It was Samin Khan of Sherpur House who showed me a clipping he had
preserved from a Karachi society magazine of 1951 (I think it was The
Mirror) with a photograph taken of you and your husband, Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto, on the day of your wedding. One society photograph among many
but significant because it was one of the more important of the social
occasions of what was then the capital of Pakistan. He showed it to
me a few weeks after Zia-ul-Haq hanged your husband. I thought as I
gazed at the fading and slightly fuzzy photograph how far death must
have been from both your minds that happy but long ago day.
Your husband, of course,was already determined to become a key player in his new country but the translation of ambition into achievement must then have seemed to you a distant prospect. For he was, after all, only in his mid-twenties; he was neither a Punjabi nor a Pathan in a country dominated by the one or the other; he was not even a particularly upmarket Sindhi wadhera, being neither Baloch nor Rajput but a mere Samma; and operating out of Karachi, which was, in 1951, at the height of its takeover by the mohajir, the immigrant from India who had muscled into Sindh's premier city and transformed it, overnight as it were, into an Urdu-speaking metropolis in which the local Sindhi was politically, economically and most importantly, culturally marginalised in his own home, albeit in the name of the shared religion of Islam. In 1951, the only asset going for your husband must have seemed his marrying into your family - wealthy, aristocratic, of impeccable Iranian lineage.
Yes, his ambitions must have appeared a little overblown -- but death must have been the last thing on your young minds. On the day death first came visiting you, I held my five-year-old daughter in my arms and imagined that this was how your husband must have cradled five-year-old Benazir when the news came in that Ayub Khan had decided to make your husband Minister of Commerce. Looking into that innocent child's eyes, I shuddered at the horror you and Benazir were at that moment going through. You must have wondered: Was any of the roller-coaster ride that your husband had taken you through, from the depths of his dismissal by Ayub to the heights of his becoming the first civilian in history to be named Chief Martial Law Administrator, to his becoming a democratically elected Prime Minister and hanging for it in an obscure gallows, been worth it?
You must have wondered too at the bitter irony of the democracy he had ushered in to take the place of military dictatorship giving way within months of his election victory to the restoration of the army on the throne of Islamabad. If only, you must have regretted, he had met the political protests in Karachi at the rigging of some of the seats with a political response, he would still have been in power; it was his decision to call in the army to confront the rioting mobs at Lalukhet Chowk ("The Stalingrad of Pakistan" as the rioters proudly dubbed their roundabout) that had restored the army to a political role and set in train, inexorably, the events that had culminated in the hanging of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the wee hours of that morning.
A year and a few months later, Sanjay Gandhi was killed in an air crash. You, but not Benazir, had been let out of house arrest at Larkana and you were back in 70, Clifton, next door to my residence at India Lodge. We were neighbours but not acquaintances because the Zia police thronged the gap between us and you. Yet common humanity won out when Sanjay died. You called to ask if you could come over to sign the condolence register we had opened at the office of the Consulate-General at 3, Fatima Jinnah Road.
As you drove in, chased by an army of Keystone Cops, did you remember that the property had been sold to us by your husband? In a sense, you were coming home. Your call on me was far more than an act of mere courtesy. Death had visited your home but a few months earlier. You knew, therefore, of the personal agony Indira Gandhi, the mother, was going through. I faithfully transmitted your deep sympathy and empathy to a mother who was also Prime Minister. Our conversation then was the first of several that were to lead to your gracing our Independence Day celebrations, our having your other daughter Sanam and her fiance over to dinner at our place, and being invited in turn to Sanam's wedding reception on the sprawling lawns of your beautiful home.
That was a Romeo and Juliet story in real life, for, like the Montagues and Capulets, your family and Sanam's husband's family had been estranged ever since your father-in-law, Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, had whisked away the Prime Ministership of Junagarh from Sanam's father-in-law in the last days before partition. The two families had never since then exchanged a word -- until the next generation decided to seal in marriage a breach that was by then distant history. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for our estranged countries. Then came the sudden death in the south of France of your second son, Shahnawaz,named after his grandfather. The circumstances could not have been more mysterious. He appeared to have been poisoned to death, some said by his own wife. No one ever got to know the truth. But it was the second time death had come visiting. The photograph of your happy nuptial day faded further.
I recalled your husband having written in his death cell that no male member of is family had been able to live much beyond fifty. The family history was littered for generations with violent, unnatural, untimely deaths. And now disaster has struck once again. You have had to bury your other son, Murtaza, dead at well below 50 in keeping with his grisly family tradition. My heart goes out to you. I do not think you could have imagined the day you came to condole the death of another mother's son that you would weep at the graves of not only one of your sons but both. That other mother too has perished in violence, and so have both her sons. "For within the hollow crown/ That rounds the mortal temples of a king/ Keeps Death his court."
There is, however, a lesson which none of us seems to learn from all this violence: that violence begets violence and the inflicting of death leads in turn to death's door. Your husband, and both your sons, never hesitated in their resort to violence and death. Your daughter, Benazir, too lets the gun too often rule her head. Can you not persuade her, at the grave of her brother mowed down by her own police, to seek peace at home and peace with her neighours? For what avails this emotion which you and I have towards each other as human beings of flesh and blood if we cannot see the millions of each other's countrymen and women as human beings who want to end inhumanity?
With my profoundest condolences,
Yours sincerely, Mani Shankar Aiyar
