farewell to you Benazir,Sleep well.

Nonchalant · #1 Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Not having lived in vain

By Tariq Islam

AFTER she had kissed her sister’s face and bid her farewell, my cousin Sanam Bhutto turned to me and said: “Benazir had spent a lifetime writing obituaries for loved ones. It is time now to write her obituary. I know my sister would have wanted you to write it.”

Well, where does one begin? The pain is yet too sharp, the wounds too raw and the tragedy too overwhelming. Words and tears can not flow together.

At the end of our summer vacation in London in July, we had spent a family evening together. Whilst leaving, I turned to her and said, “BB, please don’t come back … they will kill you.” She held my hand and smiled, there was sadness in her eyes. She said nothing. Her eyes said it all. She knew death awaited her upon return. She knew that somewhere, in some dark corner, a sniper was lying in wait. But she was not going to run from death. She was the daughter of the East, daughter of destiny. She was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter.

I was with her on that truck on Oct 18 when the bomb blast ripped apart the soul of a nation. For any other person, it would have been an opportune time to heed the warning and retreat. But no, not her. She was what she had always been. She was Benazir.As children we grew up together. But today when I look around she is not there. In leaving us for another world, she has left us only with flashes which linger in the memory. Like us she was a teenager once and how she loved those tear-jerking, sloppy songs. How she loved listening to Bobby Gentry’s ‘Honey’, Terry Jack’s ‘Seasons in the sun’ and ‘California dreamin’’ by the Mamas & the Papas.

I have seen the roller-coaster ride that has taken her from the halcyon, blissful days of Karachi Grammar School to Radcliffe and Oxford and then the sudden, steep fall into the valley of cruel reality. Her Oxford days were marked by the carefree, windswept rides in the yellow sports MG, childish outbursts and outrageous flights of tantrum. Nothing had prepared her for the hardships and tragedies that were to follow. But travails and tragedy did come and they came in a flood.

She dealt with adversities with the disdain and abandon of her salad days. The toughness of the steel was not mellowed by the pampered indulgence of youth. She returned after graduating from university, hoping to savour the fruits of fulfilment. But a military coup overthrew her father’s government and turned her life upside down. Her father was implicated in a false and fabricated murder charge. She donned his political mantle whilst running from one legal counsel to another, from one court to another in the pursuit of justice — all in vain.

How on that dark, dreaded April night, herself in prison, she must have counted the seconds as they led her father to the gallows. How her little heart must have sunk. How, like the trembling heart of a captive bird, she shrank in her space. Yet there was a legacy to preserve, there were miles to go, promises to keep. Blackness heaped on darkness, there was no relief. The traumatic days and months in the unforgiving heat of Sukkur jail where they tormented and tortured her and damaged her left eardrum, the menacing pose of the colonels, father’s shadow gone and no one to cling to; who was there to save her now? Something within her said hold on and so she did. She was allowed to fly out for an emergency operation but only under an international outcry.

Her life has been a metaphor, bigger than her known portrait. She saw the highs and the lows of life, she met with tragedy and with triumph and Kipling-like she treated both those impostors just the same. In her brief span, she ascended pedestals and stepped into graves to bury two youths, who were your brothers.

She lived to vindicate the memory of her father and became the Islamic world’s first woman prime minister. She could have chosen the route of revenge and retribution. But she was determined not to be a prisoner to permanent prejudice. In the interest of her country and a future without hate, she quarantined the past. It was time to move on; to cross new frontiers, to meet new challenges and to dream new dreams.

For a brief shining moment, the world was hers and a brilliant star blazed over her horizon — then the moment passed. And night closed in again.

Her brief spell in government was cluttered with byzantine-like intrigues, which can be best captured by paraphrasing a passage from T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.”

She secured the freedom of so many when she first came to power but upon losing it, she saw her own husband locked behind bars. Tales were spun, myths created and conspiracies hatched in the dark, dirty corners of sickened minds. Like metal, myths are frequently recycled — the daughter of the East had to go. But they had not mastered the art of vanquishing her. The words of Queen Elizabeth I could well have been hers when she declared, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and the king of England too.”

She surmounted impossible obstacles to vanquish her foes and win power for a second time in 1993. She moved at a frenetic pace. There was a sense of exhilaration and she felt she was going places. The world was her oyster. With spirit renewed, with hope unhindered and a strong and clear vision, she set sail yet again on a voyage that was finally to lead her ashore. Or so she hoped. But travesty and tragedy were written in the stars. Her own appointed president stabbed her in the back. Nowhere do dreams melt so quickly as in the cauldron of politics.

Undaunted and undeterred she battled on. She fought the governments that followed; she fought her cases and returned home to fight the terrorists.

A single assassin’s bullet on that fateful December day put out a candle but fanned fires across the country. A single assassin put out every light in every home and filled our hearts with sorrow. In one bloody moment, a vision has been shattered and all our dreams wrecked on the sharp rocks of gruesome reality. There is this debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty loathing to the point where an element belonging to the other end of the moral spectrum persuades itself to believe that the Bhuttos must vanish.

The killer has had his way and now we must learn to cope without her.

When we finally look at her life, we will see a kaleidoscope of jumbled pieces. She met with failure and she met success. She had moments of joy and laughter but all too fleetingly. She encountered more than her fair share of moral squalor and political kerb crawlers. With her martyr’s blood, she has touched the sublime but left us in spiritual emptiness. Very few will ever know where the person began and the metaphor ended. There is a Chinese proverb: “Wronged souls don’t vanish.” And vanish she won’t. Whatever she was, she has passed into sainthood.

When the final curtain falls, we will look back at her life in the immortal words of Keats,
“But I have lived and not lived in vain;
My mind may lose its force;
My blood its fire;
And my frame perish even in conquering
pain;
But there is that within me;
Which shall tire,
torture and time
And breathe when I expire”.
So farewell to you Benazir, our beloved shade. Sleep well.

http://www.dawn.com.pk/2008/01/01/op.htm

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