Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (8 page)

As his reputation as a barrister grew, Zulfikar shifted to the offices of A. K. Brohi, another respected Sindhi lawyer. One day, Iloo remembers, Zulfi mentioned that Brohi had given him a legal draft to vet. As they drove around the city in Iloo’s car, Zulfikar mentioned that it was a big step in his career and he’d have to spend proper time going through the document. The next day, as he often did, Iloo picked his friend up from his law office, which was near Mohammad Ali Jinnah or Quaid-e-Azam’s tomb. ‘How did it go with the draft?’ Iloo asked, since Zulfikar hadn’t mentioned it. Zulfikar smiled. ‘I changed every line of it. I thought Brohi would go mad, but he accepted it.’ Iloo knew his friend only too well. ‘Zulfi,’ he cautioned, ‘you shouldn’t do these things deliberately.’ Zulfi continued smiling at his friend. ‘I wanted him to know I know more than he does,’ he replied and laughed, not joking in the least.

While his career was creating ripples in legal circles and his adjustment to life in a new country was going well, socially things in Karachi were slightly dry. After so many years abroad, in California and London, Zulfikar didn’t know too many people in Karachi. He loved to go out to restaurants and nightclubs, but hadn’t managed to find a suitable partner to accompany him. Sindhi families are notoriously conserva-tive; men didn’t take their wives out to social functions, let alone their daughters. It was by chance that one evening, at a wedding, Zulfikar came across a beautiful Iranian who had moved with her family to Karachi from Bombay after Partition. Nusrat was tall and slender with chiselled cheekbones and dark auburn hair. She was new to the city too and had only learned English a short while before. She had a gaggle of sisters, but none of them was of any importance when she was in the room. They all faded into the background like shadows when Nusrat was present.

Nusrat and Zulfi made an attractive couple. They were both elegant and lively, both rebellious and charming. Soon Zulfikar had fallen
in love. He approached his parents to ask if he could have their permission to send a proposal to Nusrat’s family, but they were not amused by their son’s suggestion. Khurshid Begum put up the strongest opposition to the notion of Zulfikar marrying an outsider. Nusrat was not Sindhi; she was entirely foreign. She came from a religious Shiite family and the Bhuttos were Sunni. She wasn’t even a
zamindar
’s daughter. Her father was a soap maker who had owned a factory in Bombay – even their name bore the mark of their profession,
Saboonchi
, the one who makes soap. He was a businessman, the lowest of professions in the feudal Bhuttos’ eyes. Khurshid Begaum put her foot down; her son was not going to marry Nusrat. Besides, she reasoned, he was already married.

But Zulfikar was as headstrong as his mother. Early one afternoon in 1951, Zulfikar drove to his friend Iloo’s house, near Quaid-e-Azam’s dome-shaped marble
mazaar
and honked his car as a signal for Iloo to come outside. He was sitting calmly in the car when Iloo walked out of his door. ‘Do you have any money on you?’ Iloo nodded. ‘Get in the car, we have to go now.’ ‘Go where?’ asked Iloo, still confused over the surprise visit. ‘I’m going to get married. To Nusrat. Today.’ Iloo reminded him that under Islam he would need two witnesses, and he was just one person. He suggested they pick up a friend of his, Karimdad Junejo, a young fellow from another one of Sindh’s prominent families. They sped towards Karimdad’s house and yanked him into the car. ‘Hurry,’ Iloo told him, ‘Zulfi’s going to get married.’ ‘To whom?’ Karimdad asked, astonished that he had been picked up to help Zulfi elope. ‘Nusrat,’ Iloo replied. ‘Nusrat? That
lambhi
?’ That tall girl? Karimdad laughed clucking his tongue, ‘She’s too tall!’

The three men drove over to Clifton to pick Nusrat up from her house, a stone’s throw away from where 70 Clifton was being built for the Bhuttos. The only male in her house was her old father, who was nearly blind and not disposed to be of any help with an elopement. Nusrat’s sisters met the groom’s procession with the opposition that their father would have mustered if he had been of sound body. ‘Have you brought the
maulvi
?’ asked one of her sisters, referring to
the mullah who was to conduct the marriage. The three friends had no idea they were supposed to provide the clergy.

‘The closest mosque at that time was just behind the Sindh Club, ten minutes away,’ remembers Iloo, leaning in conspiratorially as we speak about the famous elopement more than fifty years later – it is the first time I’ve heard the story directly and I lean in too, feeling momentarily involved in the hatching and planning of my grandparents’ secret marriage. ‘I picked a fellow up and raced back to Clifton so he could conduct the ceremony, but as we entered the house Nusrat’s sisters said, “He’s Sunni. We want a Shiite
maulvi
. Send him back”, so I dropped the fellow all the way back to his mosque and asked him if he could direct me to where I might find a Shiite mullah. He opened the car door, got out, and abused me heartily.’ Iloo has always been a religious man, and as he drove around in circles scouting out other possible mosques, he stopped to say his
asr
or mid-afternoon prayers at a mosque near Bori Bazaar in the middle of the city.

As he walked out of the mosque having completed his prostra-tions he stopped a
maulvi
and asked if he was Sunni or Shiite. For the second time in the day, Iloo had a hail of curses flung at him by a member of the clergy. ‘As I was walking out sheepishly after having been yelled at, a gentleman approached me. He had overheard my conversation and said, “
Beta
, son, you won’t find a Shiite
maulvi
at a mosque.” So I asked him where I could find one and he told me that I should go to the Imam Bargha, or Shiite mosque. I had no idea where the Imam Bargha was. In those days we didn’t think of ourselves, Sunnis and Shiites, as so separate – what did we know? The gentleman told me it was nearby in Bolton market.’ After crossing Bolton market, Iloo caught sight of a friend on the road and stopped him to ask for help. His friend laughed at him. ‘You’re never going to get a Shiite
maulvi
, you need to book them days in advance.’ Iloo explained his predicament to his friend, who ended up saving the day. ‘Go to Sindh Madrassah – there are two schools, one preaching the Sunni teachings of Islam and one for the Shiites, you might find someone willing to perform the
nikkah
there.’

By now it was dusk, nearing the time for
maghreb
prayers, and
Iloo pulled up at the madrassah just as a
maulvi
was walking out. ‘I stopped him and asked him to please come with me to Clifton to read a
nikkah
for your grandfather. The
maulvi
was reluctant to come with me. “How much will it cost for you to perform the ceremony?” I asked him and he shrugged his shoulders and grumbled that it would cost fifty rupees. I pulled out the hundred-rupee note from my pocket and handed it to him. “There,” I told him, “that’s your advance” and pulled him into the car.’

After the ceremony was read and the marriage contract signed, Iloo packed the newlyweds into the car and drove them to the Palace Hotel. They were married, finally.

Two days later Sir Shahnawaz hosted a reception for his son and his new wife, but he was not the least bit pleased about it. Khurshid Begum was even frostier to her new daughter-in-law. A week later, Zulfikar and Nusrat took off to Turkey for their honeymoon. They would stay with his sister Mumtaz, who had married an army man posted by the Bosphorous. In the black-and-white photographs from their honeymoon, the only ones taken marking their union as man and wife, Zulfikar has his coat collar pulled up to his chin and Nusrat is wearing a sari under her overcoat. They looked beautiful, my grandparents, like old-time movie stars.

In the 1950s, Pakistan, like most other nations, was caught up in the quagmire of the Cold War. Neutrality or non-alignment was not considered an option by the military coterie that even then pulled the strings of Pakistani politics. Impartiality was deemed impractical on the basis that the emergence of an equally powerful third force was unforeseeable in the near future. Pakistan rejected the possibility of bipartisanship and joined forces with the United States in its urgent quest to rid the world of communism.

Even as a young student, this angered Zulfikar who felt that ‘the central motif of the so called bipartisan policy of the United States was to tie up all the nations outside the Iron Curtain into an intricate net
of interlocking alliances which would embroil them all in any attempt by the communist states to spark off a conflagration.’
¹⁰
It was under this guise that Pakistan was to become a part of SEATO, the supposed South-East Asian counterpart of Europe’s NATO, in 1954. Zulfikar felt it ridiculous for Pakistan to ally itself with this monstrous power, claiming to have common interests, when, ‘while blood flowed in Kashmir, Jeffersonian America kept aloof with remarkable nonchalance, whereas the first shot out of a trigger-happy communist in any theatre of the world can cause such a reaction throughout the non-communist bloc.’
¹¹

The world was being ripped apart by dissension and attempts to disrupt the balance of power. This disarray in world politics meant that ‘in one breath, the leaders of the world preach peace and in the next threaten to obliterate civilization with atom bombs . . . our position’, wrote Zulfikar, speaking of Pakistan, ‘is pathetically unstable’.
¹²
Fifty-odd years years later, Zulfikar’s assessment rings frighteningly true: Pakistan remains in a desperately unsound state.

The frustration the young Zulfikar felt towards the state of world affairs was matched by his feelings of solidarity towards the Third World. While still studying at Berkeley he insisted that it was necessary for us to ‘halt this moribund pattern of our politics and rearrange our world in a revolutionary way’.
¹³
He felt himself most strongly attached to the fate of fellow Muslim nations. When looking at the state of world affairs at the time, Zulfikar reflected, ‘I am not a devout Muslim, I do not say my prayers regularly; I do not keep all the fasts . . . my interest is soaked in the political, economical, and cultural heritage of Islam.’
¹⁴
Sindhis, especially, born into a culture rich with Sufi Saints, Hindu lore and tribal ancestry, aren’t known for their observance to orthodox Islam. The Bhuttos were never devoutly religious, unusual for Pakistan’s political elite, but Zulfikar must have been only twenty-one years old when he committed himself to the renewal of his Muslim brethren, saying, ‘I genuinely consider any accomplishments of the Islamic people as a personal feat, just as I consider any failure of the Muslim world as a personal failure.’
¹⁵
It was a romantic notion, the idea that in order to break the chains of
the status quo and to ease the plight of future generations of Asians and Muslims alike, it would be necessary for the people of such diverse blood and myriad heritages to come together as a unified whole, putting aside their cultural, political and linguistic differences. He truly believed that a unity of this kind would ‘give to the world a blueprint of the brotherhood of mankind’.
¹⁶
Considering the lay of the land in today’s world, Zulfikar’s political desire to see the dispossessed come together to defeat centuries of ruthless exploitation sounds fanciful, but Zulfikar carried this dream with him for many years to come. When he later became Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar would write long letters to his eldest son, Murtaza, then away at Harvard, detailing in an almost lecture-like way all that was happening in Pakistan and around the globe. In one letter, after discussing the Vietnam War and the tragedy of its people, Zulfikar reminded his son, ‘I am telling you this because you are an Asian. You belong to this part of the world. You have to live here and work for the people of your country. You can never think of leaving your homeland.’
¹⁷

The Pakistan Zulfikar returned to after his time abroad was entirely new to him. It was, after all, only a few years old. He had finished Berkeley, carried on at Oxford and then passed the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, where Jinnah himself was schooled in the field of law. Education, Zulfikar always told his children, is the one thing no man can rob you of. ‘There is no last phase in education, it continues from birth to death, from the time one begins to see and observe and understand till the time one ceases to see, observe and understand.’
¹⁸