Songs of Blood and Sword by Fatima Bhutto

Author:Fatima Bhutto [Bhutto, Fatima]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Politics, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781568586328
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2010-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

I was born in Kabul under curfew around 3.45 on the morning of 29 May 1982. Labour started around seven or eight in the evening and Fowzia was taken into a government hospital under heavy protection. The mujahideen insurgency in Kabul was at its peak and there were constant attacks all around the city, necessitating lock-downs at curfew time. The government, under Dr Najibullah’s orders, placed special troops around the hospital in anticipation of my birth, worried that the hospital might become a mujahideen target, allowing them to hit the Bhutto family and the regime in one go. Fatan, Dr Najibullah’s wife, was there at the hospital to look after the arrangements. Ehsan Bhatti, a member of the Al Zulfikar Organization and a dear friend of Murtaza and Shahnawaz, was placed outside the delivery room in his khaki uniform and Palestinian keffiyeh, which he was asked to remove by Fatan on the grounds that it was ‘too conspicuous’.

‘Mir was so anxious,’ Suhail told me, ‘so Dr Najibullah’s number two, Jamil Nooristani, who had become a friend of ours, took us and Shah back to his house to wait till the news of your birth came.’2 Nooristani, I remember my father teasing me, had tried to distract him from his jitters by suggesting traditional Pashtun names for his future child, names like Gulabo or Gulrukh, all starting with the prefix Gul.

At four in the morning, Papa received the news that I had been born. It was not an easy birth and eventually the doctors were forced to resort to forceps. Papa celebrated with a toast and an earnest discussion began about my name. ‘The first names that came to him were your paternal great-grandmothers’ names,’ Suhail recalled, recounting a story I have heard my father tell many times before, ‘Fatima and Khurshid.’ Thankfully, Papa went with the former and I was named after my Iranian great-grandmother. Suhail always clucks his tongue at me when I register horror at the possibility that I might have been called Khurshid. ‘It means sun in Urdu, you know,’ he always tells me.

‘Mir was really happy,’ Suhail says, smiling. ‘He took to you immediately, like you were put on earth for him.’ There is a black-and-white photograph of me soon after my birth, my little mouth is open as if I’m talking. ‘About four weeks old,’ my father has written in blue on the back of the photograph. ‘Tall like me.’ I was tall, until the age of twelve when my growth curiously slowed and then stopped, leaving me for ever at 5'3", a full foot shorter than my father.

Three months later, almost to the day, Shahnawaz became a father too. He also had a daughter and named her Sassi, after the tragic heroine of a popular Sindhi folktale. Two brothers married two sisters and both had daughters. It almost seemed as though life was turning around for the Bhutto brothers.

In fact it carried on as dangerously as before. After the hijacking, Al Zulfikar made its most daring attempt at confronting the regime.

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