always loved life. He was always engaged in what he was doing.’
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In Toronto, Murtaza continued his efforts to garner interest in the possibility of making a documentary on the judicial trial of his father. ‘It just didn’t happen,’ remembers Milbry, apologetically shrugging off the disappointment years later. ‘We met with commentators and TV stations and we got close a number of times but we were awfully young – the whole campaign in the United States was very frustrating. Americans don’t often look beyond their own borders and Pakistan was a border very far away. But Mir had to keep going, trying to free his father consumed his life; if he expected his father was going to be killed he would have lost heart.’
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Della and I met thirty years after she and my father fell in love. It felt like a reunion, although we had never met before. She contacted me – I had tried to find her for years – asking all my father’s old friends whether they knew her, the Greek love of my late father’s young life. I didn’t know Della’s last name. It wouldn’t have mattered; she had changed it. Two years after I had been in the United States, a man I had only spoken to on the phone, an old boyfriend of one of my aunts, met Della at a dinner in Palm Beach. She introduced
herself and something must have clicked. Or maybe they spoke about Pakistan and how they had both dated Pakistanis, before the names came up and struck a chord. Somehow my father’s name came up and the man told Della that Mir, whom she loved, had a daughter and that she was looking for her. That was all it took – once Della knew that we wanted to know her, she and a friend Googled me and quickly found my email address.

In the summer of 2008, I flew to Greece to meet Della. She was in her early sixties but still very beautiful. She reminded me of Nusrat, my grandmother. She had fine cheekbones and she carried herself well, just like my
Joonam
,
my life
, as I called my grandmother in her native Farsi. I landed in Athens and we flew to her home in Mykonos, where she showed me my father’s letters and photographs. It was hot and breezy in Mykonos and the smell of basil plants, natural Greek mosquito repellents, permeated the evening air with their sweet scent. Della told me that she and Papa had listened and danced to Ma Baker and Mammy Blue (both mother songs, I thought to myself). Della picked up on my funny expression and said that Papa had often told her that she reminded him very much of Nusrat and that he used to tease her by calling her Ma Baker, making her squeal and squirm with laughter at his naughty sense of humour. She reminded me of the smoke rings Papa blew as he smoked and somehow Della managed to bring him back to life in a new manifestation. I met his friends, friends I never knew he had, all over Greece. On our first night in Mykonos we went out for dinner; Della’s sister Nana was with us, and Della told me about a trip she had taken with my father to Monte Carlo, along with a friend of hers, Kryssa. They had spent a weekend there at the beginning of their love affair and when it was time for Kryssa and Della to leave, they couldn’t find a taxi. They were running out of time, their flight was scheduled to leave early in the afternoon. So my father chartered a helicopter to fly them to the airport. I couldn’t imagine him doing something so wild, so reckless. He was in love, I suppose, and love makes us do remarkably unhinged things. First I laughed at the story, then cried over my main course, because I had never known that Mir.

After dinner, Della led us down the narrow white alleys of Mykonos to a restaurant. I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew it wasn’t the way we came. At the restaurant she went up to the owner and hugged her, chatting away quickly in Greek. It was Kryssa; her name means ‘golden’ in Greek. She was shorter than Della, with a raspy smoker’s voice and a lit cigarette in her hand. It was around midnight. Della brought Kryssa to me – I didn’t know she was Kryssa from the helicopter story – but I introduced myself only as Fatima and held out my hand. As she shook it, she stared at me. ‘Don’t tell me,’ Kryssa said to Della in Greek. ‘Is she the daughter of the Pakistani?’ Della nodded and she and Kryssa began to cry. Wiping away her tears, Kryssa grabbed me, hugging me and squeezing my arms. She kissed my hair and told me in her accented English, ‘It’s the eyes. I can see from your eyes that you’re Mir’s daughter.’ I cried for the second time that night. Kryssa asked me if I had any pictures of my father. I had one, a photograph of us together when I was a baby. It’s a beautiful picture of my father; he’s smiling and holding me close to his face. ‘He looks so sad,’ Kryssa said, shaking her head.

‘Can you believe what happened to our Mir?’ Della asked her, smoothing her face clean of tears. Kryssa shook her head. ‘If I think about it, I go crazy.’

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7
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T
he start of 1979 was marked by a frenzied effort to increase the international pressure on Pakistan’s military regime to save Zulfikar’s life. His death sentence had been passed; from Benazir in Karachi, Suhail delivered the news that the junta was going to execute Zulfikar to Nusrat in Lahore. Both women were among the first to know and were devastated, unsure of what they could do to save him. As Zia ul Haq’s government busied itself with asserting its control over the country, Zulfikar’s health was rapidly deteriorating.

Word from Pakistan was bleak. Zulfikar, who had never expected a fair trial from the military, was sure that he would be killed, but Murtaza continued to be convinced that the Save Bhutto Committee could exert enough pressure on the Pakistani government from foreign quarters to keep his father alive. In a file of clippings he kept from the time, Murtaza highlighted a grainy black-and-white photograph of an austere-looking man with a caption that read:

Stan Newens, MP, put down a motion in the House of Commons on the matter and obtained 100 signatories: ‘I stand on the left of the Labour Party . . . but I can say that from the left of the Labour Party to the right wing of the Conservative Party, right across the spectrum, there was a deep sense of revulsion at this trial, at the verdicts they called and, now, at the so-called sentence being carried out. I myself take the view that what we have here is an assassination which has been cloaked in a political or judicial form.’

Murtaza, working as the head of the Save Bhutto Committee in London, organized a two-day conference to discuss the legal inconsistencies of the junta’s case against his father. The Convention of International Jurists on the Trial of Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was convened to discuss the judicial process against the former premier and participants came from around the world in an extraordinary show of legal solidarity. From England there was the (later disgraced) MP Jonathan Aitken, the editor-in-chief of the
Observer
, law and politics professors from Oxford and the London School of Economics. Amnesty International sent two participants. The Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Commission of Jurists flew in from Geneva along with trial lawyers from the United States. The heaviest legal hitter on the panel was undoubtedly Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under the US President Lyndon B. Johnson. Murtaza’s friend, Suhail, remembers Clark’s presence as powerful. ‘He not only attended the law conference but he gave a statement saying that Bhutto’s case was not a trial of murder, rather it was the overt murder of a trial – it was very promising to have him come out so forcefully for the Chairman.’
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