Fatima Bhutto - Songs of Blood and Sword

Songs

of

Blood

and

Sword

Songs

of

Blood

and

Sword

A DAUGHTERS MEMOIR

FATIMA BHUTTO

VIKING CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright Fatima Bhutto, 2010

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Manufactured in the U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-0-670-06960-6

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For my Joonam, Nusrat, who is always with me
And my mother Ghinwa
for giving me life

THE BHUTTOS OF LARKANA

Taken from a family tree commissioned by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and kept in 70 Clifton

Poem of the Unknown

On your breast lay

the deep scar of your enemy

but you standing cypress did not fall
it is your way to die.

In you nestles songs of blood and sword
in you the migrating birds

in you the anthem of victory

Your eyes have never been so bright.

KHOSROW GOLSURKHI (Executed 1972)

Preface

November2008

I t is almost eleven at night in Karachi. From my bedroom in70 Clifton I can hear the constant hum of traffic. Im used to the sound now; it has become the soundtrack to my writing and thinking here. But now there are sirens too. Ambulances, or maybe politicians, driving around the city blaring out announcements of their arrival. Heavily armed elite guards, mainly Rangers toting Kalashnikovs, accompany them. Sometimes, theres gunfire. More often than not, its a staccato burst and it sounds far away. Its not the wedding season in Karachi, when macho males take to the streets and spray the sky with bullets. Its not New Years Eve, traditionally boisterous and often peppered with gunfire to mark the start of the New Year. This is the new Karachi. But weve seen it all before.

Fourteen years ago I missed weeks of school because of the violence that had taken hold of our city. I remember going to sleep hearing the hum of bullets nearby. I remember picking up the newspapers the next morning and seeing the previous nights body count. It was a dangerous city then, my Karachi. The Sindhi PPP government launched a genocidal strike, called Operation Clean-Up, against the ethnic Muhajirs who form the bulk of the MQM political party. The MQM began to hit back. They formed their own death squads and the sound of their revenge became aggressively familiar too.

There were moments, when I was younger, when it scared me to be here in Karachi, in this house. I used to shiver in the dead of summer nights, begging myself to sleep and praying that I might push past the fear of the violence and the spectres of the dead that surrounded me and my city. But one night I heard the mynah birds outside my window crowing at five in the morning. After that I would wait to hear them, these dark, rough birds, and I would fall asleep as they reassured me with their raven song that we had defeated the night once more. I made my peace with 70 Clifton and with this city when I realized that the sounds of the mynah birds would not follow me elsewhere and that I would miss them should I pack my bags and head somewhere far away

But that was a long time ago. We havent lived like this in over a decade. We havent been this afraid in a long time.

After the PPP government fell in 1996, on the heel of more violence, we had a few years of calm in Karachi as Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the sometimes opposition sometimes ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League, blundered through his own second term. It was quiet then. We went to school, took our tests, ate our watery lunch at the school cafeteria, and came home safely.

After the Musharraf coup and the advent of the war on terror, we saw violence rear its head in our city again. The times and methods of terror had changed in the sleepy interim period; violence shifted its course and mutated, growing stronger until it became an unrecognizable strain of what we once knew intimately. This time they werent gunmen. Instead, they were suicide bombers and they tended to strike fast-food outlets and crowded malls designed like traditional bazaars. When they were feeling particularly aggrieved, they attacked embassies. But we Karachiites, so schooled in survival, knew which ones to avoid. We avoided driving past the American consulate. We didnt drive very close to the British high commission either. And we ordered take-away when we were feeling peckish.

The electricity just went off, blinking out in between the typing of these words. The lights go out all the time now; this is the fifth time the power has been cut today. Its worse outside the city, though. A friend recently returned from the interior told me today that in central Sindh villagers are lucky to get two hours electricity a day, if any at all. Autumn in Sindh, oddly enough, is one of the hottest periods of the year. Rarely, on good days, my friend explained, four hours worth of electricity might reach the poorest houses across the province. There is, fortunately, a generator in my house so I sit in the darkness listening to the restless sound of Karachis errant traffic, chaotically composed of cars, trucks, amped-up motorcycles carrying families of four or more and auto rickshaws, as I wait by the glow of my laptop for the generator to whirr into life. Its frenzied sound overpowers everything. Its like a mosquito buzzing in my ear as I write.