Archives: Literatures

For several months, unmanned American Predator drones have been flying over Northern Pakistan in what feels like daily missions. Local newspapers report the strikes that kill scores of people with disheartening ease. They say the ‘operations’ were ‘successful’.

Sometimes, they tell us that the dead were militants.
Sometimes they tell us they were Al Qaeda operatives.
Other times, they say they were part of the burgeoning Pakistani Taliban. They’re never civilians. There are never mistakes; the drones remove the possibility of human error.

This is terrorist hunting, American-style.

Dead women and children killed in their schools and fields are ‘human shields’, young boys armed with only blackboard slates in their local madrassahs, since they have no government schools to attend, are future jihadis, it is inconceivable that anything less than the hysterical is possible.

But never before have we allowed a foreign country, American or otherwise, to carry out strikes on our own soil. It’s unheard of.

Never before have we allowed machines to fly through our skies and kill our citizens for free, as if life here costs nothing and can be swiftly cancelled out if the political will is strong enough.
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Tonight, as I write this, the BBC is reporting that a US missile strike in North Waziristan has killed eight school children. Two missiles, fired from yet another drone, hit the school this morning. The school was near a supposed Taliban commander’s house.

The Pakistani Army issued a classic we’re investigating this response. The United States has said nothing. This is how wars are fought now.

The new President of Pakistan has hungrily asked for drone technology for himself; he needs it, he says, to fight Pakistan.

The new parliament has vowed vigorously to continue to help America, and its allies, the Pakistani Army, to launch successful operations against the terrorists. Or militants. Or Al Qaeda. Or schoolchildren, if they happen to get in the way.
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In 1984, during the height of Zia’s dictatorial repression, a bomb was planted in central Karachi’s popular Bori Bazaar. Bori Bazaar is a busy market named after the religious sect of Bohri Muslims who wear distinctive long petticoats and blouses with hijab-like hoods. When the bomb exploded, scores of women and children who frequent the bazaar to shop for fabric, beads and colourful homeware were among the injured.

Upon hearing the news Ali Sonara ran to the bazaar from his home nearby in Lyari. He was certain that the bomb had been planted by the military but if Bhutto activists raised protests, the neighbourhood would be swept and men would be swiftly carted off to jail or, worse, to stadiums for public lashings.

When Sonara arrived at Bori Bazaar he ran back and forth between ambulances helping to shift bodies onto stretchers. He coordinated blood donations and was dealing with the panicked families of the dead and injured as best he could when Zia’s Chief Minister, Ghous Ali Shah, turned up surrounded by film crews to survey the wreckage. Ali Shah claimed that the blast had been the work of the antimilitary activists, terrorists they called them then, and that the state would soon find these terror mongers and punish them without mercy.

As soon as Sonara saw Ali Shah, he raced over to him and punched him squarely in the face. It was the desperate act of a desperate man. The Chief Minister promptly arrested Sonara for planting the bomb in Bori Bazaar. He was later released without charge.

When, in May 1986, Benazir returned to Karachi from self-imposed exile in London, it was Sonara, with the help of several other prominent activists, notably Ali Hingoro, who arranged for her reception in the city. At the time, General Zia’s supporters in Sindh, the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM) party, had been set up in Karachi to present an alternative to the People’s Party, whose power base was in the province.
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On 18 September, General Naserullah Babar, Benazir’s powerful Interior Minister who would proudly herald the Taliban in next-door Afghanistan as ‘my boys’, had taken to the floor of the National Assembly in Islamabad. General Babar announced that there were going to be, according to his top-level information, two bomb blasts in Karachi as a protest against the arrest of the terrorist Ali Sonara. He informed the assembly members and the press that the perpetrators of the violence were going to be from the MQM party or the Shaheed Bhutto party. Sure enough, there were ‘blasts’, and the government was quick to blame my father’s party.

Papa [Mir Murtaza Bhutto] began his statement. ‘There is a plot against me, formulated by the most criminal elements within the police force, such as Wajid Durrani and Shahbaig Suddle.’

Suddle was the District Inspector-General of Karachi and Wajid Durrani was the Senior Superintendent of the Police,

But Papa mispronounced one of their names; it wasn’t Shahbaig Suddle, it was Shoaib Suddle. We wouldn’t forget Shoaib Suddle’s name again, not ever.

Papa said and pointed to Sonara. ‘Naseerullah Babar, the Minister of the Interior, said on the floor of the National Assembly that there would be blasts after Sonara’s “arrest” and that the MQM or SB would be behind it. If he had this information what did he do to avert any danger of the blasts actually going off? Nothing.

The Interior Minister knew about these supposed blasts because it is his office that planted them.

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‘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’.

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.’
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Their [Bhuttos] first child, a daughter, Benazir, born in June 1953, was named for her father’s sister, who died as a young girl. Her mother delivered her in one of Karachi’s Christian hospitals. Begum Mazari, the sister of the renowned Baloch fighter Akbar Bugti and the wife of the Sardar of the Baloch Mazari tribe, remembers visiting Nusrat in the hospital after her first delivery.
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It is said that it was Nusrat, his foreign-born wife, to whom Zulfikar owed his political career. An Iranian friend of Nusrat’s had married Iskandar Mirza, the President of Pakistan. As the government was facing a steady stream of unsettling upheavals, Nusrat mentioned to her friend Naheed Mirza that she might ask her husband to invite Zulfikar to join politics; he was from a good family and had a brilliant young mind lauded in his professional sphere. Mirza, it was known in certain circles, was looking for someone fresh to represent Sindh.
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President Mirza, who assured the nation that martial law would be lifted within three months (they all do that, it must be force of habit) and that a referendum was soon to take place, justified his actions by blaming political parties for the poor state of affairs.
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Military dictators and those who passionately enable them are nothing if not trite. In the late 1950s this may have been somewhat of an original rationale, but by Pakistan’s sixtieth anniversary of independence and three dictators later, the ‘elections don’t help anything’ reasoning has become a remarkably familiar refrain. Mirza, none the wiser, was ousted from power by the army twenty days after martial law was instituted.

Military dictators in Pakistan tend to cuddle up to any power that promises to protect them and it is no small surprise that the power which most frequently enables militarism in Pakistan is the United States.
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Countries like Thailand and the Philippines were eager to band together under SEATO, fearing a Korean War-inspired outbreak in their own countries, but Pakistan, miles away from communist Korea, was hardly at risk. India, Burma and Indonesia refused point blank to be part of SEATO and Ceylon eventually wriggled out of negotiations too.

The great alliance was to be made up of three countries: Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines.

CENTO caused a great deal of disruption within the Arab world as it was seen as a ploy to destroy Arab unity. Pakistan, by virtue of being a signatory, became suspect – and not for the last time – in the eyes of Arab states.

Pakistan did nothing to improve its PR when it played a subversive role during the Suez crisis and came out on the side of the aggressors on all the aspects of the conflict: the nationalization of the canal itself, Anglo-French collusion with Israel and aggression against Egypt. As a result, Pakistan’s image in the Middle East was pitiful. A Syrian newspaper, Al Badra, wrote that Pakistan, like Israel, was solely a creation of British imperialism.

There is no doubt that CENTO was extremely detrimental to Pakistan’s relationship with Arab and Middle Eastern Nations, but it was SEATO that cemented the notion that Pakistan acted wholly as an American tool.
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As Foreign Minister, Zulfikar made no secret of his disgust at many of the decisions of the government and isolated himself from the machinations of the state when he spoke out in the National Assembly, pointing out that: It was said that the foreign policy of Pakistan was bankrupt; that we must walk out of the alliances of CENTO and SEATO, but the next day on getting into office, there were dazzling somersaults and it was solemnly said that without CENTO and SEATO Pakistan would not survive. These are some of the people who have played havoc not only with our internal life, but have made us feel ashamed in the world outside in our external dealings.

Foreign policy was an extraordinarily weak point of Ayub’s, who couldn’t have cared less about diplomacy so long as American money kept flooding in through military pipelines,

A year into his post as Foreign Minister he [Bhutto] wrote that ‘the foreign policy of a nation is a manifestation of its sovereignty.If a people enjoy all power, except the right to conduct foreign relations, it cannot be regarded as independent.’
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While bilateral relations were the centrepiece of Zulfikar’s foreign policy, there was no easy way to avoid the fact that relations between Pakistan and China had seriously deteriorated under General Ayub. The General was constantly pushing China out in order to make room for the United States, blind to the glaring fact that Pakistan was no longer America’s favourite client.

Relations with China, and conversely with the United States, took a sharp turn in 1963 when Zulfikar, seen as the architect of Pakistan’s bilateral foreign policy, took up the position of Foreign Minister.

In anticipation of Pakistan’s possible rapprochement with China in December 1962 and the young Foreign Minister’s socialist leanings, the United States transferred 300 million rupees in counterpart funds, meant to initiate credit expansion, from the State Bank of Pakistan to US commercial banks operating within Pakistan. It was a clear warning to Pakistan. But Zulfikar did not respond well to threats.

An emissary of the United States – rumours point to Henry Kissinger – told Zulfikar once that if he were one of their senators, they would have dealt with him before he got out of hand. I wouldn’t be a senator, Zulfikar cockily replied, I’d be your president.
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General Ayub disregarded his Foreign Minister’s advice not to go to Tashkent, and ignored the protests from the Pakistani people, who believed they had been double-crossed by the Soviets. Dictators tend to do as they please – it is one of their less endearing traits – so General Ayub flew to Tashkent in January 1966.

The United States, meanwhile, was pleased that Pakistan had forgone China at Tashkent and announced its decision to resume military and economic aid to both Pakistan and India.

Two days after the announcement, Zulfikar Bhutto resigned as Foreign Minister and left General Ayub Khan’s government.
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The Punjab is the seat of power in Pakistan. Most of the armed forces and bureaucrats come from the Punjab province. If you win in the Punjab, they say, you take all of Pakistan. ‘It was the status quo we were fighting,’ recalls Dr Ghulam Hussain, an elderly comrade of Zulfikar’s. ‘We wanted class consciousness, we wanted real change.’
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General Ayub’s regime, meanwhile, was not coping well with the expansion of Zulfikar’s popularity since he had resigned. Those who were coming out to support him were ordinary people, activists, students and labourers – not bureaucrats or military lackeys, the kind of crowds they could control.

The state consoled itself with the belief that the strength of the army and the state was far greater than any support that the people could muster; the establishment in Pakistan pays little heed to the voters (who rarely get a chance to vote, and almost never get a chance to vote freely).

At that point, elections, free and fair general elections, had never been held in the twenty-year-old country. What did bother the state, however, was the support Zulfikar received internationally.
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The city of Lahore is unlike other cities in Pakistan. It is large and winding with canals to guide one through the urban sprawl that has grown all around this historic fort city. In the summer the roads are full of people riding their bicycles and tongas to work across large avenues lined with shady trees. The canals are dotted with young children and men splashing about in the water to escape the sweltering heat.

In the autumn, however, the climate is cool – unlike in the rest of the country – and slowly, as the winter months draw near, a mist descends over Lahore. In contrast to the craziness that one finds in other metropolitan areas in Pakistan, Lahore always has a sense of calm about it. The neighbourhoods are spacious, the restaurants teeming with lazy eaters out to sample some of Punjab’s finest dishes, and the schools and universities carry on educating their students in some of the finest institutions the country has to offer.

Lahore lacks that sense of urgency, of needing to prove itself, as if it has already arrived. Lahore is quietly aware of its envied place in Pakistani history.

It is the city that the Mughals built as their capital this side of the border and holds not only the tomb of Jahangir, the Shish Mahal or palace of mirrors, but also the Shalimar Gardens, designed by the architect of the Taj Mahal for the emperor Shahjahan. Lahore is also the home of the sandstone Badshai Mosque and Kim’s gun, made famous by Rudyard Kipling, and is heralded as the birthplace of Pakistan – it was in Lahore that the original Muslim League, led by Jinnah, passed the Pakistan Resolution at its annual session on 23 March 1940.

Lahore is where the dream of Pakistan was born. Lahore added another notch to its historic record, as the birthplace of the Pakistan People’s Party, when in 1967 Sindh’s famous son came to the Punjab to make his own history.
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When news had spread that Zulfikar, free of General Ayub’s regime, was about to launch his own political platform, the General’s government took steps to ensure that this would not go smoothly. Assembly in public spaces in Lahore city and its neighbouring districts was banned under Section 144 of the criminal code to prevent Zulfikar from holding a massive public gathering that would potentially embarrass the government.

Section 144 is an establishment favourite. It has been put into effect on numerous occasions – it was used during the 1971 civil war, employed to halt union and trade demonstrations, and more recently put forward by General Pervez Musharaff to thwart people from rallying around radical Islamic parties in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
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Six Point programme of 1966. The Six Points voiced the party’s demands for a parliamentary form of government with a central parliament directly elected by the people; for the powers of the federal government to be restricted to defence and foreign policy, leaving all other affairs to constituent units; for separate fiscal policies or currencies to be introduced to stop the flow of capital from East Pakistan; limited powers of taxation for the federal government; provincial rights to enter into trade agreements with foreign countries and full control over its earned foreign exchange; and finally for the provinces to have their own militaries and paramilitaries if necessary.

Essentially, politely, the Awami League was asking for more than provincial autonomy; it was asking for its own country.

On the issue of the Awami League’s six points, the PPP, as Dr Mubashir Hasan puts it, ‘accepted five and a half’, rejecting mainly the notion of separate assemblies and a new Bengali currency.
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Zulfikar, who had a wicked sense of humour, kept one reminder of his former boss – a large portrait of the General [Ayub] in uniform. He hung the portrait, painted at his commission, in his drawing room in Larkana. To this day, members of the General’s family have asked for the portrait but family rules – handed down from Zulfikar himself – forbid it. Ayub hangs in our drawing room still.
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Zulfikar, while writing the manifesto with his colleagues, translated his vision of bilateralism more clearly than he had previously. He was the lone voice in Pakistan calling for the nation to leave the British Commonwealth which, in his estimation, had ‘lost any meaning it might have had at one time’ by serving colonial interests and taking the side of the United States in its war against Vietnam.

Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s presidency, Pakistan voluntarily withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1972. Pakistan voluntarily rejoined the Commonwealth in 1989, under the premiership of Zulfikar’s daughter, Benazir.
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The first ever general election held in Pakistan, on the principle of one man, one vote, took place on 3 December 1970. Twenty-three political parties contested 291 seats in the National Assembly, putting up a total of 1,237 candidates. Three hundred and ninety-one candidates ran as independents.

The results were predictably divided; the Awami League took East Pakistan and the PPP won the majority of seats in the West, sweeping Punjab and Sindh. East Pakistan, however, made up 56 per cent of Pakistan’s population and so the balance hung in the Awami League’s favour. However, any constitutional settlement hinged on the two parties reaching an agreement to share power, which would leave Mujib with East Pakistan and Zulfikar with the West and General Yahya Khan in charge of the military.
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Mujib wanted the constitution to be framed by his party, allowing him to form the government, while Zulfikar was not comfortable with the army’s assurances that the PPP would be given as equal a hand as the Awami League in the proceedings.

Effectively, promising power and position to both parties, the army played the two men against each other and ensured that no harmonious settlement was reached. After decades of Western hegemony over the country, the army – based in Western Punjab – had no interest in handing over power to its compatriots in the East. However, it was equally reluctant to allow the socialist Zulfikar to translate his party’s victory into government.

On 1 March 1971, the National Assembly proceedings were postponed and General Yahya Khan dissolved his civilian cabinet. The army vetoed the proposed coalition government and the Awami League’s opportunity to form a national government was over. Riots broke out across East Pakistan. The bloodletting began.

The military, unsurprisingly, reacted with brute force to the rumblings in East Pakistan, most notably by sending General Tikka Khan, a soldier known for his eager use of force, to act as the military’s chief authority in the province. General Tikka Khan, a graduate of the Dehra Dun school and a Second World War officer who fought on the Burmese and Italian fronts under the banner of the Raj, enjoyed an infamous reputation. He was nicknamed the ‘butcher of Balochistan’ for his role in quelling the province’s secessionist unrest in the early 1960s.

He would soon add ‘butcher of Bengal’ to his CV.
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By 25 March 1971 talks between Bhutto, Yahya and Mujib had stalled and the military put into effect an emergency plan: within the next twenty-four hours Mujib was arrested, the Awami League banned and a cessation of all political activities throughout Pakistan enforced.

At midnight, General Tikka Khan led the assault on Dhaka University and various other points in the city’s old quarters. Thousands were killed. Pakistan was plunged into a bloody civil war as the East Pakistan Rifles, a paramilitary group, mutinied and joined the rebels fighting to take East Pakistan.

The army countered the insurgency by mounting a fierce offensive against the Bengalis. Within six months, on top of thousands dead and wounded, a refugee population of approximately 10 million had been created, with thousands fleeing across the border into India.

The violence of the conflict was staggering. Reports from East Pakistan placed the number of civilian casualties in the millions, citing figures of around 3 million killed. Pakistani officials, via the ludicrous Hamood-ur-Rehman commission – whose pages were edited by the army and whose full copy no one has yet seen – insisted the number was closer to some 30,000, a mere by-product of the war.

International figures, treading lightly, estimated around 200,000 dead on the Eastern front. While the numbers differ, there is no dispute regarding the sheer force used by the Pakistani Army against civilians, most notably women.
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In addition to reports of sanctioned violence towards women, there were charges levelled against the Pakistani Army for its use of violence towards intellectuals, academics and minorities, Hindus specifically. Word had spread to Karachi that the Pakistani Army, having killed 200 intellectuals in Dhaka, was planning to carry out the same kind of massacre in Sindh to quell inconvenient questions of their brutality in the civil war.

Abdul Waheed Katpar, the Sindhi lawyer who worked with Zulfikar early on his career, was present when the news reached the ears of the People’s Party chairman. I asked Katpar if he meant to say that Zulfikar believed the rumour that the army was planning to massacre Sindhi intellectuals. ‘Yes!’ replied Katpar ardently. ‘They don’t believe in anything, these Khakis.’ Zulfikar picked up the phone and called General Gul Hasan, the corp commander of Sindh. ‘He was furious,’ remembers Katpar. ‘He told him, “I’m hearing you’re killing intellectuals in the East. If you bring this vicious tactic to Sindh, I’ll be your second Mujib and rise up against you!”’
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By the summer of 1971, the Mukti Bahini, a Bengali liberation army, began to receive training and equipment from India. As India continued funding and instructing the East Pakistani secessionists, reports began to surface of increased border shelling between the two countries.

On 29 November 1971 the provisional government of Bangladesh was announced, just one week after General Yahya instituted a state of emergency and told his countrymen to prepare for an all-out war. As the year drew to a close, it was not only inevitable that Pakistan would be broken into two, but also that war with India was once again on the horizon.

On 3 December, the Pakistani Air Force struck Northern Indian military targets. The escalation in border shelling had reached its peak and this time India reacted with its full military might.

By 4 December, India had launched an air, ground and naval attack into East Pakistan, converging on Dhaka. Two days after their spectacular invasion, the Indians had all but taken over East Pakistan, tightened their grip around the soon to be capital city of Dhaka and recognized the provisional government.

The Indian government violated a tenuous peace between the two countries and continued to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty by securing its hold on Dhaka.
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It was in the early weeks of December that Zulfikar was sent by General Yahya Khan to plead Pakistan’s case at the United Nations Security Council. It was on the 15th of the month, after the UN had ruled in Bangladesh’s favour by supporting its claim to independence, that Zulfikar angrily declared, ‘So what if Dhaka falls? So what if the whole of East Pakistan falls? So what if the whole of West Pakistan falls? We will build a new Pakistan. We will build a better Pakistan… We will fight for a hundred years.’

Zulfikar had felt from the start, leaving aside his respect for Mujib as a compatriot, that the Awami League’s Six Point programme would divide the new and fragile country. Now, disgusted with the proceedings at the Security Council, Zulfikar ripped up his papers and walked out, angry and frustrated. ‘My country hearkens for me, why should I waste my time here in the Security Council?’

On 16 December, Pakistani forces surrendered and the following day a ceasefire was put into effect.

Yahya Khan resigned his position four days later and Zulfikar, having just left New York, flew to Islamabad to assume the presidency.
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China supported Pakistan wholeheartedly. It used its United Nations veto to keep Bangladesh out of the international body, refusing to recognize the new state as a legitimate sovereign nation. In fact, China did not recognize Bangladesh until October 1975, long after Pakistan had extended its recognition, which it did in February 1974. China also refused to exchange ambassadors with India until it had fully restored diplomatic relations with Pakistan in the summer of 1976.
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The following day, even Zulfikar was said to have admitted to the press that there was ‘some kind of deadlock’. Both sides continued to hold their breath and wait.

That evening as Indira Gandhi walked alone in the gardens of the hill station where the negotiations were taking place, Zulfikar, himself frustrated by the failure of their talks thus far, went out to join her. The two leaders walked alone, without delegates and advisors, for some time. They spoke freely and without the usual tension that seemed to dog their relationship on every other occasion. Both of them had come to Simla for peace, a peace that did not leave their countries beholden or indebted to the other but that guaranteed them both a measure of political equality.

As they walked in the evening cool of Simla’s summer, Zulfikar and Indira came to an agreement.
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Feudalism was an ill that was universally recognized within the party apparatus and a vow was made to amend the inequities of Pakistan’s landed elite. Zulfikar held true to the promise of land reforms. The government instituted a ceiling of 250 acres of irrigated land and 300 acres of unirrigated land, making the reforms the most radical in Pakistan at the time.

Zulfikar lost much of his family’s land in the reforms, slicing away his children’s inheritance.

Zulfikar acknowledged that the reforms had further to go and formulated stricter ceilings, 100 acres for irrigated land and 200 for unirrigated land, to be put into place during the second stage of land reforms, but they were too late. He would not have the time to implement them.

Unfortunately, in Pakistan, politics is nothing if not personal – it seems to be the country’s one constant. But rather than engage in the pros or cons of nationalization, it suffices to say that in a country where twenty-one men controlled the nation’s economy, nationalization was the only available means to redistribute wealth.

The move might not have been permanent, but only a short-term remedy on the way to a mixed economy. But, again, Zulfikar was not to have the time to test out his economic theories.
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By the time of the Raj, Balochistan had been part of the Mughal, Persian and Afghan kingdoms and had added culturally, linguistically and ethnically to its population.

By the nineteenth century, the province was divided into four princely states, the majority of which were brought under the suzerainty of the British Raj. Wars and imperial struggles further unified the larger area that is now Balochistan, a province rich in mineral resources, namely gas, but whose population is poor.

As the subcontinent began to break apart, two states were asked where they wanted to go: Balochistan and Nepal. As the Baloch remember it, the people of the province voted to be independent – like Nepal, they didn’t choose to belong to either Pakistan or India. The centres of Baloch authority unanimously rejected the idea of joining Pakistan and declared their independence. However, they were ruled by princes, who were easily bribed.

The Pakistani Army was sent in and forced Prince Mir Ahmed Yar Khan of Kalat to change his tune; the Khan of Kalat signed an agreement revoking Baloch claims to independence and brought his people into Pakistan. His brother, on the other hand, refused to bow to Pakistani pressure and was later killed in his quest for Baloch national sovereignty.

The mode of operations had been set. The second conflict between the province and the state of Pakistan took place a mere ten years later in response to General Ayub’s One Unit centralization policy.

Balochistan was not going to go quietly into Pakistan’s fold. The third struggle – they were averaging one per decade – happened in the early 1960s as the Pakistani Army began to build garrisons for its troops in Balochistan. Militants, insurgents belonging to various tribes, took up arms and attacked the state’s army.

General Yahya quelled the violence by erasing the One Unit structure and signed a ceasefire with the various warring factions. But the Baloch, formally and forcefully brought into Pakistan, were not held peacefully for long.
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‘Pakistan is a colony,’ Khair Bux Marri, the head of the Marri tribe, insisted to me when I went to speak with him at his Karachi home. I was met at the gate by burly men with large shalwars and Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders. The Bhuttos are not particular favourites of Sardar Marri, but the elder tribesman met my request for an interview graciously, received me courteously and offered me orange juice as we spoke.

‘Very few countries are independent,’ he continued, ‘but Pakistan has been an imperial colony from the British to the Americans now. How can a colony have an independent attitude? Pakistan accepts the dominant position of imperialism. They chose to call this country Pakistan, land of the pure, because they believed the Koran is here, as if all other nations are pagan. To call it Pakistan is a grave mistake. It is na-pakistan, land of the impure.’

I asked Marri how it was that the Baloch found themselves perpetually pitted against the state.

‘There’s a saying in Balochi,’ he explained, speaking so quietly I had to keep edging closer towards him, this tribal chieftan who famously loathed my family, so that I might hear him. ‘A man comes into a railway compartment and he sits in a corner as if he is there out of other people’s generosity. You can tell him to move back in the carriage until he has nowhere else to go. But when pushed to the wall, he will draw his dagger. At that point, he’ll either kill you or he’ll die.’

In 1972, the Baloch found themselves pushed against the wall once more. They had voted alongside the Awami League and were further isolated when East Pakistan broke away from the union. Members from a range of political parties in the province grouped together to form the National Awami or People’s Party, NAP, and pitted themselves as a bloc against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government. Various Baloch leaders demanded more representation in the federal government and began to formulate a secessionist plan of their own.

The following year a large consignment of arms was found at the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad. The weapons, police alleged, were en route to the Marris of Balochistan. Zulfikar reacted quickly; he called the actions of the Marri insurgents treasonous and dismissed the provincial Baloch government. The issue behind closed doors was admittedly larger; there was pressure from the Shah of Iran, who believed that the ethnic Baloch on his side of the border were arming themselves against Pahlavi rule. Worried at the prospect of an armed revolt, the Shah asked Pakistan to intervene.

The army was sent into Balochistan once more. Zulfikar was not the first premier to take excessive measures against the Baloch, but he shouldn’t have acted in conformity with his predecessors, all insecurely prone to excessive violence against the Baloch people.

Khair Bux Marri, the same man who served me orange juice, put together the Baloch People’s Liberation Front, BPLF, and began a guerrilla war against Zulfikar’s government and his troops. Estimates, shrouded as they are, put Pakistani losses at around 3,000 with close to 10,000 Baloch separatists killed.
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Marri was jailed on Zulfikar’s orders. Many tribesmen were. Their dissent was silenced forcefully and they have never forgiven him for it.

Yousef Masti Khan, another Baloch politician my father’s age, also agreed to speak to me about the role Zulfikar played in Balochistan and was less old-fashioned and reticent about his views. He too had been arrested in 1974.

Masti Khan was kept in barracks across from the passport offices in Saddar, Karachi, for fifteen days before he was moved by the army to a jail in Quetta. He was a young activist, a small player in provincial politics, and his father, Akbar Masti Khan, was an old friend of Zulfikar’s. They used to argue about his policies.

After the younger Khan was released, his father was called by his old friend, the Prime Minister, and offered a contract to build a highway across the province.

‘I told my father, if you do it, I will leave here and take up arms in the mountains,’ Yousef Masti Khan told me, speaking animatedly. ‘My father said, I can’t just refuse Zulfikar, he’s very vindictive.’

Eventually, according to Yousef, his father went to see Zulfikar. He knew he couldn’t take the deal and had to find a way out. He reached the official residence of the Prime Minister in Rawalpindi and found Zulfikar sitting on the staircase in his pyjamas, smoking a cigar. They talked for a while about old times, shooting the breeze as if things were normal, until finally Zulfikar asked him how things were in the province.

‘Do you want to hear the answer for a Prime Minister or for a friend?’ Akbar Masti Khan asked him. Zulfikar told his friend to speak openly. ‘Why are you killing people in Balochistan?’ he asked him. Zulfikar spoke about the violence, about the attacks on the state by the insurgents, about the sabotage. I don’t want violence, he said, but what can I do?

‘Withdraw the army,’ insisted his friend. With that Zulfikar hung his head. ‘I can’t,’ he replied. It was a familiar refrain. He had, like all those before him, no power against the army when he was engaged in a war against his own people.

The moment that Zulfikar began to fight Pakistanis, treasonous ones or not, he began to distance himself from his power base, from the source of his ultimate strength, and then the army, finally back in business, began to turn against him.

Akbar Masti Khan was also arrested. And the army remained in Balochistan till the end of the decade.
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I asked Sardar Marri about the operation carried out in the 1970s. He demurred. ‘You are his granddaughter, it wouldn’t be proper,’ he said politely. I was surprised by Marri’s formality with me. I assured him that I was there to listen to him, to hear whatever he had to say.

‘I have within me great fire against the PPP,’ he cautioned. I insisted that I would not take anything he had to say personally. I am not my grandfather’s keeper, I said with a laugh, please speak freely. He shrugged. I had asked for it.

‘Bhutto was no different from Hitler,’ Sardar Marri began. ‘Before the operation he initiated, death only touched certain areas of the province. Then it affected all of Balochistan. The violence was expanded. Before our resistance had been traditional, tribal. Then it became more nationalistic.’
==========
25

‘The feudalists betrayed him. They infiltrated the party and then used its apparatuses against the people and because he had become insecure by that point, because these feudalists distanced him from the people, Zulfikar let them,’ Miraj explained to me in Urdu.

‘I walked out of a meeting in 1972 when we were discussing the union protest in Landhi, Karachi. The workers were striking and causing disruptions and Zulfikar said to us, “I assure you the strength of the street will be crushed by the strength of the state.” So I walked out.

He called me later and said I’d broken protocol. I told him why I left, why I broke party protocol. “It’s the situation, Miraj!” Zulfikar replied, justifying what he had said. But the police, under the orders of the Chief Minister, had fired on the workers. The workers, the people, before this shooting believed that everything had changed with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, they believed they had come to power and this terrified the industrialists. So, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto placated them.’

For Miraj, a lifelong Marxist so committed to the idea of a new Pakistan he still refuses to speak in English, this U-turn was unacceptable. Though he was one of Zulfikar’s closest associates, Miraj left the party.

‘I told him, you’re being taken over by Intelligence. They’re alienating you from your strength. J. A. Rahim was pushed out, Dr Mubashir Hasan was pushed out, so was I – all the founding members, all of us the most radical elements. Intelligence would send him reports saying we were plotting to kill him and as he got weaker, he became more paranoid.’ The year after he left, Miraj was arrested.

J. A. Rahim one of the writers of the party manifesto, was brutally punished for his dissension. Dr Mubashir Hasan, the Finance Minister at whose house the PPP was founded, resigned from his ministry post, but stayed – one of the few – with Zulfikar.

All of the men who gave their youth and their commitment to the party with Zulfikar that afternoon in Lahore were, one by one, sent to jail.

‘He was not a prophet,’ Miraj, now frail and ill, told me. ‘He was a great man and a great leader, but in our culture we have a tendency to make prophets out of men.’
The conclusion of Zulfikar’s power was near, and in his weakness he didn’t even see it coming.
==========
26

Losing his solid footing, Zulfikar became nervous and started to appease the opposition at home, hoping the turnaround would placate his traditional enemies. He amended the 1973 constitution several times, enhancing his own powers by allowing the federal government to ban political parties and curbing the power of the courts so that, under the third amendment, ‘no order could be made prohibiting detention or granting bail to a person so detained’.

Imagining his position secure, Zulfikar curried favour with the religious parties, small in number but powerful in terms of their fear factor, by amending the constitution to define the parameters of who was a Muslim.
==========
27

Abdul Waheed Katpar, one of the founding members of the PPP, remembers this period as one of intense paranoia for Zulfikar. ‘He thought the army would kill him. He called them the Khakis.

When the big zamindar in the party began to destabilize the party’s image with their public feuding, Zulfikar told them, “Your fighting won’t destroy me, the army will not spare me now – don’t think they will spare you either.”’
==========
28

In 1976, when the butcher of Bengal, General Tikka Khan, retired from the army, Zulfikar replaced him with General Zia ul Haq ‘over the heads of five senior generals’, promoting him to Chief of Army Staff purely because Zulfikar believed him to be a meek, subservient man.

Zia swore his undying loyalty to the Prime Minister on a Koran and bowed feverishly whenever Zulfikar walked into a room.

Zia was a ‘cunning man’, remembered Katpar, ‘always acting over-courteous with Bhutto. He was very ambitious and that made him very cruel.’
==========
29

Zulfikar had called his army chief [Zia] to the Prime Minister’s office for a word. Zia arrived on time, early even, and was taken into the office, where he sat down nervously, shaking his feet and twitching his legs. He had begun to smoke, a habit he indulged in to calm his nerves, when the Prime Minister walked in. Zia, various family members would exclaim, jumped up deferentially and shoved the lit cigarette into his pocket. It began to burn through the fabric of his jacker. Smoke came billowing out of Zia’s uniformed military jacket, but he was so anxious around Zulfikar that he was too embarrassed to admit he had been smoking – hardly a crime – and too polite to put out the fire.
==========
30

He was assigned an advisor in the government department to guide him through the process of writing his undergraduate thesis – the only problem, Murtaza wrote in his letters home, was that his advisor, a big name in the department, was also infamously known at the time as the ‘butcher of Vietnam’. His name was Samuel Huntington.
Samuel ‘clash of civilizations’ Huntington was then known for his advisory role in Vietnam. Huntington advocated the herding of villagers into clusters away from the Vietcong, not appreciating that it made it much easier for the US army to bomb civilians in their separated enclaves.

When I travelled to Cambridge in the spring of 2006, I found Huntington a frail old man. He wore a woolly navy sweater in April and drank Coca-Cola from a Starbucks espresso cup. He shrunk into his brown leather armchair as we spoke and seemed to be so much smaller than his frightening legend suggests.
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31

As an understanding between the PPP and a newly formed alliance of opposition parties was reaching its culmination, General Zia declared martial law. He closed down the country on the night of 4 July 1977 and appointed himself chief martial law administrator. Elections would be held in ninety days, he promised on television, adding that the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was under ‘protective custody’.

Zulfikar was released several weeks later.

He immediately set off on a political campaign across the country, rallying crowds and attacking the military’s attempt to discredit him and seize power. As millions of people came out to hear him, whatever political credit Zulfikar had lost during his time in power had been regained. He was unstoppable.

General Zia realized that Zulfikar would not lose the election, no matter when it was held. ‘It’s either him or me,’ the General is said to have prophesized. ‘Two men, one coffin.’
==========
01

After several arrests and releases the military government placed a ‘conspiracy to murder’ charge against Zulfikar, accusing him of attempting to murder a political opponent, Ahmed Raza Kasuri.

Three years earlier, gunmen had fired at Kasuri’s car, killing his father. At the time Kasuri – a former member of the PPP – blamed the government.

A tribunal was called to investigate the matter and rejected the allegations, after which Kasuri rejoined the People’s Party – the party he claimed had attacked him and killed his father. The claims, sensational and provocative, were factually weak. But a man, even a Prime Minister, could be hanged for murder.

Kasuri cooperated with the military and charges were filed against Zulfikar. They finally had him in their sights.

Upon opening the window Gudu saw that the walls of the house were being scaled by men in uniform. ‘I panicked’ he recalled. ‘I ran to Mir and told him what I had seen. He was as calm as ever. He told me to calm down and then we went to tell his father.’ By the time they reached Zulfikar, an army officer was standing in front of him.

Gudu remembers the soldier apologizing to the Prime Minister. ‘Sorry, sahib’, he said before escorting him to the car waiting outside.
==========
02

Murtaza and Shahnawaz flew to Beirut to meet the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian friend from college arranged the meeting for Murtaza and his brother, and for his part Arafat confidently told the Bhutto brothers that their father’s life would be spared.

He recounted a story of running into General Zia at Mecca while both men were performing the Hajj. Arafat told the brothers that he asked General Zia in front of the Kaaba to spare Bhutto’s life and that the General had promised clemency.
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03

It was still early in General Zia ul Haq’s dictatorial rule. He promised to hold elections after ninety days in July 1977 but swiftly reneged on his promise on the grounds that he felt it more prudent to start an ‘accountability’ process in regard to politicians first, a vetting process that led to the filing of the White Papers against Bhutto.

The veneer of Zia’s power seemed thin. Murtaza believed that General Zia would not kill his father.

A messenger came to London with the news that Zulfikar’s health had worsened. He had lost a lot of weight and had asked to see a dentist; his teeth were rotting.

I remember my father telling me that Zulfikar used to find shards of glass in his prison food and that his gums would be cut as he ate, mixing his blood with the prison gruel.
==========
04

Rawalpindi, situated in the Potwar Plateau, is a short distance from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. It is, and always has been, a garrison city.

Home to the Raj’s British forces and since independence the Pakistani Army, Rawalpindi sits higher up than the land surrounding it, instantly cooler and breezier, but it has a sinister reputation, at least among politicians.

It was once the home of the exiled nineteenth-century Afghan king Shuja Shah.

It is where the man Mohammad Ali Jinnah had appointed as Pakistani’s first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was assassinated, and it is where the army had taken Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to die.

Almost thirty years after his murder, his eldest child, Benazir, would also lose her life in Rawalpindi. I’ve never liked the place. It’s a desolate, eerie town.
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05

Nisar Khuro was brought into the People’s Party after Zulfikar’s death by his daughter Benazir, and was made head of the Sindh branch of the party. Khuro remains an integral part of the PPP till this day, currently serving Benazir’s and her husband’s PPP as the speaker of the Sindh Assembly.

Nisar Khuro, a member of the Khuro feudal family from Larkana had been agitating for Zulfikar’s imprisonment and murder; Abdul Waheed Katpar, one of the PPP’s founding members and another Larkana native, recalls Khuro chanting, ‘First hang Bhutto then try him!’ at gatherings around the city.

‘And when they killed Bhutto sahib, Khuro distributed sweets, mithai, around the city – it is well known,’
==========
06

The people of Pakistan, whom the PLA seems to be fighting for, are an even stranger breed of people. Their ‘war’ for ‘independence’ was ‘won’ by them one year before they had wanted it. Independence was forced on them; they were begged to become independent and free… The Pakistani Army effectively reflects the valour and determination of the people it lives off.

1) When a soldier fell on his backside he suffered brain damage.

2) It believes in equality: it constitutes 00.06 per cent of the population but consumes between 70 and 80 per cent of its wealth

The official spokesman of the PLA, Wolf, feels he can take on the Pakistani Army any time in an intellectual confrontation. We have advised him to refrain from challenging them as it will only provoke the heroic Pakistani Army into committing mass suicide. This is a very predictable reflex in the character of our brave army. They are also world-famous for surrendering heroically.

A very shrewd British statesman once remarked, ‘War is too serious a business to be left to the soldiers.’ How true.
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07

During the day the brothers [Mir and Shahnawaz] worked at drafting a manifesto for their movement, whose name they changed to Al Zulfikar, the name of the two-pronged sword carried by the Shiite Imam Ali, who was known to be a fearless warrior and a brave leader, and of course there was the connection with their father, who took his name from the Imam’s sword: Zulfikar Ali, the sword of Ali.

Since their move to Kabul and their declaration that they were going to fight the military regime until the democratic constitution of 1973 was restored, the regime began to portray them as terrorists.

In Pakistan, ever since Zulfikar’s imprisonment there had been a concerted smear campaign against the Bhutto family. The junta printed stories of Zulfikar’s ‘un-Islamic’ nature, calling him a communist and an atheist. They ran photographs of Nusrat and her daughters – their heads superimposed on bodies of women cavorting in swimsuits or knocking back drinks at raucous parties.
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08

As soon as General Zia reneged on his promise to hold elections in October 1979, the junta instituted blanket press censorship. Six daily newspapers were permanently shut down – Musawat, which Murtaza carried on printing and distributing from London, Tameer, Hawat, Aafaaq, Sahafat and Sadaqat.

The weekly Mustaqbul and monthly Dhanak were also closed.

Martial Law Regulation No. 19 was enacted and gave the government the right to censor matters deemed ‘prejudicial to Islamic ideology’, Pakistan’s security, and ‘morality and maintenance of public order’.

Local and international media outlets, including the BBC, were subject to twice-daily checks by the junta censor, who alone had the power to decide what would and would not be reported. What was considered offensive to ‘Islamic ideology’, a pet cause of the fundamentalist General, was often absurd and arbitrary – one over-eager TV producer went as far as censoring Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl out of the cartoon because she wore a skirt.

Women anchors on Pakistan state television, PTV, were required to wear a hijab before being allowed on air. Mehtab Rashdi, a newscaster, was the first woman to quit in response to the mandatory hijab edict.

The reporting of any item that made the military regime look bad was considered ‘anti-state’.

Hussain Naqi, the Lahore bureau chief of the Pakistan Press Institute, lost his job in 1984 when he reported that the US President had stated during a press conference that Pakistan wasn’t a democracy.

In 1978, the editors of the Urdu dailies the Urdu Digest, the Sun and the PPP’s Musawat were arrested and sentenced to one year of rigorous imprisonment and ten public lashes for ‘publishing derogatory remarks against Zia’. They were later pardoned and released but the message was clear.

Disobedience to the state was unacceptable. Siddiqueh Hidayatullah, a teacher who was at the start of her career at Kinnaird College in Lahore, witnessed the frenzy around the city’s first public flogging and described the spectacle for me.

‘The lashing was being held on a large chowrangi or roundabout on Jail Road, right there in the open, in the middle of a busy street. People came in what looked like the thousands to watch, some were called from the nearby bazaars and others must have just turned up to have a look. Some men even climbed trees to have a decent view. It was sick. There was such a tamasha, or commotion, created around the floggings so that all of us would know how ferocious the regime was.’

The turning point came in May 1978 when four newsmen were publicly flogged for their dissidence.

journalists began to invite arrest by staging highly visible sitins, hunger strikes and rallies and by printing material critical of the government. In the two months after the floggings took place, 150 journalists were arrested.

Zia justified his regime’s unforgiving treatment of the press by declaring, ‘I have no respect for these newspapers and journalists who blindly use the stick of the pen to harm national interests.’

Nine Urdu dailies in Muzzafarabad were shut down by a local magistrate’s decree in 1979 as they refused to cease printing material critical of the government.

Ten journalists in Lahore lost their jobs in 1983 for taking part in a civil disobedience campaign protesting the extensive government repression, and as further punishment were banned from working in the media for the duration of Zia’s rule. Second, the press, which has never been braver since, fought against martial law through covert resistance, or as the government called it ‘deviant behaviour’.

Instead of filling their papers with large swathes of meaningless items, the newspapers began to leave the spaces blank.

When the largest English daily newspaper, Dawn – an establishment mouthpiece – printed almost an entire newspaper of empty columns, the government threatened it with permanent closure.

When blank columns in newspapers were forbidden, journalists like Mazhar Abbas, who wrote for the Daily Star, began resisting the censor’s pen more caustically.

‘In the blank spaces we would print a picture of a donkey or a dog and print news of Zia speaking or his ministers speaking underneath the pictures. So, they realized then that something fishy was going on, Then they said you had to inform the censorship board specifically of what news you would use to fill the blank spaces!’
==========
09

The lawyers’ resistance was a clear reaction against the junta’s co-opting of the judiciary and its interference in the state’s legal affairs.

The infamous Doctrine of Necessity, which claims that ‘that which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful’, had been used retroactively by Pakistan’s courts to justify every period of martial law imposed by the army, and was also used to condone Zia’s seizure of power.

By 1979 those judges who had demonstrated their lack of enthusiasm for the military in government had been swiftly sacked and replaced.

The power of the civil courts had been clipped and Sharia courts and military tribunals were created to do the bidding of the regime.
==========
10

Zina bil jabr is a variant taken to mean rape; however, under the junta’s new definition, consent was not the issue, but intercourse. A woman could be convicted by law after being raped because, willingly or not, she had had intercourse out of wedlock.

Under the Hudood laws, rape victims were prosecuted alongside their rapists for engaging in zina bil jabr.

In 1983, Lal Mai from Liaqatabad became the first woman to be publicly flogged on adultery charges under the Ordinances.

Reports indicated that 8,000 men witnessed Mai receive her fifteen lashes. It’s unclear whether the spectators at Mai’s punishment were brought to the scene by the police and made to watch her public torture, as happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or whether they were there out of morbid curiosity. But they were there, in their thousands.

Prior to the implementation of the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s penal code did not label fornication a crime, but rather had provisions for dealing with the crime of marital rape and viewed rape itself as a crime where the rapist, not the victim, was the sole party to be indicted under law.

Moreover, zina laws under the Hudood Ordinances stipulated that an individual could be ‘found guilty with or without the consent of the other party’, which meant that women, as a result of medical evidence, were more likely to be convicted under the Ordinances than men. A simple examination could prove that a woman had recently had sex, or that she was no longer a virgin, but men’s innocence rested simply on their word.

No section of society was safe from the army’s interference in the early 1980s. Besides insinuating itself politically and legally into all corners of daily life, the army began to meddle in the running of Pakistan’s economy. If the army could not set the price of goods in the economic market, those goods would simply disappear.

If the army could not take a cut out of black market profits, those vendors would be arrested and often flogged.
==========
11

Urban professionals and intellectuals also played a substantial role in resisting martial law. The medical profession, otherwise neutral, took a unique and unprecedented stand against the junta.

The Hudood Ordinances ordered that thieves be punished by amputation of the hands, and as the sole group qualified to mete out the punishment doctors refused to comply.

Ghulam Ali from Okara was convicted of stealing a clock from his local mosque and sentenced to have his right hand removed; yet not a single doctor in all of Pakistan could be found to carry out the amputation, whereas we know that in countries where similar punishments are prescribed against theft, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, amputations were and are still carried out with the aid of the local medical communities. The courts had no choice but to convert Ghulam Ali’s sentence to six years of rigorous imprisonment instead.
==========
12

Not all PPP members, it is worth noting, sacrificed themselves in the fight against the junta. The party’s current Prime Minister, Yousef Raza Gilani – who bears more than a passing resemblance to Saddam Hussain – spent his time not in jail but serving on the dictator’s majlis e shoora or religious parliamentary council, rubbing shoulders with General Zia’s protégé Nawaz Sharif.
==========
13

After the hijacking, Al Zulfikar made its most daring attempt at confronting the regime. A group of three people attacked Zia’s plane as it took off from Chaklala air base in Rawalpindi. They were armed with a Samsix heat-seeking missile and narrowly missed hitting the aircraft as it gained height.

On board the plane, the pilot and passengers were aware of the attempt on their lives. Sharing the flight with General Zia was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the then chairman of the senate – and the man from whom Benazir would take her oath as Prime Minister to his presidency in 1988 – and Mahmood Haroon, whose signature featured prominently on Zulfikar’s death warrant, and who in another absurd placing would be appointed by Benazir as the governor of Sindh under her first government.

It seems unthinkable that of the three junta leaders on board the aeroplane, Benazir would work with two of them, negotiating with but narrowly missing her chance to work with the third. The three men managed to escape, but the Samsix attack intensified the regime’s fury towards the Bhutto brothers and their Kabul-based organization.

‘It was the most daring, direct attempt we made,’ Suhail tells me.

Suhail says that eighty-four charges of treason were made against Murtaza and Shahnawaz by the junta, all carrying the death penalty.

(I remember the number of charges being higher, in the nineties somewhere. Other people place them in the mid-hundreds.)
==========
14

Tribals from Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt were sent to Kabul to assassinate the brothers.

For Zulfikar to have placed his sons, his heirs, in direct danger was maddeningly irresponsible. For him to have ended his children’s chance of a peaceful, safe, ordinary life was vengeful; it would destroy his sons.

Zulfikar should have known that. But they were wrong to have followed him too. There are signs, a changing of course over time, that suggest they understood that.
==========
15

Unlike Gandhi’s acts of civil disobedience, the MRD drive in 1983 was not entirely peaceful. There were strikes and shut-downs, but they were accompanied by significant acts of violence.

Agitation in Larkana, Sukkar, Jacobabad and Khairpur in Sindh was so fierce that the Governor of Sindh was forced to admit that in the first three weeks of the unrest the government had 1,999 people arrested, 189 killed and 126 injured.
==========
16

In December 1984, Zia held a referendum on his Islamization programme, linking the referendum to his right to remain in power. The question placed before the voters was insideously worded: ‘If you agree that Islamic laws be brought in in conformity with the Koran, then say YES. If the results of the referendum are positive it will mean that you approve of General Zia ul Haq continuing as President for another five years.’

The referendum produced a ludicrously inflated 98 per cent approval rating for the President and his policies.

With the ‘support’ of the people behind him, Zia called for elections in early 1985, which in turn created the plausible façade of a new civilian order and effectively legitimized the General’s rule. The MRD boycotted the elections and put itself out of the running.

It had failed to dislodge the dictator and had pushed Zia in the right direction – he had taken it up on its suggestion and had begun to ‘democratize’.
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17

‘There was friction between Mir and her [Benazir]. He loved her; he stepped aside for her. He said to us once, “She wants to be the political heir, so OK, I’ll move aside.”’
==========
18

Unwittingly, by constantly insisting on the importance of democratic government, but not tackling the abuses of the military regime or the incompatibility of the armed forces and an egalitarian system of rule, the MRD had given Zia the tools to strengthen his hold on power and neutralise the opposition to his junta. Democracy, after all, has always just been a word, a catch-phrase or election slogan – not a style of governance – in Pakistan.

The advisors to the new Prime Minister, Junejo, had in fact, pushed him to allow Benazir back into the country telling him and General Zia that ‘Benazir was more a threat to the MRD than to the government’.11 The advisors proved to be right.

By 1985 the MRD was politically deflated; not only had it failed to unify the varied resistance movements, but it had broken them.

The fuel that ran the resistance movement in Pakistan had run out, compromised by the political incompetence of the MRD.

Journalists were tired of fighting a regime that showed no signs of weakening, aided as it was by American money and support.

Students gave up their stone throwing and went back to classes, eager to earn degrees that would get them out of Pakistan.

Writers who had made their names through subversive plays and articles had bills to pay.

The same was true for Al Zulfikar. It existed, but only in spirit.
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19

They entered the apartment and found Shah’s [Shahnawaz Bhutto] body lying face down on the living-room floor, between the sofa and the coffee table.

‘When I saw him,’ Murtaza would later say, ‘I knew he was dead.’ Shah had blue marks on his chest and his face had already begun to turn a blue-ish black. He was wearing the trousers he had on from the previous evening, but no shirt. He was dead.

The police arrived and immediately began to inspect the flat. Murtaza looked for the poison in all the rooms, but found nothing. He searched the kitchen cupboards, careful not to move anything. A doctor, who came hours too late to save Shah, was standing in the kitchen when Murtaza opened the rubbish bin and found under several tissues a small glass bottle labelled ‘PENTREXIDE’.

Murtaza always believed Zia’s government had ordered the assassination. But how they carried it out was harder to explain.

And then, there was another theory, the main one. I have spent my life believing that Shah’s wife, Raehana, had something to do with her husband’s death.

The autopsy placed the time of Shah’s death in the early hours of the morning, approximately nine hours passed before the family and police were called to the scene. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Raehana had not raised the alarm until well past the time of death. This is where things get tricky. The police statements that Raehana made still exist and her testimony shakes everything up. It is rambling and incoherent.

I have read the statements, both in French and in English. I have had them translated and retranslated. I have read them backwards and forwards and I still don’t know what to make of them.

I grew up with my family’s belief that Raehana had been involved in some way. She hadn’t called for help in time. She hadn’t reacted fast enough. She had a rocky relationship with her husband. She’d thrown Murtaza out of the apartment the night before. There had always been distrust and dislike. In Raehana’s police testimony, there is a suggestion that she did not help Shah as he lay dying, but a clear assertion that she did not kill him.

Raehana was detained and spent time in jail in Nice [France]. She was questioned over a period of several months and then released. She then left France and flew to California to be with her family who were already looking after Sassi. It was the last time any of us saw her.

I remember that Papa was always unsure of what had really happened. But by then it was too late.

Too much time, too much anger, too much sadness had passed. He blamed himself for not being there that night to protect his younger brother. That always stayed with him.

Papa lost weight. He lost his smile and his ability to joke and laugh. Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] too, I remember, took the death like a weight upon her heart. She was never the same again.

Why had Raehana been let go if she was involved? By all accounts she was not kept long as a suspect. She had been released and allowed to leave the country, surely not standard procedure for a murder suspect. But then who was responsible? I asked. And the answer, the possibility of who was to blame, at least indirectly in terms of benefiting from Shah’s death, was nothing I had ever imagined before. It was scandalous, mind-blowing.

But I knew, from experience, that anything is possible in the Bhutto family.

‘I wanted to make a big scandal about Shah’s murder,’ Vergès said, ‘but Benazir was against it. She didn’t want to fight the CIA and the Pakistani Intelligence service, who your father was always convinced were behind his brother’s death.’

Why not? I asked, genuinely curious. Vergès laughed again and made a face at me that I understood. Because she worked with them. Because her power was always based on their approval.

Months before her death, reports now claim, Benazir contacted Blackwater, America’s mercenary contractors, to provide the security for what would be her last election campaign. They declined. But my father, I asked, what did he think? ‘He was convinced and was prepared to make a stir, but his sister, she stopped it.’ Nobody believed it was suicide, Vergès confirmed, it just wasn’t a possibility.

I was sitting on the edge of my finely woven antique chair so Vergès could hear me clearly and I lowered my voice, uselessly, to ask the unthinkable, remembering what Sassi had told me months before: why did Benazir leave the case so skewed by refusing to fight it all the way? Did she have something to gain by not pursuing it? My hands were shaking so hard I could barely write. ‘It’s not impossible,’ Vergès replied cautiously.

‘It’s clear that when Mir and Shah decided to take this action,’ Vergès said, referring to AZO, ‘that Benazir would not approve. She was on another track – one with Western cooperation, especially with the USA. They were both against it, fighting it openly. I am not surprised that it would benefit her for one brother to be disposed of before the other.’

‘Imagine, to be killed by your own sister,’ he muttered

‘In her mind, what her two brothers were doing wasn’t helping her,’ Vergès calmly speculated. ‘Among the two brothers, the strongest brother was Mir. Perhaps it was necessary to get Shah out of the way because he was the weaker one.’

‘When did Benazir become Prime Minister?’ Vergès asked, returning to our topic. ‘Three years later,’ I replied. He nodded his head and said nothing.

‘She never opened an investigation into her brother’s murder,’ I said out loud, thinking back to what Sassi had told me earlier. ‘Ahh well,’ Vergès sighed, leaning back in his chair, ‘perhaps she already knew.’
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20

I remember wearing a woolly coat in those days, and learning new words. I learned the word divorce early; I knew what it meant and it sounded very grown-up to me. It is hard for me to disconnect my feelings about Fowzia [Fatima’s biological mother] from the woman I encountered as a teenager and adult. I am scared, frightened even, of my biological mother.

As a child I remember her moods, her unpredictable temperament, how beautiful she was and how much care she took of her hair, the dark kohl she would line her eyes with, how aware she was of her beauty. She would let me drink tea with her, sugary and diluted with milk, in the afternoons – I think that was our time together. But that’s it. That’s as far as my memories extend. Papa gave me my baths, read my bedtime stories, cut my hair, dressed me, and bought me boots that looked like his own polished shoes. I was a tomboy, as if to distance myself from Fowzia (I used to cut her lipsticks with scissors to trim their pointy, pyramid-like tips), and was a walking, talking devotee of my father.

When I finally saw Fowzia in Mr Dewolf ’s office, I wasn’t comforted. ‘Your father kidnapped you,’ she snarled once she had given me a huge cellophane-wrapped gift basket. It was less than six months after his murder. ‘I could have taken you back, you know?’

The drama of a ten-year-old divorce was being played out in front of Mr Dewolf, whom I had asked to stay in the meeting room with us. ‘I knew people in the American military. They offered to bring you back for me, by helicopter. Your father could have done nothing to stop them,’ Fowzia continued. ‘But I didn’t, for your sake.’

That week, after I baulked and refused to see her, Fowzia gave press conferences about my ‘kidnapping’ and my brainwashing at the hands of my evil ‘stepmother’ from Bilawal House, Benazir and Zardari’s Karachi home.

She called Mummy a maid whom Papa hadn’t loved but had married to take care of his child. She called Zulfi my ‘half-brother’, and said I was just like her. Fowzia wrote open letters to me in all the English language newspapers and filed a case for my custody in the Pakistani courts.

The school librarian, a kind British woman, took the newspapers off their racks every morning and hid them from me so I wouldn’t see Fowzia’s latest salvo as I did my homework in the library. I employed a lawyer and told Fowzia that I didn’t want to be with her, that I would never leave my family for her, a virtual stranger.

‘You’ll forget about them in two weeks,’ she assured me and gave me on bottle of vanilla-scented nailpolish. I am, I suppose, in some recesses of my 27-year-old being, still afraid of Fowzia.
==========
21

At night, before we slept, Papa [Mir] would kneel down and search under the bed. I asked him once what he was looking for and he told me he was just checking, making sure there was nothing that might hurt us under there. I assumed he meant a bomb. Or a man with a weapon.I never felt brave enough to look, but always felt a wave of relief once Papa had completed the routine search.
==========
22

The rumour circulating at the time was that a box of mangoes had been packed with explosives and placed on board Pak One. People whispered that it was fruit that had finally taken the dictator down.

There were, according to Epstein, ‘no outcries for vengeance, no efforts at counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia and Rehman’s names disappeared within days from television, newspapers and other media.’

The Pakistan Air Force Board of Inquiry said the ‘most probable cause’ of the crash was ‘sabotage’ but stopped short of taking the investigation further.7 In fact a thorough investigation was never carried out. It was standard procedure; once the assassination had been carried out, no records were kept, no archives made. Nothing. Violence was the easiest means of disposing of yet another Pakistani politician, however odious he may have been.

The United States National Archives has some 250 pages of documents on the incident, but they remain classified to this day.
==========
23

The General [Zia] had taken the step of announcing elections for 1988, fully emboldened in his new role as the seemingly ‘democratic’ head of an authoritarian government. He had even begun to conduct secondparty negotiations with Benazir, who was not going to be left out of the power stakes by boycotting the elections like she had done in 1985. It was Benazir’s tremendous luck, something she had always benefited from, that Zia was killed before the elections took place. She had been preparing to be Prime Minister to his President.
==========
24

Murtaza had spoken to his sister about the party’s decision to engage in power-sharing negotiations with the junta. He had disagreed with her fundamentally on this issue. I remember the conversation. ‘What do you mean “take part”?’ Papa [Mir] said, almost shouting. ‘You’re willing to be Zia’s Prime Minister?’

Benazir was less calm, but she too had the air of someone used to beating her opponents. ‘I have a plan,’ she said. Papa was enraged. I got worried, I had never seen my father so upset. He started speaking angrily, talking about the dead, about their father, their brother, the many who lost their lives under Zia and the many more who were still suffering.

Papa was angry now and he was fighting with the sister he called Pinky, who was about to capitulate to power for the first of many times.

‘I can’t keep sitting on the outside,’ she said. ‘We have to be in government. It’s my chance. I’m not losing it. We can’t keep living like this.’ She mentioned money, making it, and Papa exploded.

He [Mir] refused to have anything to do with the party’s election campaign. He didn’t advise his mother or sister, he didn’t put forward any candidates, didn’t pledge his support. They spoke once more, Murtaza and Benazir, about the 1988 elections. He was upset that she had given her new husband, Asif Zardari, the party ticket to stand from Lyari, the heart of the People’s Party Power base in Karachi.

‘It’s for the workers, it’s their area, Pinky, how can you put him there?’ he asked her. She became cross and the conversation was over.
==========
25

‘She [Benazir] considered Yasser Arafat,’ Mummy recalls, unable to stop a smile from spreading across her face. ‘She thought he might be a suitable match.’

Karachi folklore says that it was Zia’s secretary, Roedad Khan, who suggested to Asif’s [Zardari] mother that he send a proposal to Benazir the year she was arranging her marriage and that Asif’s mother took the idea to Manna, Zulfikar’s sister and only living sibling, who did the rest of the damage. Dr Sikandar Jatoi of Larkana, the Bhuttos’ hometown, snarls at the mention of Zardari’s name, ‘He was a vulgar street boy. Before marriage, who knew him? No one.’

Benazir’s new husband, Asif Zardari, was key in the shaping of this new coterie through his role in giving out election tickets for the 1988 elections. He allocated these tickets to his school friends and loyal sidekicks or as Talbot puts it ‘opportunist entrants to the party’, effectively sidelining old party loyalists.
==========
26

When the news came that Zia had died in a plane crash, Papa and I were at a family friend’s house. My grandmother, Joonam [Nusrat], called our apartment and Aunty Ghinwa picked up the phone. Joonam was hysterical and had barely asked for her son before blurting out, ‘He’s dead, my God, Zia’s dead.’ Ghinwa frantically dialled Murtaza’s friend’s number and shrieked into the receiver that she had to speak to Mir. When his friends passed him the phone he listened quietly. His friends watched him, saw his neck turn red and worried that something awful had happened, that some other misfortune had befallen the family. Then Murtaza screamed. Ghinwa heard him drop the phone. He rushed back home, me rushing along with him, all of us ecstatic that it was over. Eleven years of fear and violence were over.

Zia was dead.
==========
27

The run-up to the 1988 elections started on the wrong foot. Benazir chose not to enter into electoral alliances with the other parties that made up the MRD – a mistake that resulted in her having to cope with a hostile coalition once in government – because she wanted to be free of the MRD’s 1986 Declaration of Provincial Autonomy.

The declaration called for limits to be placed on the centre’s power in four areas: currency, communications, defence and foreign policy. The declaration went a step further towards democratizing politics by placing ‘strict limits on the dissolution of provincial governments by the centre’.

She alienated many of the Pakistan People’s Party’s inner circle. Founding members and old guard, including her uncle, Mumtaz Bhutto, and Hafeez Pirzada, the author of the 1973 constitution, were among many who left the party under Benazir’s leadership.

Dr Ghulam Hussain, a founding member, and one of the prisoners released in the aftermath of the PIA hijacking, found no place for himself under the new Benazir/Zardari reshaping of the PPP. Hussain had served as the party’s Secretary-General under Zulfikar, a role that cost him five years in jail during martial law.

‘Zia sent three generals to me in jail,’ Dr Hussain tells me at his house in Islamabad, ‘and they asked me to resign from my Secretary-General position in writing, offering me a ministership in the new regime. Otherwise, should I refuse, they warned, they would prosecute me for treason. They accused me of leading a shooting at Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi. Imagine! There was no trial, no conviction, I was simply arrested and put in jail. I told them, I’ll stay with Bhutto come what may. They made good their threats once we were brought before a judge, to scare us into understanding our position as prisoners without rights and I caused a scene. I said to the judge,
“You are scared of Zia. I am scared of God, not this small man.”

I was led out of the courtroom shouting Zia hatao! ’ – Remove Zia!’ ‘Benazir, who couldn’t read Urdu – she had to write her speeches in English – bypassed me and gave the PPP ticket in Jhelum to Chaudry Aftaf, who was from the Pakistan Muslim League – Zia’s party! – because he was a jagirdar, a man so powerful as a feudal master that he owned serfs. This same man, who violated all the party’s principles ideologically, had also sat in Zia’s Majlis e Shoora! I didn’t even learn about my demotion from Benazir. I read about it in the press the next day.’

‘By 1985 we had grown disillusioned with Benazir’, he starts, speaking to me in a mixture of Urdu and English.

‘The party had been taken over. A part of it by capitalist rich industrialists with zero political understanding, another part of it by friends of the Chairperson and her husband, another by jagirdar, another by feudals or zamindar, and those workers who had merited leadership positions because of their understanding of the party’s ideology, because of their sacrifices, their loyalty, their immersion in the communities they represented – we were pushed out. Benazir was catering to those other factions for power. We lost our right to speak.’
==========
28

The party’s [PPP] decision to negotiate with the army and to work with Zia’s protégés in the lead-up to the elections [1988] carried with it the end of the PPP as its workers knew it.
==========
29

‘The differences between Mr Bhutto’s party and Benazir’s only grew,’ Shahnawaz continued. ‘It became like a war – us old workers against these businessmen who had erased the party’s founding ideology. It was a war about soch, about thought.’ Mauli agrees.

‘She was the opposite of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been. He made the party what it was by giving tickets to the small, the poor. But working with Benazir, we were thrown aside and watched waderas’ – a mixture of the land-cultivating zamindar and peasantexploiting jagirdar – ‘receive ticket after ticket. It was no longer about merit, it had become about power and favours.’

‘When Benazir came back from self-imposed exile in 1986 after her brother’s murder we joined her because she promised to take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s programmes forward. We stayed with her because she promised us no more Bhuttos would be killed, that they would be protected by the strength of the party. Even then, however, people asked us, “Why are you struggling for her?” and our answer was always the same. Our struggle didn’t begin with her, it started a long time ago.’
==========
30

The deal Benazir brokered with the military elite sealed her fate, even after Zia was removed from the equation. The army ensured that the PPP would not sweep the 1988 polls, keeping Benazir on a tight leash. The party took ninety-two out of 207 national assembly seats – numbers which meant Benazir would have no power in parliament to roll back or reverse any of Zia’s laws, leaving the dictator’s legacy firmly in place.
==========

Nisar Khuro was brought into the People’s Party after Zulfikar’s death by his daughter Benazir, and was made head of the Sindh branch of the party. Khuro remains an integral part of the PPP till this day, currently serving Benazir’s and her husband’s PPP as the speaker of the Sindh Assembly.

Nisar Khuro, a member of the Khuro feudal family from Larkana had been agitating for Zulfikar’s imprisonment and murder; Abdul Waheed Katpar, one of the PPP’s founding members and another Larkana native, recalls Khuro chanting, ‘First hang Bhutto then try him!’ at gatherings around the city.

‘And when they killed Bhutto sahib, Khuro distributed sweets, mithai, around the city – it is well known,’
==========
07

The people of Pakistan, whom the PLA seems to be fighting for, are an even stranger breed of people. Their ‘war’ for ‘independence’ was ‘won’ by them one year before they had wanted it. Independence was forced on them; they were begged to become independent and free… The Pakistani Army effectively reflects the valour and determination of the people it lives off.

1) When a soldier fell on his backside he suffered brain damage.

2) It believes in equality: it constitutes 00.06 per cent of the population but consumes between 70 and 80 per cent of its wealth

The official spokesman of the PLA, Wolf, feels he can take on the Pakistani Army any time in an intellectual confrontation. We have advised him to refrain from challenging them as it will only provoke the heroic Pakistani Army into committing mass suicide. This is a very predictable reflex in the character of our brave army. They are also world-famous for surrendering heroically.

A very shrewd British statesman once remarked, ‘War is too serious a business to be left to the soldiers.’ How true.
==========
08

During the day the brothers [Mir and Shahnawaz] worked at drafting a manifesto for their movement, whose name they changed to Al Zulfikar, the name of the two-pronged sword carried by the Shiite Imam Ali, who was known to be a fearless warrior and a brave leader, and of course there was the connection with their father, who took his name from the Imam’s sword: Zulfikar Ali, the sword of Ali.

Since their move to Kabul and their declaration that they were going to fight the military regime until the democratic constitution of 1973 was restored, the regime began to portray them as terrorists.

In Pakistan, ever since Zulfikar’s imprisonment there had been a concerted smear campaign against the Bhutto family. The junta printed stories of Zulfikar’s ‘un-Islamic’ nature, calling him a communist and an atheist. They ran photographs of Nusrat and her daughters – their heads superimposed on bodies of women cavorting in swimsuits or knocking back drinks at raucous parties.
==========
09

As soon as General Zia reneged on his promise to hold elections in October 1979, the junta instituted blanket press censorship. Six daily newspapers were permanently shut down – Musawat, which Murtaza carried on printing and distributing from London, Tameer, Hawat, Aafaaq, Sahafat and Sadaqat.

The weekly Mustaqbul and monthly Dhanak were also closed.

Martial Law Regulation No. 19 was enacted and gave the government the right to censor matters deemed ‘prejudicial to Islamic ideology’, Pakistan’s security, and ‘morality and maintenance of public order’.

Local and international media outlets, including the BBC, were subject to twice-daily checks by the junta censor, who alone had the power to decide what would and would not be reported. What was considered offensive to ‘Islamic ideology’, a pet cause of the fundamentalist General, was often absurd and arbitrary – one over-eager TV producer went as far as censoring Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl out of the cartoon because she wore a skirt.

Women anchors on Pakistan state television, PTV, were required to wear a hijab before being allowed on air. Mehtab Rashdi, a newscaster, was the first woman to quit in response to the mandatory hijab edict.

The reporting of any item that made the military regime look bad was considered ‘anti-state’.

Hussain Naqi, the Lahore bureau chief of the Pakistan Press Institute, lost his job in 1984 when he reported that the US President had stated during a press conference that Pakistan wasn’t a democracy.

In 1978, the editors of the Urdu dailies the Urdu Digest, the Sun and the PPP’s Musawat were arrested and sentenced to one year of rigorous imprisonment and ten public lashes for ‘publishing derogatory remarks against Zia’. They were later pardoned and released but the message was clear.

Disobedience to the state was unacceptable. Siddiqueh Hidayatullah, a teacher who was at the start of her career at Kinnaird College in Lahore, witnessed the frenzy around the city’s first public flogging and described the spectacle for me.

‘The lashing was being held on a large chowrangi or roundabout on Jail Road, right there in the open, in the middle of a busy street. People came in what looked like the thousands to watch, some were called from the nearby bazaars and others must have just turned up to have a look. Some men even climbed trees to have a decent view. It was sick. There was such a tamasha, or commotion, created around the floggings so that all of us would know how ferocious the regime was.’

The turning point came in May 1978 when four newsmen were publicly flogged for their dissidence.

journalists began to invite arrest by staging highly visible sitins, hunger strikes and rallies and by printing material critical of the government. In the two months after the floggings took place, 150 journalists were arrested.

Zia justified his regime’s unforgiving treatment of the press by declaring, ‘I have no respect for these newspapers and journalists who blindly use the stick of the pen to harm national interests.’

Nine Urdu dailies in Muzzafarabad were shut down by a local magistrate’s decree in 1979 as they refused to cease printing material critical of the government.

Ten journalists in Lahore lost their jobs in 1983 for taking part in a civil disobedience campaign protesting the extensive government repression, and as further punishment were banned from working in the media for the duration of Zia’s rule. Second, the press, which has never been braver since, fought against martial law through covert resistance, or as the government called it ‘deviant behaviour’.

Instead of filling their papers with large swathes of meaningless items, the newspapers began to leave the spaces blank.

When the largest English daily newspaper, Dawn – an establishment mouthpiece – printed almost an entire newspaper of empty columns, the government threatened it with permanent closure.

When blank columns in newspapers were forbidden, journalists like Mazhar Abbas, who wrote for the Daily Star, began resisting the censor’s pen more caustically.

‘In the blank spaces we would print a picture of a donkey or a dog and print news of Zia speaking or his ministers speaking underneath the pictures. So, they realized then that something fishy was going on, Then they said you had to inform the censorship board specifically of what news you would use to fill the blank spaces!’
==========
10

The lawyers’ resistance was a clear reaction against the junta’s co-opting of the judiciary and its interference in the state’s legal affairs.

The infamous Doctrine of Necessity, which claims that ‘that which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful’, had been used retroactively by Pakistan’s courts to justify every period of martial law imposed by the army, and was also used to condone Zia’s seizure of power.

By 1979 those judges who had demonstrated their lack of enthusiasm for the military in government had been swiftly sacked and replaced.

The power of the civil courts had been clipped and Sharia courts and military tribunals were created to do the bidding of the regime.
==========
11

Zina bil jabr is a variant taken to mean rape; however, under the junta’s new definition, consent was not the issue, but intercourse. A woman could be convicted by law after being raped because, willingly or not, she had had intercourse out of wedlock.

Under the Hudood laws, rape victims were prosecuted alongside their rapists for engaging in zina bil jabr.

In 1983, Lal Mai from Liaqatabad became the first woman to be publicly flogged on adultery charges under the Ordinances.

Reports indicated that 8,000 men witnessed Mai receive her fifteen lashes. It’s unclear whether the spectators at Mai’s punishment were brought to the scene by the police and made to watch her public torture, as happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or whether they were there out of morbid curiosity. But they were there, in their thousands.

Prior to the implementation of the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s penal code did not label fornication a crime, but rather had provisions for dealing with the crime of marital rape and viewed rape itself as a crime where the rapist, not the victim, was the sole party to be indicted under law.

Moreover, zina laws under the Hudood Ordinances stipulated that an individual could be ‘found guilty with or without the consent of the other party’, which meant that women, as a result of medical evidence, were more likely to be convicted under the Ordinances than men. A simple examination could prove that a woman had recently had sex, or that she was no longer a virgin, but men’s innocence rested simply on their word.

No section of society was safe from the army’s interference in the early 1980s. Besides insinuating itself politically and legally into all corners of daily life, the army began to meddle in the running of Pakistan’s economy. If the army could not set the price of goods in the economic market, those goods would simply disappear.

If the army could not take a cut out of black market profits, those vendors would be arrested and often flogged.
==========
12

Urban professionals and intellectuals also played a substantial role in resisting martial law. The medical profession, otherwise neutral, took a unique and unprecedented stand against the junta.

The Hudood Ordinances ordered that thieves be punished by amputation of the hands, and as the sole group qualified to mete out the punishment doctors refused to comply.

Ghulam Ali from Okara was convicted of stealing a clock from his local mosque and sentenced to have his right hand removed; yet not a single doctor in all of Pakistan could be found to carry out the amputation, whereas we know that in countries where similar punishments are prescribed against theft, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, amputations were and are still carried out with the aid of the local medical communities. The courts had no choice but to convert Ghulam Ali’s sentence to six years of rigorous imprisonment instead.
==========
13

Not all PPP members, it is worth noting, sacrificed themselves in the fight against the junta. The party’s current Prime Minister, Yousef Raza Gilani – who bears more than a passing resemblance to Saddam Hussain – spent his time not in jail but serving on the dictator’s majlis e shoora or religious parliamentary council, rubbing shoulders with General Zia’s protégé Nawaz Sharif.
==========
14

After the hijacking, Al Zulfikar made its most daring attempt at confronting the regime. A group of three people attacked Zia’s plane as it took off from Chaklala air base in Rawalpindi. They were armed with a Samsix heat-seeking missile and narrowly missed hitting the aircraft as it gained height.

On board the plane, the pilot and passengers were aware of the attempt on their lives. Sharing the flight with General Zia was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the then chairman of the senate – and the man from whom Benazir would take her oath as Prime Minister to his presidency in 1988 – and Mahmood Haroon, whose signature featured prominently on Zulfikar’s death warrant, and who in another absurd placing would be appointed by Benazir as the governor of Sindh under her first government.

It seems unthinkable that of the three junta leaders on board the aeroplane, Benazir would work with two of them, negotiating with but narrowly missing her chance to work with the third. The three men managed to escape, but the Samsix attack intensified the regime’s fury towards the Bhutto brothers and their Kabul-based organization.

‘It was the most daring, direct attempt we made,’ Suhail tells me.

Suhail says that eighty-four charges of treason were made against Murtaza and Shahnawaz by the junta, all carrying the death penalty.

(I remember the number of charges being higher, in the nineties somewhere. Other people place them in the mid-hundreds.)
==========
15

Tribals from Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt were sent to Kabul to assassinate the brothers.

For Zulfikar to have placed his sons, his heirs, in direct danger was maddeningly irresponsible. For him to have ended his children’s chance of a peaceful, safe, ordinary life was vengeful; it would destroy his sons.

Zulfikar should have known that. But they were wrong to have followed him too. There are signs, a changing of course over time, that suggest they understood that.
==========
16

Unlike Gandhi’s acts of civil disobedience, the MRD drive in 1983 was not entirely peaceful. There were strikes and shut-downs, but they were accompanied by significant acts of violence.

Agitation in Larkana, Sukkar, Jacobabad and Khairpur in Sindh was so fierce that the Governor of Sindh was forced to admit that in the first three weeks of the unrest the government had 1,999 people arrested, 189 killed and 126 injured.
==========
17

In December 1984, Zia held a referendum on his Islamization programme, linking the referendum to his right to remain in power. The question placed before the voters was insideously worded: ‘If you agree that Islamic laws be brought in in conformity with the Koran, then say YES. If the results of the referendum are positive it will mean that you approve of General Zia ul Haq continuing as President for another five years.’

The referendum produced a ludicrously inflated 98 per cent approval rating for the President and his policies.

With the ‘support’ of the people behind him, Zia called for elections in early 1985, which in turn created the plausible façade of a new civilian order and effectively legitimized the General’s rule. The MRD boycotted the elections and put itself out of the running.

It had failed to dislodge the dictator and had pushed Zia in the right direction – he had taken it up on its suggestion and had begun to ‘democratize’.
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18

‘There was friction between Mir and her [Benazir]. He loved her; he stepped aside for her. He said to us once, “She wants to be the political heir, so OK, I’ll move aside.”’
==========
19

Unwittingly, by constantly insisting on the importance of democratic government, but not tackling the abuses of the military regime or the incompatibility of the armed forces and an egalitarian system of rule, the MRD had given Zia the tools to strengthen his hold on power and neutralise the opposition to his junta. Democracy, after all, has always just been a word, a catch-phrase or election slogan – not a style of governance – in Pakistan.

The advisors to the new Prime Minister, Junejo, had in fact, pushed him to allow Benazir back into the country telling him and General Zia that ‘Benazir was more a threat to the MRD than to the government’.11 The advisors proved to be right.

By 1985 the MRD was politically deflated; not only had it failed to unify the varied resistance movements, but it had broken them.

The fuel that ran the resistance movement in Pakistan had run out, compromised by the political incompetence of the MRD.

Journalists were tired of fighting a regime that showed no signs of weakening, aided as it was by American money and support.

Students gave up their stone throwing and went back to classes, eager to earn degrees that would get them out of Pakistan.

Writers who had made their names through subversive plays and articles had bills to pay.

The same was true for Al Zulfikar. It existed, but only in spirit.
==========
20

They entered the apartment and found Shah’s [Shahnawaz Bhutto] body lying face down on the living-room floor, between the sofa and the coffee table.

‘When I saw him,’ Murtaza would later say, ‘I knew he was dead.’ Shah had blue marks on his chest and his face had already begun to turn a blue-ish black. He was wearing the trousers he had on from the previous evening, but no shirt. He was dead.

The police arrived and immediately began to inspect the flat. Murtaza looked for the poison in all the rooms, but found nothing. He searched the kitchen cupboards, careful not to move anything. A doctor, who came hours too late to save Shah, was standing in the kitchen when Murtaza opened the rubbish bin and found under several tissues a small glass bottle labelled ‘PENTREXIDE’.

Murtaza always believed Zia’s government had ordered the assassination. But how they carried it out was harder to explain.

And then, there was another theory, the main one. I have spent my life believing that Shah’s wife, Raehana, had something to do with her husband’s death.

The autopsy placed the time of Shah’s death in the early hours of the morning, approximately nine hours passed before the family and police were called to the scene. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Raehana had not raised the alarm until well past the time of death. This is where things get tricky. The police statements that Raehana made still exist and her testimony shakes everything up. It is rambling and incoherent.

I have read the statements, both in French and in English. I have had them translated and retranslated. I have read them backwards and forwards and I still don’t know what to make of them.

I grew up with my family’s belief that Raehana had been involved in some way. She hadn’t called for help in time. She hadn’t reacted fast enough. She had a rocky relationship with her husband. She’d thrown Murtaza out of the apartment the night before. There had always been distrust and dislike. In Raehana’s police testimony, there is a suggestion that she did not help Shah as he lay dying, but a clear assertion that she did not kill him.

Raehana was detained and spent time in jail in Nice [France]. She was questioned over a period of several months and then released. She then left France and flew to California to be with her family who were already looking after Sassi. It was the last time any of us saw her.

I remember that Papa was always unsure of what had really happened. But by then it was too late.

Too much time, too much anger, too much sadness had passed. He blamed himself for not being there that night to protect his younger brother. That always stayed with him.

Papa lost weight. He lost his smile and his ability to joke and laugh. Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] too, I remember, took the death like a weight upon her heart. She was never the same again.

Why had Raehana been let go if she was involved? By all accounts she was not kept long as a suspect. She had been released and allowed to leave the country, surely not standard procedure for a murder suspect. But then who was responsible? I asked. And the answer, the possibility of who was to blame, at least indirectly in terms of benefiting from Shah’s death, was nothing I had ever imagined before. It was scandalous, mind-blowing.

But I knew, from experience, that anything is possible in the Bhutto family.

‘I wanted to make a big scandal about Shah’s murder,’ Vergès said, ‘but Benazir was against it. She didn’t want to fight the CIA and the Pakistani Intelligence service, who your father was always convinced were behind his brother’s death.’

Why not? I asked, genuinely curious. Vergès laughed again and made a face at me that I understood. Because she worked with them. Because her power was always based on their approval.

Months before her death, reports now claim, Benazir contacted Blackwater, America’s mercenary contractors, to provide the security for what would be her last election campaign. They declined. But my father, I asked, what did he think? ‘He was convinced and was prepared to make a stir, but his sister, she stopped it.’ Nobody believed it was suicide, Vergès confirmed, it just wasn’t a possibility.

I was sitting on the edge of my finely woven antique chair so Vergès could hear me clearly and I lowered my voice, uselessly, to ask the unthinkable, remembering what Sassi had told me months before: why did Benazir leave the case so skewed by refusing to fight it all the way? Did she have something to gain by not pursuing it? My hands were shaking so hard I could barely write. ‘It’s not impossible,’ Vergès replied cautiously.

‘It’s clear that when Mir and Shah decided to take this action,’ Vergès said, referring to AZO, ‘that Benazir would not approve. She was on another track – one with Western cooperation, especially with the USA. They were both against it, fighting it openly. I am not surprised that it would benefit her for one brother to be disposed of before the other.’

‘Imagine, to be killed by your own sister,’ he muttered

‘In her mind, what her two brothers were doing wasn’t helping her,’ Vergès calmly speculated. ‘Among the two brothers, the strongest brother was Mir. Perhaps it was necessary to get Shah out of the way because he was the weaker one.’

‘When did Benazir become Prime Minister?’ Vergès asked, returning to our topic. ‘Three years later,’ I replied. He nodded his head and said nothing.

‘She never opened an investigation into her brother’s murder,’ I said out loud, thinking back to what Sassi had told me earlier. ‘Ahh well,’ Vergès sighed, leaning back in his chair, ‘perhaps she already knew.’
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21

I remember wearing a woolly coat in those days, and learning new words. I learned the word divorce early; I knew what it meant and it sounded very grown-up to me. It is hard for me to disconnect my feelings about Fowzia [Fatima’s biological mother] from the woman I encountered as a teenager and adult. I am scared, frightened even, of my biological mother.

As a child I remember her moods, her unpredictable temperament, how beautiful she was and how much care she took of her hair, the dark kohl she would line her eyes with, how aware she was of her beauty. She would let me drink tea with her, sugary and diluted with milk, in the afternoons – I think that was our time together. But that’s it. That’s as far as my memories extend. Papa gave me my baths, read my bedtime stories, cut my hair, dressed me, and bought me boots that looked like his own polished shoes. I was a tomboy, as if to distance myself from Fowzia (I used to cut her lipsticks with scissors to trim their pointy, pyramid-like tips), and was a walking, talking devotee of my father.

When I finally saw Fowzia in Mr Dewolf ’s office, I wasn’t comforted. ‘Your father kidnapped you,’ she snarled once she had given me a huge cellophane-wrapped gift basket. It was less than six months after his murder. ‘I could have taken you back, you know?’

The drama of a ten-year-old divorce was being played out in front of Mr Dewolf, whom I had asked to stay in the meeting room with us. ‘I knew people in the American military. They offered to bring you back for me, by helicopter. Your father could have done nothing to stop them,’ Fowzia continued. ‘But I didn’t, for your sake.’

That week, after I baulked and refused to see her, Fowzia gave press conferences about my ‘kidnapping’ and my brainwashing at the hands of my evil ‘stepmother’ from Bilawal House, Benazir and Zardari’s Karachi home.

She called Mummy a maid whom Papa hadn’t loved but had married to take care of his child. She called Zulfi my ‘half-brother’, and said I was just like her. Fowzia wrote open letters to me in all the English language newspapers and filed a case for my custody in the Pakistani courts.

The school librarian, a kind British woman, took the newspapers off their racks every morning and hid them from me so I wouldn’t see Fowzia’s latest salvo as I did my homework in the library. I employed a lawyer and told Fowzia that I didn’t want to be with her, that I would never leave my family for her, a virtual stranger.

‘You’ll forget about them in two weeks,’ she assured me and gave me on bottle of vanilla-scented nailpolish. I am, I suppose, in some recesses of my 27-year-old being, still afraid of Fowzia.
==========
22

At night, before we slept, Papa [Mir] would kneel down and search under the bed. I asked him once what he was looking for and he told me he was just checking, making sure there was nothing that might hurt us under there. I assumed he meant a bomb. Or a man with a weapon.I never felt brave enough to look, but always felt a wave of relief once Papa had completed the routine search.
==========
23

The rumour circulating at the time was that a box of mangoes had been packed with explosives and placed on board Pak One. People whispered that it was fruit that had finally taken the dictator down.

There were, according to Epstein, ‘no outcries for vengeance, no efforts at counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia and Rehman’s names disappeared within days from television, newspapers and other media.’

The Pakistan Air Force Board of Inquiry said the ‘most probable cause’ of the crash was ‘sabotage’ but stopped short of taking the investigation further.7 In fact a thorough investigation was never carried out. It was standard procedure; once the assassination had been carried out, no records were kept, no archives made. Nothing. Violence was the easiest means of disposing of yet another Pakistani politician, however odious he may have been.

The United States National Archives has some 250 pages of documents on the incident, but they remain classified to this day.
==========
24

The General [Zia] had taken the step of announcing elections for 1988, fully emboldened in his new role as the seemingly ‘democratic’ head of an authoritarian government. He had even begun to conduct secondparty negotiations with Benazir, who was not going to be left out of the power stakes by boycotting the elections like she had done in 1985. It was Benazir’s tremendous luck, something she had always benefited from, that Zia was killed before the elections took place. She had been preparing to be Prime Minister to his President.
==========
25

Murtaza had spoken to his sister about the party’s decision to engage in power-sharing negotiations with the junta. He had disagreed with her fundamentally on this issue. I remember the conversation. ‘What do you mean “take part”?’ Papa [Mir] said, almost shouting. ‘You’re willing to be Zia’s Prime Minister?’

Benazir was less calm, but she too had the air of someone used to beating her opponents. ‘I have a plan,’ she said. Papa was enraged. I got worried, I had never seen my father so upset. He started speaking angrily, talking about the dead, about their father, their brother, the many who lost their lives under Zia and the many more who were still suffering.

Papa was angry now and he was fighting with the sister he called Pinky, who was about to capitulate to power for the first of many times.

‘I can’t keep sitting on the outside,’ she said. ‘We have to be in government. It’s my chance. I’m not losing it. We can’t keep living like this.’ She mentioned money, making it, and Papa exploded.

He [Mir] refused to have anything to do with the party’s election campaign. He didn’t advise his mother or sister, he didn’t put forward any candidates, didn’t pledge his support. They spoke once more, Murtaza and Benazir, about the 1988 elections. He was upset that she had given her new husband, Asif Zardari, the party ticket to stand from Lyari, the heart of the People’s Party Power base in Karachi.

‘It’s for the workers, it’s their area, Pinky, how can you put him there?’ he asked her. She became cross and the conversation was over.
==========
26

‘She [Benazir] considered Yasser Arafat,’ Mummy recalls, unable to stop a smile from spreading across her face. ‘She thought he might be a suitable match.’

Karachi folklore says that it was Zia’s secretary, Roedad Khan, who suggested to Asif’s [Zardari] mother that he send a proposal to Benazir the year she was arranging her marriage and that Asif’s mother took the idea to Manna, Zulfikar’s sister and only living sibling, who did the rest of the damage. Dr Sikandar Jatoi of Larkana, the Bhuttos’ hometown, snarls at the mention of Zardari’s name, ‘He was a vulgar street boy. Before marriage, who knew him? No one.’

Benazir’s new husband, Asif Zardari, was key in the shaping of this new coterie through his role in giving out election tickets for the 1988 elections. He allocated these tickets to his school friends and loyal sidekicks or as Talbot puts it ‘opportunist entrants to the party’, effectively sidelining old party loyalists.
==========
27

When the news came that Zia had died in a plane crash, Papa and I were at a family friend’s house. My grandmother, Joonam [Nusrat], called our apartment and Aunty Ghinwa picked up the phone. Joonam was hysterical and had barely asked for her son before blurting out, ‘He’s dead, my God, Zia’s dead.’ Ghinwa frantically dialled Murtaza’s friend’s number and shrieked into the receiver that she had to speak to Mir. When his friends passed him the phone he listened quietly. His friends watched him, saw his neck turn red and worried that something awful had happened, that some other misfortune had befallen the family. Then Murtaza screamed. Ghinwa heard him drop the phone. He rushed back home, me rushing along with him, all of us ecstatic that it was over. Eleven years of fear and violence were over.

Zia was dead.
==========
28

The run-up to the 1988 elections started on the wrong foot. Benazir chose not to enter into electoral alliances with the other parties that made up the MRD – a mistake that resulted in her having to cope with a hostile coalition once in government – because she wanted to be free of the MRD’s 1986 Declaration of Provincial Autonomy.

The declaration called for limits to be placed on the centre’s power in four areas: currency, communications, defence and foreign policy. The declaration went a step further towards democratizing politics by placing ‘strict limits on the dissolution of provincial governments by the centre’.

She alienated many of the Pakistan People’s Party’s inner circle. Founding members and old guard, including her uncle, Mumtaz Bhutto, and Hafeez Pirzada, the author of the 1973 constitution, were among many who left the party under Benazir’s leadership.

Dr Ghulam Hussain, a founding member, and one of the prisoners released in the aftermath of the PIA hijacking, found no place for himself under the new Benazir/Zardari reshaping of the PPP. Hussain had served as the party’s Secretary-General under Zulfikar, a role that cost him five years in jail during martial law.

‘Zia sent three generals to me in jail,’ Dr Hussain tells me at his house in Islamabad, ‘and they asked me to resign from my Secretary-General position in writing, offering me a ministership in the new regime. Otherwise, should I refuse, they warned, they would prosecute me for treason. They accused me of leading a shooting at Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi. Imagine! There was no trial, no conviction, I was simply arrested and put in jail. I told them, I’ll stay with Bhutto come what may. They made good their threats once we were brought before a judge, to scare us into understanding our position as prisoners without rights and I caused a scene. I said to the judge,
“You are scared of Zia. I am scared of God, not this small man.”

I was led out of the courtroom shouting Zia hatao! ’ – Remove Zia!’ ‘Benazir, who couldn’t read Urdu – she had to write her speeches in English – bypassed me and gave the PPP ticket in Jhelum to Chaudry Aftaf, who was from the Pakistan Muslim League – Zia’s party! – because he was a jagirdar, a man so powerful as a feudal master that he owned serfs. This same man, who violated all the party’s principles ideologically, had also sat in Zia’s Majlis e Shoora! I didn’t even learn about my demotion from Benazir. I read about it in the press the next day.’

‘By 1985 we had grown disillusioned with Benazir’, he starts, speaking to me in a mixture of Urdu and English.

‘The party had been taken over. A part of it by capitalist rich industrialists with zero political understanding, another part of it by friends of the Chairperson and her husband, another by jagirdar, another by feudals or zamindar, and those workers who had merited leadership positions because of their understanding of the party’s ideology, because of their sacrifices, their loyalty, their immersion in the communities they represented – we were pushed out. Benazir was catering to those other factions for power. We lost our right to speak.’
==========
29

The party’s [PPP] decision to negotiate with the army and to work with Zia’s protégés in the lead-up to the elections [1988] carried with it the end of the PPP as its workers knew it.
==========
30

‘The differences between Mr Bhutto’s party and Benazir’s only grew,’ Shahnawaz continued. ‘It became like a war – us old workers against these businessmen who had erased the party’s founding ideology. It was a war about soch, about thought.’ Mauli agrees.

‘She was the opposite of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been. He made the party what it was by giving tickets to the small, the poor. But working with Benazir, we were thrown aside and watched waderas’ – a mixture of the land-cultivating zamindar and peasantexploiting jagirdar – ‘receive ticket after ticket. It was no longer about merit, it had become about power and favours.’

‘When Benazir came back from self-imposed exile in 1986 after her brother’s murder we joined her because she promised to take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s programmes forward. We stayed with her because she promised us no more Bhuttos would be killed, that they would be protected by the strength of the party. Even then, however, people asked us, “Why are you struggling for her?” and our answer was always the same. Our struggle didn’t begin with her, it started a long time ago.’
==========
31 May

The deal Benazir brokered with the military elite sealed her fate, even after Zia was removed from the equation. The army ensured that the PPP would not sweep the 1988 polls, keeping Benazir on a tight leash. The party took ninety-two out of 207 national assembly seats – numbers which meant Benazir would have no power in parliament to roll back or reverse any of Zia’s laws, leaving the dictator’s legacy firmly in place.

Benazir accepted the army’s conditions. The defence budget was to remain ‘sacrosanct’, the army was to hold the ultimate veto in security and foreign policy matters, and IMF loan conditions and stipulations were to be reaffirmed and left untouched.

Zia’s Foreign Minister, Yakub Ali Khan, remained in place to deal with the army’s special spots like Afghanistan and Kashmir, and Zia’s one-time favourite and Chairman of the Senate, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, was promoted to serve as Benazir’s President.
==========
01 June

The PPP had won with only a slight majority. Murtaza called his sister and pleaded with her, ‘Pinky, don’t accept these results.’ She ignored him, overjoyed that she was so close to power, close enough to touch it. Nusrat also advised her daughter to reject the results. It will make you stronger, she told her. Benazir made a public show of her irritation at the suggestion by leaving her mother in Islamabad and travelling to Larkana by herself, remaining there until her decision had been announced. She said yes to all the army’s conditions.
==========
02

It took Zia’s number two, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a week to invite Benazir to become Prime Minister. The insult infuriated Murtaza even more. The army’s conditions, the stalling, the rigging, it was too much.

He [Mir] called his sister again. ‘They’re tying your hands,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to be weak. Refuse their conditions, Don’t take the government, sit in the opposition, Pinky. You’ll be in a phenomenal position. Don’t bow down to these bastards.’ But those around the future Prime Minister told her not to listen.

‘We can’t afford to sit in the opposition, Mir,’ she told her brother on the phone. ‘If people don’t feel they’re getting something from the party they’ll leave us.’ It was untrue. The party had nothing but loyal workers. It was the interlopers, the new moneyed recruits, who would have fled but they were a gamble Benazir was already unwilling to risk.
==========
03

‘Please don’t come back now, Mir,’ she had begged him, ‘it’s too hard on me.’ Benazir told her brother that Pakistan’s Intelligence, the ISI, had ‘lost his file’, that no one knew the exact number of charges the dictator had brought against him. She told her brother that her hands were tied.
==========
04

In Karachi, on that first trip, my mother gave her first press conference. Papa had trusted Ghinwa to speak for him. A journalist asked the question on everyone’s mind that winter of 1989: why hadn’t Murtaza returned to participate in his country’s turn towards democracy? Mummy answered honestly: ‘He wants to. But his sister has asked him not to come back now.’

Benazir would not forget her sisterin-law’s frank remark.
==========
05

The PPP had been fully opened to the remnants of Zia’s regime. Mahmood Haroon, whose signature was on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death warrant, was appointed the Governor of Sindh; Nisar Khuro, who publicly demanded that Zulfikar be ‘hanged first and tried later’, was made the head of the party in Sindh, and various other floaters from Zia’s cabinet and inner circle had been given party tickets.

Benazir reversed many of her father’s programmes, easily and openly. She asked the Commonwealth to allow Pakistan back, oblivious to Zulfikar’s principled decision in leaving the British-run organization; she scrapped the ceilings on land holdings set in place by Zulfikar’s land reforms, thereby safeguarding the feudal system her father had been taking steps to roll back; and she began the process of privatizing the industries that her father had nationalized and made sure that the lion’s share was never far from her hands.
==========
06

Zardari’s crooked business chums along with petty small-time thieves he happened to know also found space for themselves within the inner sanctum of the PPP. It was said that they made millions, money taken under the table, and that kickbacks were ceremoniously given back to the first couple, earning Zardari the nickname Mr Ten Perent.
==========
07

Internationally, the government carried on Zia’s policies unamended. The Afghan adventure continued, aided and abetted by the Intelligence agencies, as did Pakistan’s nuclear programme.

Iqbal Akhund, one of Benazir’s foreign affairs advisors and a career diplomat who watched Benazir’s government first hand, summed up the PPP’s foreign policy perfectly: ‘On Afghanistan, Kashmir and India the government was faced with very complex and thorny issues but the decision making in all these had been taken over by the army and the intelligence agencies in Zia’s time, and there, in the ultimate analysis, it remained.’
==========
08

Benazir did not suspend the Hudood Ordinances, that called for women who commit adultery or engage in premarital sex to be put to death; nor did she enhance women’s rights in any official way. In a two-year period, the Pakistan People’s Party government led by Benazir did not introduce any meaningful legislation. Nothing was changed, no institutions strengthened.
==========
09

Dr Ghulam Hussain was summoned to meet his former political student, who was, in late 1990, in a good mood. ‘She asked me what I thought the difference had been between her government and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s,’ he says. ‘I told her, “Leave it.” But she insisted, she was feeling quite jolly. So I told her.

“In front of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto we party workers were afraid to lie – we were punished for it greatly. In front of you,” I said, “we are afraid to tell the truth.”’

‘“But Benazir sahiba,” I told her,’ Dr Hussain says, having now forgone his tears for anger, his voice rising, ‘“You think you can buy credibility? You can’t! How much will it cost?”’ Dr Hussain doesn’t mince his words, but still, I’m amazed that he spoke to her like that. That she tolerated his questioning of her leadership. It was never easy to do, but Dr Hussain’s seniority afforded him his right to speak, and he continued, before the doors were closed on him for good.

‘“In my village,”’ Dr Hussain shouts, as if with my notebook and pen before him I suddenly represent Benazir, ‘“there used to be no electricity, no schools.” I told her, “If you were born in my village, you wouldn’t have got past primary school. We earned this right to criticize and we fought to speak openly. You only inherited it.”’
==========
10

Maulabux, one of those political workers, speaks forcefully when I mention this idea of the prodigal son returning home. ‘In our culture, the asl waris, or true heir, was Mir baba.’ The assumption was that Benazir’s brothers were not in Pakistan during the time that Benazir built her political career under Zia because it was too dangerous for them to remain in their country.

Zulfikar had sent his sons out of the country specifically because he saw them as the inheritors of his throne.

‘The unsaid understanding,’ Mauli continues, ‘was that whatever Benazir did at that time she did as a representative of her family, not as Benazir the individual, but as Benazir the child of Bhuttos.’

Mauli understands how this must sound, this trying to explain to me that we are our families, nothing more defined, nothing more unique than that. He’s also talking to another eldest child, a daughter ironically. ‘Look,’ he starts again, measuring his words, ‘it’s the same in Baloch culture, in Pathan culture – even in Western cultures, isn’t it? – it’s the eldest son’s role, duty even, to take over the father’s work whether it is farming, business or politics.’ Mauli stops. ‘Bibi,’ he says, ‘Bhutto ka waris Bhutto hai.’ ‘Bhutto’s heir is a Bhutto’.

Benazir had become a Zardari. It’s a not so subtle reminder to me too, though Mauli is taking pains to make sure I don’t take his explanation to heart – I’m single after all; there’s no reason to take it personally, not yet at least.
==========
20

‘In the twenty months of his sister’s rule, Mir maintained his silence’ Suhail reminds me. ‘Even though he saw and disagreed with what was going on. He took a very political and democratic path: he decided to contest elections. He didn’t return and demand his title. He set himself up for a fight. How many people, you tell me, have contested elections from abroad and won?’ Suhail asks, raising his eyebrows. He’s right, I only know of one.

In the summer of 1993, Murtaza made up his mind. He was going home. He called Ghinwa, who had taken Zulfi to Oklahoma for the summer to visit her elder sister, Racha, and told her to come back home; he was going to contest the election.

Ghinwa cut her trip short and flew home.

I was away with my grandmother, Joonam, and was also put on a flight and bundled home. Murtaza spoke to his mother, who still held – and not for much longer – an honorary chairpersonship in the party. Murtaza asked Nusrat for the application forms to file for election tickets. But it was Benazir, the active Chairperson, who along with her husband had the task of choosing the party’s candidates. Benazir spoke to her brother directly. She refused him a ticket straight out and offered him some advice: if he was serious about coming back to Pakistan then he ought to leave Syria, a rogue state in her estimation, and settle in London for a few years, long enough to expunge any taint of socialism, and then they could talk about him running on a party ticket, maybe in an election or two.

Benazir was a consummate bully; she had got her own way for too long.
==========
21

No, he [Mir] finally insisted to his sister, I’ll contest this election. Murtaza asked for nine tickets – all of which were eventually handed out to Zardari and his cronies. Benazir pushed back and rejected his request. ‘I can’t give you and your people nine seats,’ she said and offered him a provincial seat in some backwoods constituency. None of us at the time could imagine why Benazir was so frightened of her younger brother.

It was at the end of 1993 that Benazir ousted her mother, who had spent the better part of the year campaigning for Murtaza, from her largely ceremonial post as honorary Chairperson and installed herself as Chairperson for Life, an actual title.

‘Nine seats in all of Pakistan,’ my mother says to me later as we stand in our kitchen and discuss our past and the book I’m writing that is making us relive it chapter by chapter. ‘It is how she sidelined him since taking over the party. She virtually eliminated Murtaza – he had become a burden to her. There was simply no space for him.’

Eventually, the seat that Murtaza had asked for as his first choice – PS 204, the Bhutto home seat of Larkana, where Zulfikar built the family home that would become Murtaza’s residence – was given to a newcomer called Munawar Abbassi. Locals knew him as the landlord who had bestowed an ajrak, a Sindhi sign of hospitality, around General Zia’s neck the first time he visited Larkana.
==========
22

Murtaza decided to run as an independent and began to prepare for the race of his life. It must be said, because it cannot be left out, that nothing in Pakistan moves without the pull and sway of the Intelligence service.

While Benazir corralled family members like Sanam, and distant friends and acquaintances, to dissuade Murtaza from returning home, the Intelligence – it’s easy to see now, in hindsight – made some calls of its own to assess how serious the rift in the Bhutto family was. How far they reached and what influence they sought to have, I don’t know, but a public feud opened a space for those who wished to work against the family.

In Benazir’s mind, her decisions always had the blessing of the all-powerful political establishment; this case was no different. In any event, the political establishment couldn’t have influenced Murtaza either way; that was their fundamental misunderstanding. If Papa won a seat in parliament, we were packing our bags. If he didn’t, we were staying put in our Damascus home. That was our family deal.

After sixteen years of exile, of being kept quiet, Murtaza had been propelled into the limelight as the heir apparent of the PPP.
==========
23

The newspapers and reports from Pakistan would not let us forget it. A story three days earlier had claimed that Benazir’s government was holding ‘in readiness non-bailable warrants of arrest for Murtaza on arrival’,

That Papa would be arrested was something we took for granted. He had packed several magazines – Newsweek and The Economist and Vanity Fair, his favourite – to read in jail. He had pen and paper to write letters – which he promised he would have someone fax across to me – and books to keep him company. He was so relaxed about jail, for my sake I’m sure, he made it seem like nothing more frightening than a spa weekend away and even joked that he planned to lose a few pounds while incarcerated.

He embraced his mother and was led away by the police and taken to Landhi Jail in North Karachi. It would be his home for the next eight months.
==========
24

Murtaza was taken to the Sindh Assembly to swear his oath and when he rose to speak for the first time in parliament, the Daily Nation newspaper noted that ‘the hall of the Sindh Assembly was in a state of pin-drop silence when a new voice intended to introduce itself in the House for the first time, the voice of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, jailed brother of the Prime Minister.’
==========
25

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s birthday falls on 5 January and has been celebrated, since his death, at the family’s ancestral graveyard at Garhi Khuda Bux, near Larkana. In 1994, 5 January coincided with Murtaza’s second month in jail. He had last seen Zulfikar in 1977 when he and Shahnawaz were sent into exile by their father.

Murtaza had never been to his father’s grave to offer the customary prayers of Muslim mourning. He wrote a letter to the Sindh Home Ministry asking to be paroled for three days so that he could travel to Larkana to mark his father’s birthday and pray at his grave. His request was swiftly turned down.

The Eid parole was one thing, everyone in the country celebrated Eid. But there were only two Bhutto heirs in Pakistan for 5 January.

On the morning of 5 January 1994, the police, led by a Karachi based officer named Wajid Durrani, and acting under the orders of the Prime Minister, cordoned off our Al Murtaza house. The Bhutto house was locked down. The state was determined that no one should leave the house, not even Zulfikar’s widow, the Prime Minister’s own mother, who had never been stopped from travelling to her husband’s grave, not even under General Zia’s junta.

Joonam was distraught. No one had ever fired upon Bhutto’s house. Not under Ayub Khan’s dictatorship, not under Yahya Khan’s martial law, not under Zia ul Haq’s repression. She had been imprisoned, denied the right to trial and had even been beaten, but Nusrat Bhutto had never been shot at before.

She spoke to the media, to the BBC, to Indian and Pakistani journalists who were at the scene. She said to the New York Times that only two days earlier Benazir had offered to drive her mother to the mazaar on the 5th, so desperate was she that Nusrat be seen with her and not with Murtaza’s workers. ‘Instead, she sent people to tear-gas and to shoot.’ Joonam continued angrily, ‘She talks a lot about democracy, but she’s become a little dictator. I can’t forgive her.’
==========
26

There was confusion, even in Karachi, over just how many cases Zia’s regime had brought against the Bhutto brothers. It was even said in the press that the total number of charges against Murtaza and Shahnawaz was higher than the ninety-odd that we knew of, that the junta had placed a total of 178 charges against the two men.
==========
27

Rumour has it that on the day that he was preparing to read the bail decision to the court, 5 June, Junejo was interrupted several times by a court clerk who kept handing him slips of paper informing him that an urgent phone call was waiting for him in his chambers. He ignored the messages and continued with his proceedings, reading the order pronouncing Murtaza’s bail.

What is certainly not rumour, however, is that the very next day Justice Ali Ahmed Junejo was sacked from his job by the government. Later, Junejo spoke openly of his belief that it was his decision to grant Murtaza Bhutto bail that cost him his job but that he felt he had done his legal duty and that justice had been served.

When Papa’s release orders were finally signed the next day, close to twenty-fours hours after his bail had been granted, we heard that Benazir had been rung up by the army, by someone with enough epaulettes to order the Prime Minister around. ‘Stop making a hero out of him,’ the army man reprimanded Benazir. ‘Let him go, quickly.’ Whatever else he said, it shook the Prime Minister.

Papa received his release papers on 6 June.

Eventually, Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] picked up the phone and called Benazir. Mummy and I sat in Joonam’s bedroom as she made the call. ‘Why aren’t you releasing Mir?’ Joonam asked, her voice tight and strained with nerves. ‘We have more cases against him, Mummy,’ the Prime Minister replied. She was not feeling chatty. She didn’t elaborate on where these cases came from, how the ‘missing’ ISI file against Murtaza had suddenly reappeared, and didn’t sound terribly aggrieved at the prospect of keeping her only brother in jail.

We busied ourselves getting dressed and tidying up the house. Papa hadn’t been home to 70 Clifton in seventeen years. It was the home he was born into; they were the same age.

Papa walked into the home he’d left as a young man of twenty-three. He was almost forty when he finally returned.
==========
28

In Karachi, Papa’s movements were watched by the Intelligence service, who parked outside 70 Clifton in a dilapidated beige car with brown leather interior and followed him everywhere he went. But even they were no match for Papa’s sense of humour. Once, en route to a wedding, we got lost on the road. Papa stopped the Intelligence vehicle and asked them for directions.
==========
29

Joonam didn’t like the way her children were so easily pitted against each other. ‘I don’t like the way you’re fighting,’ she said to Wadi [Benazir]. ‘It’s bad for your father’s legacy.’ Zardari had been sitting in an armchair in the room, silently, until then. ‘As if there was a legacy,’ he sneered loudly, filling up the room all of a sudden. Everyone went quiet, even Wadi.

No one ever spoke about Zulfikar like that, dismissively, vulgarly. Not in the family, not ever.
==========
30

‘There’s no question, Begum Sahiba [Nusrat Bhutto] was firmly with Mir’, Suhail says to me over dinner in Karachi. ‘But you must remember, Nusrat was the spirit of the PPP after ZAB was arrested in ’77. Zia wanted to split the party and your grandmother played a very large role in keeping it together initially. She stood on trucks to give speeches, led rallies across the country, was beaten by the police and arrested – she was the life force of the PPP in those dark days.

But as soon as Mir came back, Benazir ousted her mother from her honorary party post. She was terrified that her mother might try to overturn her decisions and welcome Mir into the party fold.’
==========
01 July

Instead of entrusting the judiciary to tackle the criminal and political thuggery of MQM, she bypassed the courts and directed her Interior Minister, General Naserullah Babar, to teach the MQM a lesson. General Babar, a cruel man with shady Afghan connections said to be so strong that he often publicly referred to the Taliban as ‘my boys’, launched an attack on the MQM and Karachi’s Muhajirs so brutal that even its name, ‘Operation Clean-Up’, does not do justice to the level of violence the state employed.

Altaf Hussain is undoubtedly a man with a criminal past, but he is not the sole – or most credible – representative of the Muhajir community by any means. The most infamous of the methods employed by Operation Clean-Up was the notorious ‘police encounter’, extrajudicial killings disguised as shoot-outs.

Assassinations, torture, mutilation and blackmail were also popular with Karachi’s security forces charged with ‘cleaning up’ the city.

Herald Magazine revealed that Benazir had attended a political seminar in Karachi and had been angrily questioned over the ‘government’s apparent policy of eliminating suspected “terrorists” by summarily executing them’.

In response, the Prime Minister ‘praised the heroic efforts of the security forces and countered the allegations of extrajudicial killings by claiming that out of the more than 2,000 people killed last year [1995] only 55 were “terrorists” of the “Altaf Group” and that all of them were killed in real gun battles with the Rangers or the police’.

‘She could not have been more wrong,’ the article stated.7 The Prime Minister’s fuzzy logic and her fervent praise for the operation make clear her role; she was aware of what was happening on the ground. She was aware that Babar had turned Karachi into a killing field.

In 1994, 1,113 people were killed in what Herald Magazine called a ‘bloody trail’ that had turned Karachi into a ‘virtual city of death’. The city was on fire. The police acted with impunity and brazenly killed those who got in their way. No arrests were made – not legally at least; warrants were not produced in the event of detentions, those who were seized by the security forces were hardly ever taken before the courts.
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02

Naserullah Babar, the retired army general who ran the operation, spoke to the Herald, attacking it for its coverage. ‘I don’t know why you should talk all the time about people who in any case have a large number of killings to their name,’ General Babar said. ‘Every man killed in an encounter had a record of murder.’

‘Encounters’ were elaborate police set-ups that always followed the same pattern. The police or Rangers would claim to turn up at location X with the intent of arresting terrorist Y who would inevitably ‘fire’ at the police and so had to be killed on the spot rather than be taken in. It bears noting that the dead terrorist was usually shot very precisely, often in the head or the chest. They were never shot in the back, for example, which might have given credence to the claim that they were running away or trying to evade arrest.

Their bodies often bore countless bullet wounds, evidence of torture, broken bones and other signs that their attackers had mutilated them.

In 1995, Karachi’s death toll rose considerably: 2,095 people were killed under Operation Clean-Up.15 The Herald published a list of people killed by the law enforcement agencies from the official start of the operation in July 1995 to March 1996. The tally is disconcerting. Executions take place almost daily, several murders per day. The victims, all men, are described by name when known or by epithets such as ‘unknown (alleged bandit)’ or ‘so and so (MQM)’.

The Prime Minister and General Babar, who both played for sympathy by dredging up stories of how nasty the dead men had been and how much better the city was now that they were gone, rejected the moral ambiguity of the state.

‘We are all idealists when it doesn’t hurt us,’ General Babar explained in his interview, ‘but when it directly affects us, we have totally different values.’

Hasnain and Zaidi [Herald writers] went so far as to visit mortuaries to see the victims for themselves. They discovered that ‘extreme forms of torture’ had been used on many of the victims, ‘with detainees being burnt with cigarettes and iron rods, beaten, cut with razors, having their flesh gouged out and their bones broken’.

The mutilated bodies were, they said, ‘the norm rather than the exception’.
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03

Operation Clean-Up was murder sanctioned by the state. Now any and all acts of police brutality and illegality could be condoned as ‘politically necessary’.

Karachi’s police were getting away with murder. The elite Rangers squads had even more freedom, fearing no repercussions from the law. When Rangers picked someone up, since they were not registered to specific stations or neighbourhoods as the police were, there was virtually no record.

‘While the police also regularly detain people illegally,’ the Herald team wrote, ‘the mere fact that a thana [police station] is a public place makes it nominally easier to trace those arrested and usually – unless they are killed immediately – their arrest is admitted by the police in three or four days.

Rangers’ premises, on the other hand, are considered to be “security” establishments and are barred to the public.’

Tasleemul Hasan Farooqui, a former MQM councillor, was – according to the Herald investigation – ‘one of the lucky ones’ who left the Rangers custody alive. ‘He was dumped in a shopping area in Buffer Zone after being tortured, during which hot iron rods were inserted into his ear and he was slashed by knives on his back and on his inner leg.’

Farooqui had no criminal background; no allegations of ‘terrorism’ were levelled against him. He was a political worker.

After he was released, Farooqui moved his family out of Karachi. No Rangers were questioned for their role in his detention and torture.

Hasnain and Zaidi [Herald writers] witnessed a doctor at Jinnah Hospital, one of Karachi’s two main emergency hospitals known for dealing with police cases, conduct four autopsies in twenty-five minutes.

Post-mortems of police victims were conducted ‘with scant regard for the facts’. Often, victims’ bodies were not brought to medical facilities until hours after their murder, allowing the corpses to decompose and forensic evidence to be destroyed. There was often no effort to conduct proper medical examinations on the victims; ‘the MLOs (Medical Legal Officers) usually just make an incision on the chest and then sew it up to give the impression that a post-mortem has been done.’ A gruesome photograph accompanies the authors’ assertions.
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04

Close to 3,000 people would be killed on the streets of Karachi before Operation Clean-Up was declared successfully completed. These are, of course, the official numbers – they are the numbers of the body bags that had names on them, of the corpses who had relatives to identify and retrieve them for burial. There must be others, unnamed and unclaimed victims of the state’s war on their citizens. People told me there were parts of Karachi, in Korangi and places like it, where bodies were left to rot out in the open, serving as gruesome warnings.
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05

In another deal, made just weeks after Benazir took the oath as Prime Minister for the second time, her Swiss banker set up an offshore company called Capricorn Trading with Zardari as its principal owner.

‘Nine months later,’ according to the Burns article, ‘an account was opened at the Dubai offices of Citibank in the name of Capricorn Trading. The same day, a Citibank deposit slip for the account shows a deposit of $5 million paid by ARY, a Pakistani bullion trading company based in Dubai.’

Two weeks later, ARY, which at the time was known for producing gaudy gold necklace pendants in heart shapes, deposited another payment of $5 million into the account.
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06

On 15 March 1995 the streets outside our house were opened to the public. People came from across the country – from Balochistan and the Frontier and from across the interiors of Sindh and the Punjab – for a two-day workers’ convention. The topics covered in ‘New Direction’ were discussed and notes were made on what form the new party should take and what additions should be made to the draft manifesto. At the end of the convention, the Pakistan People’s Party (Shaheed Bhutto) was launched. Papa was no longer an independent candidate.
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07

My father had been shot several times. His face had been hit, his beautiful smiling face, and he had superficial wounds on his chest and arms. None of the shots in the hail of gunfire hurt him seriously. He was still alive. Ashiq [Jatoi] was sitting in the front seat pressing his palms down on the car’s horn. ‘Call an ambulance!’ witnesses heard him shout. He was yelling, screaming, ‘Murtaza Bhutto is injured! Get help!’

But none of the police responded.

Two of the police officers at the scene, Haq Nawaz Sial and Shahid Hayat, both shot themselves in the foot and leg respectively. The police were going to claim that there had been a shoot-out, but it wouldn’t look right that seven men were killed – five of them on the spot and two murdered later, while no policemen had any injuries. Forensics later showed that both men’s wounds were self-inflicted.

Furthermore, the ballistics and forensic examination proved that there had been no crossfire. The only spent ammunition came from police-issued weapons.

Haq Nawaz Sial later died mysteriously. The police insisted it was suicide, but those close to him insist that he had been killed. No investigation into his death was ever carried out.

Shahid Hayat is currently still employed in the police force, as all the others are, in high-level, government-sanctioned posts.

Asghar says that he heard my father speaking after the shooting. He heard him say, ‘They got us, Zardari and Abdullah Shah’ – the Chief Minister of Sindh – ‘finally got us…’ Asif says he heard it too. I’ve never been able to concentrate on Papa’s dying declaration. They weren’t his last words, not for me at least, they meant something larger. That he was speaking at all meant, up until that point, that Papa was OK. He was alive.

Qaisar and Asif Jatoi tell me separately they saw the police approach my father. ‘We were lying on the road,’ Qaisar tells me, confirming what other witnesses have testified in court, ‘and we saw Mir baba being taken out of the car. I saw blood on his clothes, but he was strong. He got out of the car on his own and walked.’
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08

Ghulam Hasnain, the investigative journalist who wrote the exposé on Operation Clean-Up, was at the scene of my father’s murder. He had been at the Karachi Press Club when he heard of the shooting and rushed straight over to Clifton.

‘We saw your father being led into the police car,’ he told me when we met to discuss the murder twelve years later. ‘There were two or three cops inside with him and he was sitting upright and holding on to the side of the car.’

Hasnain remembered seeing bodies lying all over the road. ‘I used to carry a leather bag with notebooks and cameras,’ he says. ‘When the police saw us, they started snatching our bags.’ Only one journalist who had come along with Hasnain managed to hide his camera and took furtive photographs when the police weren’t looking.
Hasnain, who is one of the most respected journalists in Karachi, tells me that the street lights had been turned off so the junior officers wouldn’t know who they had been summoned to kill that night. I don’t know if I believe that.

‘Shoaib Suddle’ – one of the police contingent – ‘is a criminologist,’ Hasnain says when I voice doubt about the street lights, ‘everything has a reason.’
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09

‘Mir baba was fine at that point,’ Asif Jatoi tells me later. ‘He didn’t even need to lean on anyone. The police’ – Asif remembers the group including Rai Tahir, Shukaib Qureshi and Shahid Hayat – ‘told Mir baba that they were going to take him to hospital and he walked over to the police car. He got into the open back section, where the policemen sit, and the APC drove off.

As it neared Do Talwar, it stopped. We heard a single shot. Then it drove off again.’

It was the last shot that killed my father. He had been injured, but he would have survived. He was walking and talking. It would take more than one bullet to kill Papa and the policemen made sure that the last bullet did the job. The last shot, Papa’s autopsy showed, was fired into his jaw at point-blank range. It was fired, forensics confirmed, by a gunman standing over him as he lay down in the police car.

Ashiq was still in the car after Papa had been taken away by the police.

Asif Jatoi was lying down on the road when he heard Wajid Durrani and Shukaib Qureshi speaking. They were talking freely and openly.

‘Isko khatam karna,’ one of them said. Finish him off.

According to Asif, Shukaib Qureshi then walked to the car and opened the door to the driver’s seat and took Ashiq out of the car. Shukaib Qureshi, all the survivors tell me when I speak to them separately and over the course of a year, was wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. They tell me that he was the only one wearing such protective gear. He was prepared. It is a significant point.

Besides Zardari, Shukaib Qureshi, who was an absconder from the courts for twelve years, is the only accused to have been acquitted in the middle of an ongoing trial.
Qureshi fled Pakistan in the aftermath of the murder and moved to England, where he worked as a lawyer, first in a private law firm and later as in-house counsel for a multinational firm. He returned to Pakistan only after Zardari became President, entering the country as a fugitive and as an absconder from the law who was miraculously spared prison. He, of course, denies having anything to do with the assassination.

Ashiq [Jatoi] was led away, no one can say where. No one knows. When he was next seen he was dead, killed with a shot to the back of the head.
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10

At around 8.30, just before I would make my call to the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad, both my father and Ashiq had been moved and killed and Rai Tahir had made a final sweep of the bloodstained road. The police, Asif Jatoi says, kicked Yar Mohammad’s dead body in the face. They put their boots on his and Qaisar’s faces, pressing down on them and rubbing their heels in their mouths.

Approximately forty minutes had passed since the police had begun their operation.

‘We heard a voice say, “Auw jawano, kam hogaya,”’ Qaisar tells me. ‘Come, boys, our work is done’. ‘Then we were blindfolded and loaded into the police vans. We didn’t know where we were being taken.’ He pauses. ‘I’ll never get that voice out of my ears,’ Qaisar says, dropping his head. ‘We heard it again in the torture cells where the police kept us after the murder,’ Mahmood adds. They were taken to Clifton police station.

Outside the station, all the dead bodies had been lined up for identification. Qaisar was ordered to identify the bodies and says he saw Ashiq’s body among the others. No one would see the body again till after two in the morning the next day, six hours later. It was standard Operation Clean-Up; keep the bodies, destroy the evidence. The street outside our house was hosed clean; all the blood and glass was washed away.

By the time Mummy and I left the house at around 8.45, some fifteen minutes later, the police had removed all the evidence.
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11

After the police fired the fatal shot into my father’s jaw, they drove the police car the few metres over to Mideast. Only two hospitals in Karachi, Jinnah and Civil, take gunshot victims because they are police cases and therefore require official paperwork. These are well-known facts. The police, however, took my father to Mideast. It was intentional. He was not going to get the care he needed there.

They dropped Papa, his midnight-blue shalwar kameez covered in blood, outside the hospital and drove off.

Aneed tells me that he was standing there in the lobby; he says my father’s face and body were drenched in blood. ‘He had one leg flat on the stretcher and one bent, he was trying to get up,’ Aneed says, describing my Papa fighting for his life.

‘He was conscious when he arrived,’ Aneed continues. ‘He looked at me, our eyes met. He was holding his jaw and his neck with his hand and he was trying to speak, but he couldn’t. There was a lot of blood. It hit me, this was serious. You know that sense of worry you get? I got it then. To see Murtaza Bhutto, who was so large and strong physically, like that…’

‘He [Mir Murtaza Bhutto] was trying feverishly to breathe, he was gasping for air, but he couldn’t. The doctors couldn’t put the endotrachic tube in properly, to give air to his lungs, because there was so much blood in his throat. I could see that his tongue had been lacerated. We had to do a tracheotomy to pass the tube in and bypass the blood blockage so he could breathe. While this was going on, he went into cardiac arrest. We had to resuscitate him.’

‘People started asking me where my father [Ashiq Jatoi] was,’ Aneed recalls. ‘And I didn’t know. I knew they had been together that evening, so I found a Mideast worker and asked him what he had heard about the shooting. At some point I asked him what car Baba had been in – I knew there was a convoy – I didn’t know they had been in the same car. He looked worried when I asked and he told me, “Your father was driving Mir Murtaza. They were together.” Still, I thought then that things would be OK, I thought somehow that they’d both survive.’
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12

Asif Zardari was on the phone. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said casually to me. ‘Your father’s been shot.’

I dropped the phone. My body went numb and cold and my heart beat so hard it drowned out everything around me.
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13

‘There’s been an incident at 70 Clifton,’ I [Sabeen] said. ‘Do you know where they’ve taken them?’ I was polite, I had no reason not to be, I was so nervous and scared, I just wanted help. And this cop, he was young and he had a moustache, he turned to me and grunted, ‘Huh, we’ve killed them [Mir and Ashiq] already.’ Sabeen started to scream.

Dr Ghaffar Jatoi, Ashiq’s [Jatoi] brother-in-law and Mideast’s principal owner, was there. He had come as soon as he was called by his staff. ‘I had no driver,’ Dr Ghaffar recalled as I spoke to him about that night for the first time.

‘So I drove myself. The area was in total darkness. There were Rangers, police, I can’t tell you how many, it was too dark to see – the road was lit only by my car’s lights. They stopped me and said I couldn’t pass. I told them I had an emergency, and they still refused to let me go through.’ Dr Ghaffar tried two or three other routes before finally reaching Mideast. It must have taken, he estimates, half an hour to make the two-minute drive from Do Talwar to Mideast.
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14

‘No one knew where Ashiq’s body was until it reached the mortuary,’

Zahid tells me thirteen years later. It was two in the morning, six hours after Ashiq had been shot in the back of the head.
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15

Somewhere around three in the morning, while Mummy was still at the hospital waiting for the autopsy to be completed and for Papa’s body to be released so she could bring him home, the Prime Minister came to Mideast.

Benazir flew from the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad to Karachi. She stopped at her home and then came to the hospital barefeet – a sign, people assumed, of her grief.

She was accompanied by Wajid Durrani, one of the shooters that night who is seen saluting her in many of photographs taken of her arrival, and by Shoaib Suddle, another of the men who participated in her brother’s assassination. Abdullah Shah, the Chief Minister of Sindh, and another accused in the murder, would also be by Benazir’s side at Mideast.

Benazir, my Wadi, would say, years later in an interview broadcast days before her own death, that it was Murtaza’s own fault that he was killed. She changed the facts about his injuries, rambling incoherently, claiming he was shot in the back by his own guards, that his guards opened fire on the police, that Murtaza had a death wish.

I did not see Benazir until after Papa’s burial. Every time she tried to drive to Al Murtaza house where Papa’s funeral was held her car was attacked by Larkana locals, who pelted her car with stones and shoes.

Benazir brought a case against Mummy in the courts. Mummy had refused to go into iddat, an obscure Islamic prescription for widows, who must remain cloistered in their homes for forty days and forty nights,

‘You know why your aunt wants me to do iddat?’ Mummy, in a rare livid moment, cried. ‘So there’s no one there to file the cases against the men who killed your father. So he disappears and his murderers disappear with him.’

The iddat case against Mummy, accusing her of violating Islam, was filed by a Larkana ally of Benazir’s.

Many years later, some five at least, the man who filed the case – which was summarily thrown out by the courts – left Benazir’s PPP and came to Mummy and apologized.
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16

Benazir, since deposed from power and soon to be rejected by the 1997 electorate which brought in her then enemies the PML with a big majority, give an interview to the famous and respected Lebanese journalist Giselle Khoury. Wadi [Benazir] called Mummy a ‘bellydancer’ who came from the ‘backwoods of Lebanon’ and repeated the vulgar claims she had made in the first Sindh Council meeting after Papa’s murder, wildly insisting that Murtaza hadn’t been sleeping with his wife and had only married her as a maid to run his house and rear his children.

Mummy, so similar to Papa in style and wit, kept her cool and responded, privately of course, ‘If Benazir knew what was happening in Mir’s bedroom, how come she claims not to know what was happening outside his house on the night of 20 September?’ After Papa was killed, I never saw that old Wadi again. She was gone.
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17
The survivors [after the assissination] often saw the policemen from that night in jail. Several of them told me, independently, that Rai Tahir, Wajid Durrani and Shukaib Qureshi were constant presences. They ran the questioning, supervised their torture – which included beatings with sachoos, a Sindhi term for the leather paddles with sharpened nails that tear out the skin and flesh – and carried out intense psychological tauntings, like the mock executions.

‘They covered my eyes and tied my hands and a sepah’ – an officer – ‘said to me, “Your time is up. We’re going to kill you tonight.”’ They drove Asif around in circles for twenty minutes before laughing and throwing him back in his cell, still blindfolded and gagged.

When the wounded survivors, all blindfolded, were brought to the thana, he brought them some water, whatever small scraps of food he could find, and something to sleep on. ‘Rai Tahir beat me first,’ he says, wringing his hands in his lap as he speaks, ‘and then Zeeshan Kazmi’ – one of the most brutal policemen who served on the Operation Clean-Up taskforces and was later murdered in Karachi – ‘found out that the witnesses were being given water. He went into a rage and beat up a Punjabi constable who told him that he had not been the one to give the water to the men, that it had been me.

I was on a break, having some food at a small stall called Ali Baba near the station. Zeeshan Kazmi had me picked up, blindfolded, and brought back to the thana. He beat me, knocking out my front teeth, and asked me why I had helped them. “What are they, your fathers?” He took away my gun and suspended me without pay as further punishment.’

None of the survivors were released until Benazir’s government fell three months after Papa’s assassination.

In one of my last phone calls to her, I asked my aunt why her government had arrested all the survivors while the police were free – they had been honourably exonerated by an internal review of any wrong-doing and were back on their beats, not missing a day’s pay. ‘You’re very young, Fati,’ Wadi told me, bristling at the questioning.

‘This isn’t the movies, this is government and we have our own ways of doing things.’ She never answered my question.
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18

Several days after my father’s assassination, Ali Sonara was shifted from his secret detention centre in Karachi to another police cell in Hyderabad, three hours away. No charges had been filed against him and they wouldn’t be for several more weeks. Warrants for his arrest had not yet been produced and no judge had approved his illegal transfer out of Karachi. Sonara was kept a prisoner of the Karachi police till 2003.

One year after his release, he was killed in Lyari.
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20

On the third day of mourning, Benazir came to Al Murtaza under cover of darkness to evade the protestors who had been attacking her motorcade. She said she wanted her mother to be with her for a few days and swept Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] out of our house. We never saw our grandmother again.

Joonam is now held incommunicado by the Zardaris in a garish house in Dubai. Benazir never allowed us to see her again, save for a brief forty-minute visit in Islamabad six months after Papa had been killed. Joonam looked ghostly, pale and haggard. She was being given medicine, I didn’t know what for. She cried when she saw Zulfi [Fatima’s brother] and me – Wadi [Benazir] said the meeting would be called off if Mummy came with us – and we clung to her when we were told our time with our father’s only family member who truly loved and was loved by us was over.

We are not permitted to speak to our ailing grandmother, not allowed to visit her and not allowed to care for her as she wastes away alone, minded by maids and strangers and various Zardari clan members.

Sanam, my father’s younger sister, entered the political fray after Papa’s death when she filed a case against Zulfi, then nine years old, Mummy and me (I had just turned eighteen) for the ownership of 70 Clifton. She comes to Pakistan every once in a while for some official presidential function or other and gives interviews against Papa, Mummy, my brother and me.
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21

Having arrested the witnesses to Papa’s murder, and not the perpetrators, Benazir’s government prohibited us from filing a criminal case against the police officers involved and instead set up a tribunal – which would have no legal authority to pass sentence – to look into Murtaza’s murder.

The tribunal, though not empowered to pass legal sentence, made several important rulings in its final report. It concluded first that Murtaza Bhutto’s death was a premeditated assassination, and that there was no shoot-out and no crossfire.

‘Who turned the lights off?’ Justice Aslam Zahid asks. ‘The police, Wajid Durrani in particular, claimed they didn’t notice the street lamps were off! But we found that it was done on purpose, because only one street, yours, had been affected and once the firing was over, the lights were turned back on.’

Secondly, the tribunal ruled that the police used an excessive amount of force and left the injured men to die in the road. ‘We named the police – Wajid Durrani, Suddle and their colleagues – as the aggressors,’ Justice Aslam Zahid continues. ‘When we compared the evidence of the injuries it is amazing that the police claim Murtaza Bhutto’s men were the aggressors when all of them are dead and only one police officer, Shahid Hayat, is hurt from a self-inflicted wound to the thigh and the other officer, Sial, had a bullet in his foot. Then after the fact, they left your father at Mideast. Mideast was not a hospital where doctors sit. They brought him there and then just left him.’

Third, the tribunal ruled that the order to assassinate Murtaza Bhutto must have come from the highest level of government.

The criminal case against the police officers Asif Zardari and Abdullah Shah was launched in 1997. It is still in the courts today, though the notion that we will ever receive justice from the corrupt and now Zardari-managed courts of Pakistan is not one I place a lot of faith in.

Judges have been constantly changed in our case – sixteen in total, one because she was a woman and the Chief Justice of Pakistan didn’t think she could bear the stress of such a case – and the accused are currently being acquitted in the middle of the ongoing trial, before all the evidence has been heard, before all the witness testimonies have been recorded and before any attempt at presenting the facts has been completed.

Justice Wajihuddin Ahmed, a former Chief Justice of Sindh like Justice Aslam Zahid and the man who bravely contested General Pervez Musharraf’s presidency in 2007, didn’t take a moment to think when I asked him if there was any hope that we would get a free and fair trial. ‘Certainly not now,’ he replied.

On 5 December 2009 Karachi’s Session Courts acquitted all the policemen accused of the assassination of Mir Murtaza Bhutto and six of his companions.

One month after the judgement was passed, former President Farooq Leghari – who sacked Benazir’s second government in the winter of 1996 – came on national television and spoke of my father’s murder. In the interview, aired on Duniya TV, a popular private channel, Leghari claimed that Zardari came to him in the late hours one night during his wife’s term and insisted that Murtaza Bhutto be eliminated.

‘It’s either him or me’ Zardari is alleged to have told the President. President Leghari, now looking frail and old beyond his years, said that both Benazir and her husband, whom he accused of gross corruption, were at the helm of the ‘massive cover-up’ after the murder. ‘He has Murtaza’s blood on his hands’ the former President said ‘and Allah knows how many others.’
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22

The closest we came to each other, Zardari and I, was at Benazir’s funeral in December 2007.

Zulfi [Mir’s son and Fatima’s brother] decided he would be present at Benazir’s burial. He was a family member, the only male alive. Someone from the family should be there to bury her, he said. The other men around the funeral were all political assistants, enablers, criminals, petty distributors and thieves. She can’t be buried by them, he reasoned.

I didn’t want him standing in the six-foot-deep pit with Zardari, with the man many believe was responsible for my father’s murder. People were saying the same sort of thing now, about this death.

In the end, Zulfi was more dignified, more gracious than I could ever have been. He placed Benazir’s body in the ground, said the fateha prayers and walked to our father’s grave.

He bent down and kissed the cloth and old rose petals that covered Papa’s grave. And then he left. Zulfi was alone that day. He was only seventeen then.

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23

One of the four murder cases pending against Zardari in the buildup to his bid for the nation’s presidency was the case of Justice Nizam’s killing. He had been president of the High Court Bar Association at the time of his death and was killed outside his home three months before Papa.

Justice Nizam had opened a case against a property deal that was being carried out in Zardari’s name. A valuable plot of land was being sold through Zardari’s frontmen, without auction. In the public interest, Justice Nizam got a stay order against the sale and readied himself for a fight in court; he was, his brother Noor Ahmed told me, ready to take the case against Zardari to the Supreme Court.

On 10 June 1996, at around two in the afternoon, Justice Nizam was on his way home for lunch. His son, Nadeem, had picked him up from the office as he often did when the family’s driver was unavailable and they drove home together. Nadeem had only recently returned home to Karachi after graduating from college abroad. As they drove towards the gates of their home, two men on a scooter drew up alongside their car. One of the men gestured to Justice Nizam and his son. Nadeem, who was driving, stopped the car and wound down his window. The men fired into the car, killing both Justice Nizam and his young son.

‘The only thing I did, on the second day after the murder,’ Noor Ahmed says, his voice still calm, ‘was this – Hakim Zardari, Asif ’s father, came to condole with me. He asked me, “How did this happen?” In my heart, which was hurting, I said everyone knows it’s your larka, your boy, who did this. I said it to him. Did he answer? No. He just kept quiet. What could he say?’
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24

Even when he had been incarcerated for the murders and myriad cases against him, Zardari hardly spent time in jail – a serious, mortally ill heart patient at the time, he had himself transferred to a luxury suite at his friend’s private hospital in Karachi. That doctor friend was rewarded with the cabinet post of Minister of Oil and Petroleum after his chum miraculously rid himself of his heart problems and ascended to the highest post in the land.

Zardari had bypassed the courts’ standard procedures to have himself absolved of my father’s murder. There was no point in appealing, he was going to be President legally or illegally. It was typical of the way he oper-ated; justice was always the first casualty.

On 20 September 2008, on the twelfth anniversary of Papa’s death, Asif Zardari took his oath as President of Pakistan.

The ceremony had been scheduled for the day before, the 19th, but had been moved on the orders of the new President, who rescheduled his big day for Saturday, Papa’s barsi. As he stood in front of parliament, which had voted him into the post almost unanimously (in the same highly democratic way that General Musharraf was ‘elected’ President), he paused in his speech and asked for a moment of silence to mark the occasion of his brother-in-law’s death.

My blood froze.

It was as if he was taunting us. But that would be nothing compared to what would follow.

On Zardari’s first Pakistan Day as President he would honour Shoaib Suddle, one of the most senior police officers present at the scene when my father was killed. Suddle was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz, a national medal in recognition of his services to the people of Pakistan. Shoaib Suddle was then made the head of the Federal Investigation Bureau.
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25

The Sindh Assembly, chaired by Nisar Khuro, in the middle of the state’s war against Swat and the northern territories that had made close to 3 million Pakistanis homeless, marked the death of the pop star Michael Jackson in the summer of 2009 with a minute of silence. Nothing was said (or not said with a moment of silence) for the many killed by American drones and the Pakistan Army’s bombarment of the NWFP.
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26

Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times past, it feels like the world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away. Sometimes, when it’s this late at night, I feel my chest swell with a familiar anxiety. I think, at these times, that I have no more place in my heart for Pakistan. I cannot love it any more. I have to get away from it for anything to make sense; nothing here ever does. But then the hours pass, and as I ready myself for sleep as the light filters in through my windows, I hear the sound of those mynah birds. And I know I could never leave.
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Disintegration, when it came, was not gradual. The general election of 1970 gave an overall majority to the nationalist Awami League, which drew its power from the eastern side of the country. In the west, the newly created Pakistan People’s Party led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto defeated all the traditional parties. Peasants disregarded their landlords and voted for the PPP en masse. Had Bhutto done a deal with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League and accepted a federal structure for the country as a whole with equal rights on every level, a new Pakistan could have been built.

Instead Bhutto, the most popular leader in the western wing, ganged up with the Pakistan army, refused to accept the majority vote, and gave green lift for the army to crush the aspirations of the Bengali people. The rest is history that I have written about elsewhere. An uprising that began by uniting Pakistan was commandeered by politicians and generals. Blaming India for taking advantage during the civil war that ensued doesn’t absolve Bhutto and the generals. It was a disgrace.

—————–

Neither East Pakistan – Bangladesh as it became in 1971 – nor West Pakistan remained stable for very long. In Bangladesh a group of young officers supported by Pakistan and US collaborators assassinated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family.

—————–

In Islamabad, the general gave Bhutto enough rope to hang himself, and when he refused to do so they did it for him. Both segments of Jinnah’s Pakistan followed a similar pattern: military dictators (at one point there was Zia in both the East and West) created parties, rigged elections, made large amounts of money and ultimately retired. Bhutto and Sheikh Mujib each had a daughter elected prime minister. Benzair was assassinated. Hasina is currently prime minister of Bangladesh. Both countries are beset by corruption and religious intolerance. Socio-economic indicators of progress are considerably more positive in Bangladesh than in Pakistan. The uprising remains a memory.

—————–

The Pakistani dictator Ayub was extremely sympathetic to the troubles facing de Gaulle, and there is some evidence to suggest that messages were exchanged soon after May 1968. Certainly, the Pakistani ruling class put forward the view that the May revolt in France was merely the result of a ‘Jewish Conspiracy’ to publish de Gaulle for his ‘pro-Arab’ sympathies. It is a sad reflection on the political consciousness of students in West Pakistan that in many cases this story was accepted at face value, and I was questioned about it closely by many student militants.

—————–

There were certain similarities between the May revolt in France and the November uprising in Pakistan. In both countries a strongman had held power for ten years with the support of the army, and the political system was that defeat at the polls was improbable.

—————–

For ten years Ayub ruled Pakistan with the backing of the army and the bureaucracy, and with the support of the feudal and capitalist interests in Pakistan. Opposition movements, whether led by students or initiated by workers in the form of strikes, had been ruthlessly suppressed and even a gentler form of opposition by bourgeois political parties had not been tolerated. The press had been effectively silenced and the radio was controlled by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The propaganda of the regime was so crude and blatant that it alienated the people, and one of Ayub’s last gimmicks – the setting up of the Green Guards and the publishing of a little Green Book containing his ‘thoughts’ – had not even amused the students; it had simply disgusted them.

—————–

These ten years they had designated the ‘decade of development’, and as far as the capitalists were concerned they certainly were the years during which properties were developed, fortunes amassed and the Ayub family emerged as one of the twenty richest families in the country. For the people of Pakistan, they were ten years of darkness, oppressions and increasing material poverty – and of intellectual poverty, the result of the rigorous political and cultural censorship imposed by the regime.

—————–

The thirty-three days which elapsed between Ayub’s speech announcing his withdrawal from politics and the military take-over by General Yahya Khan saw the political processes of Pakistan in full play. The right-wing political forces and pro-Moscow groupings were mobilized into a hurried united front to negotiate with Ayub at two successive conferences. These were known as the Round Table Conferences, a title obviously inspired by the conferences which took place in London during the 1930s when the representatives of the Indian bourgeoisie negotiated India’s political independence with the British ruling class. During these thirty-three hectic days the civilian representatives of the landowners and upper petty bourgeoisie argued desperately to be allowed to participate in the running of the state, but their own differences and the predetermined decision of the army to take over power after Ayub frustrated them. The army was worried that a civilian government coming in the wake of a mass popular upsurge would be forced to make radical concessions; and also a civilian government posed a threat to the financial autonomy of the army, which had become a jealously guarded preserve. Therefore, no civilian government could be tolerated immediately after Ayub.

—————–

The poetry of Habib Jalib (the Poet of the Revolution), who had been imprisoned many times by the dictatorship, was in great demand. It reflected the moods and aspirations of the masses engaged in struggle, and though effete critics attacked the literary merit of his poems they themselves stayed aloof from struggle.

—————–

The fact that the masses felt that they, and only they, had brought down Ayub gave them a feeling of confidence that they could act in a similar way with any future regime which sought to oppress them. But they lacked an organization, and this made the army take-over on 25 March 1969 a comparatively each affair. After a historic struggle lasting over three months by the Pakistani students, workers and peasants, there had merely been a change of dictators and the Pakistan army had emerged clearly and unmistakably as the main defender of bourgeois law and feudal order in Pakistan.

—————–

However, there were some important differences between the martial law of 1958 and the take-over of 1969. Though the army was numerically much stronger in 1969, politically it was in a much weaker position and the second martial law was not feared as the first one had been. Even though the martial law regulations were in many instances exactly the same, the attitude of the masses was different.

—————–

When Ayub arrived in Peshawar mass student demonstrations greeted him, and student-police clashes took place all over the city. Ayub’s public meeting was packed largely with plain-clothes policemen, members of the Convention Muslim League, local landlords and their tenants who had been forced to attend, in addition to large numbers of hired cheerleaders. Some students had also managed to get past the security barriers. From the very minute Ayub arrived at the meeting-place it was clear that all was not well. Anti-Ayub slogans were shouted, and slogans against the millionaire Ghafoor who was hailed as ‘sugar thief’. After Ghafoor had finished presenting the address of welcome, a young student stood up and fired two shots at Ayub. The result was pandemonium. Ayub hid behind the sofa on the platform while one his sons three himself on top of him. The student was arrested and removed from the meeting, but for a long time Ayub stayed crouching behind the sofa. After assurances from his followers that it was over he emerged from his hiding place, and soon after, left the meeting for Government House, shattered and shaken.

—————–

The local bureaucracy was quite unprepared for the demonstration. As the Gordon College students marched towards the offices of the civil secretariat, the Commissioner fled and asked the Deputy Commissioner to deal with the students. The Deputy Commissioner found himself in a quandary. He had sent all the available police to the Polytechnic to deal with Mr. Bhutto’s arrival, so he came out himself to speak to the students; but they wanted, as they put it, someone ‘of higher authority’. The Deputy Commissioner then informed them that he had come alone to meet them whereas he could have brought a whole posse of policemen to deal with them. This so enraged the students, not least because they knew it was a lie, that they tore off the Deputy Commissioner’s trousers and spanked him. They would continue to demonstrate, they said, until their demands were met, and they were prepared to discuss these demands only with someone who had authority to accept them. After this the students moved towards the Hotel Intercontinental to go and speak to Bhutto.

—————–

The demonstrator’s mood was restless. Every official car with a flag was stopped, the flag was removed and anti-Ayub slogans were shouted at the occupants. The limousine carrying the Chief Election Commissioner, the man who was to help rig General Ayub’s next election, was stopped and the bureaucrat’s ears were pulled after which he was allowed to proceed on his way. There was no police opposition at this first demonstration, although the students were unprecedentedly aggressive. Considering the repressive nature of the dictatorship, it was a striking display of student power.

—————–

Rawalpindi, the scene of this first important demonstration, was not only the headquarters of the Pakistan army; Ayub had also made it his capital city, partly because he was reluctant to be far away from the army, but also because he was enraged in depoliticizing the nation and Karachi’s strong political traditions hampered this process.

—————–

East Pakistan had always been politically ahead of their counterparts in West Pakistan. The Bengali students had been the first to demonstrate against martial law, but in 1962 and 1963 they had stood almost alone and they had been crushed. In 1964 they had been extremely active in Miss Jinnah’s election campaign, not because they had any illusions about the old lady’s political views, but because she had become a magnet for the forces struggling against the hated dictatorship. As we have seen, her defeat had caused a general feeling of frustration which had affected the students more acutely than anyone else, perhaps because they had suffered most from arrest and torture.

—————–

Ayub himself choses this particular moment to visit Dhaka, thus diverting the entire police force and army units in the city for his personal protection. He was greeted by angry demonstrators and black flags (a sign of protest in Pakistan) wherever he went – in fact, from the airport to Government House and back. He had come to cheer his soldiers in the National Assembly. This pathetic and grotesque body was meeting in Dhaka. Never has a parliament seemed more superfluous, its debates more irrelevant, and the people inside it more isolated, than the National Assembly in Dhaka when the masses were demonstrating on the streets of their city. Among a host of other demands, they were asking for a free ballot, and they were being answered by police bullets. It did not even occur to the people to march to the National Assembly and stone it or burn it down; even the most illiterate worker in Dhaka knew it for the decrepit body it was. Ayub left Dhaka as he had come, skulking like a whipped dog. But he still thought that he could win.

—————–

Nobody asked why or pointed out that the supreme leader who had created this strange bird, Muhammad Ali Jinnah barely knew a word of Urdu himself. English was his favored tongue. At best, he managed a little pidgin Urdu. Quite a few British civil servants and officers spoke it better than he did. Nonetheless Urdu was imposed without any opposition in the Punjabi heartland of the West wing.

In contrast, East Pakistan consisted largely of Bengalis, who were proud of their own refined language, known locally as Bangla, and a literature that was over a thousand years old. It was foolish of the Western overlords to announce that Bangla would take second place to Urdu. When the frail supreme leader arrived in Dhaka in 1948, he was given a reception that shook him to the core: tens of thousands of angry demonstrators, spearheaded by students, hurdling stones at the motorcade and chanting anti-Jinnah slogans, made it clear that nobody could rob them of their language. The police opened fire, and some students were killed, later to be commemorated with a ‘language martyrs’ memorial’.

—————–

Pakistan had yet to celebrate its first anniversary. Jinnah did not stay too long in Dhaka, poor man. The massacres that accompanied Partition in 1947 had taken a heavy toll on him. After visiting a refugee camp with Mian Iftikharuddin, the Minister for the Rehabilitation of Refugees in the Punjab, a shaken Jinnah confessed, ‘I had no idea it would be like this.’ What he had really wanted was a smaller version of India with Muslims as the dominant community, a utopia that was never to be, though a sizable section of Bengali Hindus stayed on in East Pakistan. A few did so in Sind as well. But these were exceptions. The Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province had been through a brutal process of ethnic cleansing.

—————–

The peasants had also been forbidden by government order to manufacture gur, a form of crude unrefined sugar, for their own use. The government was determined that the mill owners make as much profit as possible from their enterprise and gur stood in the way of this. As the peasant could not afford the exorbitant prices demanded for sugar, they continued to manufacture their own. Police seized the implements used to manufacture gur and the peasants surrounded the police stations in the area, recaptured their implements and brought them back.

—————–

The December upsurge in East Pakistan brought the masses of both parts of the country together and united them in a common struggle. It was the first time that both wings of the country had acted in unison, and it must have frightened the regime considerably. Ayub tried to concede to the students a few of their university demands, but it was too late. The student movement had penetrated the political structure of the country too deeply for it to be fobbed off.

—————–

A revolutionary uprising that spreads over a number of days can develop victoriously only in case it ascends step by step, and scores one success after another. A pause in its growth is dangerous; a prolonged marking of time, fatal. But even successes by themselves are not enough; the masses must know about them in time, and have time to understand their value. It is possible to let slip a victory at the very moment when it is within arm’s reach. This has happened in history.

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

—————–

The government thought that by arresting the leftist student leaders of Karachi they would be able to control the upsurge. In fact, exactly the opposite happened. Enraged by the arrest of their spokesmen, the workers and students fought even more violently. In one area of Karachi over a thousand students marched on the house of a prominent member of Ayub’s Muslim League who, seeing the crowd approaching, shot and critically wounded a student. The next day ten thousand students marched on the mansion. An army unit was station outside with a young officer in command. He asked the students what they had come to do, and they told him that they had come to set fire to the mansion. After they had explained their reasons, the army officer was suddenly observed to order his unit to another area. The mansion was burned to the ground.

—————–

In Lahore on 26 January, a large fire was seen burning near the building which houses the Supreme Court of Pakistan; it seems almost as though it had been lit to highlight the servile role played by the majority of Supreme Court judges during the ten years of Ayub raj. In Lahore, Karachi and Rawalpindi students stopped cars carrying leading civil servants, pulled them out and forced them to shout anti-Ayub slogans. Not a single bureaucrat refused, much to the amusement of student onlookers. In Lahore, the most senior police official was stripped of his uniform and forced to march at the head of a large student demonstration.

By now some professional people were beginning to follow the example of the students. Journalists, teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, architects and prostitutes participated in demonstrating throughout West Pakistan. The Times wrote editorials implying and hoping that the worst was over and showed no signs of receding.

—————–

The students of East Pakistan have left the entrenched opposition parties behind both in their programme and action. They have taken upon themselves the most challenging task of leading a political movement. By their actions and determined movement, the student community have been able to infuse unbounded courage among the common place. While the political parties are busy modifying their points and counterpoints, the students have inspired all sections of the people to come out in the streets under their own banner of the eleven-point programme. The demand charter placed by them exceeds the imagination of the orderly political parties. What the students are agitating for can very well form the basis of an anti-feudal, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist democratic movement. Their programme and leadership have largely been accepted by the people of the country.

Holiday, 28 January 1969.

—————–

The Bengali soldiers accused together with Mujibur Rahman of conspiracy in the Agarthala Case, died from bullet wounds. The prison authorities claimed that he had been trying to escape, but the other prisoners denied this and said that he had been shot down in cold blood. Whatever the facts about his death, the killing of Zahurul Haq had an explosive effect on the people of Dhaka. Students clashed with the police many times and Maulana Bashani called a funeral meeting on Sunday, 16 February 1969. It was at this meeting that the eighty-six-year-old peasant leader ended his oration with the call, ‘Bangla jago, agun jalo’ (Bengalis awake, and light the fires). No sooner had the Maulana said these words than smoke was seen rising from the city center. It was pure coincidence, but the dramatic effect heightened the already tense atmosphere in the city. The building which had been set on fire was the new headquarters of the Ayub Muslim League, still under construction, but nonetheless considered worth burning. Later the house of Nawab Hasan Askari, one of Ayub’s Dhaka supporters and a provincial minister, was also set on fire, as was the house of the Central Information Minister, Khawaja Shahabuddin. The masses, too, were enraged by the killing of Zahurul Haq. Government property and official cars were set on fire, and the army had to be called out once again to ‘restore order’. A day later the stat of emergency was withdrawn and Bhutto, Wali Khan and other political prisoners were released. Again on 17 February there were violent demonstrations in Dhaka, and the army imposed a curfew.

—————–

I wrote in a report: ‘By a strange coincidence, I arrived in Pakistan on the morning of February 21^st, 1969. That same evening Ayub was scheduled to broadcast to the nation. He had been unable to meet the needs of a mass movement which had been active since November 1968. He had offered too little too late and political activists waited anxiously for his broadcast. The atmosphere was reminiscent of Paris last June with students and workers waiting for de Gaulle to appear on the small screen. In the evening he announced his ‘irrevocable’ decision to retire from politics. His voice was distraught. He spoke in simple Urdu of his deep love for Pakistan (cynics speculated as to which of his two favorite civil servants – Gauhar or Q. Shahab – could have written the speech. A few private bets were placed.) Ayub is down, but he is out? Excitement ran high in the streets of the main cities. Crowds danced with pleasure. Few ponder about the future. The present is more important. The struggle has been victorious.’

Cf. Blake Dwarf, 18 April 1969

—————–

The peasants’ revolt disturbed the gentry’s sweet dreams. When the news from the countryside reached the cities it caused immediate uproar among the gentry… from the middle social-strata upwards to the Kuomintang right-wingers, there was not a single person who did not sum up the whole business in the phrase, ‘It’s terrible’. Under the impact of the views of the ‘It is terrible’ school then flooding the city, even quite revolutionary minded people became downhearted as they pictured the events in the countryside in their mind’s eye; and they were unable to deny the word ‘terrible’… but as already mentioned, the fact is that the great peasant masses have risen to fulfill their historic mission and that the forces of rural democracy have risen to overthrow the forces of rural feudalism… It’s fine. It is not ‘terrible’ at all. It is anything but terrible. No revolutionary comrade should echo this nonsense.

Mao Zedong, Selected Works (Beijing, 1949), vol.1, pp.26-7.

—————–

Now the peasants surrounded the bureaucrat’s office and demanded their money back – the bribe money only. In every case where the money was refused the office was burned down. In North Bengal the peasants stopped all payments due to the government and some villages elected people’s courts to try the local ‘evil gentry’. About a dozen revenue officers, bureaucrats and basic democrats were tried and executed.

—————–

But the conspiracy theory of historical development, despite its petty bourgeois attractions, is usually false. The army had quite clearly made up its mind to ‘save the nation’ once again. While they obviously used some of Bhashani’s statements to scare the West Pakistani middle class, in their minds the matter was settled. It was only a question of preparing the prologue, and the fact that the upsurge seemed to be tailing off did not suit the plans of the generals. Their aim was to put forward a picture of a country on the verge of destruction, and themselves as the saviors. Ayub had used the same method in 1958.

—————–

The staunchest defender of feudal property relations, apart from the feudal political parties, is the Pakistan army. Since 1947 the Pakistan army and its leadership have rested in the hands of the feudal and lumpen-feudal elements. The officer class has had strong links with the countryside, and many landlords have traditionally sent their younger sons into the army. Even more important nowadays, the army’s influence ensures that retired army officers are given preference, along-with former bureaucrats, whenever there are auctions of state-owned land; as a result, ex-army officers and ex-bureaucrats are a significant proportion of middle landlords in West Pakistan, and the ties between the army and civil service are very close. The army has grown to over five times its since 1958, and there has been an influx of non-feudal officers, but it will be some time before they can gain positions of power.

—————–

In 1968, as we mentioned earlier, the Chief Economist of the Pakistan Planning Commission revealed during the course of a speech that twenty leading industrialist families controlled 66% of the industrial assets of the country, 70% of insurance and 80% of banking interests. At the same time over 25% of the labor force was unemployed (including seasonal unemployment) and the Pakistani worker one of the worst paid in the world. The disparities were becoming sharper every day, but the DAS (Development Advisory Service) could only note in its annual review for 1967-8: ‘Although the President’s illness created a period of uncertainty, progress in economic policy and performance was excellent.’

—————–

However, the rapid pace of industrialization has not resulted in an increase in the standard of living of the Pakistani worker. On the contrary, industrialization has taken place under the direction of the givers of foreign loans, and the tax exemptions, tariff protections, export bonus schemes and so on that they have provided have benefited few but the Pakistani capitalist, who also enjoys the right to charge the highest possible price for the goods he manufactures. Even Gunnar Myrdal was forced to acknowledge the truth of this situation, and though he continued to see Ayub as the best alternative, he nevertheless described in Volume 1 of his Asia Drama the growth of Pakistani capitalism:

“Large amounts allotted for development projects benefitted financial backers of ruling parties. Inflation was countenanced while the Rupee’s high international rate was maintained, distorting priorities and encouraging less essential types of consumption. Large investments took place in residential construction for the upper classes; fortunes were accumulated by building shoddy hotels, running cinemas, money-lending and dealing in import or export licenses. Evasion of taxes was rewarded by government subsidies to defaulters. Smuggling, black-marking, auction of licenses and permits for replenishing party funds, bribery and corruption were rampant…”

Myrdal is describing the situation on the eve Ayub’s martial law, but it is beyond all doubt that it became ten times worse during the ‘decade of development’. The workers in the towns, the urban equivalent of the rural proletarians, are paid subsistence wages; they live in hovels, their children die for lack of food and medical aid, and they themselves cannot afford to be ill. Some are unemployed for years at a stretch.

—————–

This does not exist as an economic force because East Pakistan has not been allowed to be produce its own indigenous capitalist class. The big industrialists established in East Pakistan are all non-Bengalis, and there is not a single Bengali family among the infamous twenty families which control the country’s economy. Bengali politics – in East Bengal at any rate – have traditionally been dominated by the upper petty bourgeoisie. In the absence of a Muslim feudal or capitalist class it was the Muslim petty bourgeois who led the struggle for Pakistan in Eastern Bengal; in their eyes, it was a way of getting rid of the hated Hindu entrepreneur who dominated Bengali finance and exercised political power in league with the landlords.

—————–

In East Bengal the establishment of Pakistan has simply resulted in non-Bengalis, mainly from West Pakistan, filling the place of the departed Hindus. The industrialists used the foreign-exchange jute earnings of East Pakistan to industrialize West Pakistan, and this exploitation was bound to provoke a nationalist response.

—————–

Although the population of East Pakistan is larger than that of the West, the geographical area is much smaller, and the high population density puts continual pressure on the land. (The total surveyed area in West Pakistan is just over 104 million acres and in East Pakistan it is just above 21 million acres.) Most of the feudal landlords in East Bengal were Hindus, and in an attempt to deprive them of their land the East Pakistan government passed in 1950 the East Pakistan Acquisition and Tenancy Act, which forbade holdings of over 33 acres and abolished the agency of the middlemen who used to collect rent from the peasants on behalf of the landlords. As a result of this measure most of the Hindu landlords left East Bengal for India, and their land was either given to the peasants who were working on it or redistributed. Feudalism, therefore, does not exist in East Pakistan.

—————–

The spring 1969 issue of Pakistan Left Review documented some interesting figures in this connection. It reported that the average monthly income of a working-class family in East Pakistan was Rs.78 per family or an average monthly income per head of Rs.17. In West Pakistan the situation was only marginally better, with an average monthly income per head of Rs.17.4. The problems faced by the proletariat in both parts of the country are therefore essentially the same. A greater degree of industrialization would not increase the average wage of the Bengali proletarian by more than a few paisas.

In the early hours of the dawn on December 14, 1986, in a slum colony at the foot of those hills, hundreds of armed men slipped from Toyota trucks into the cold, dusty lanes, their faces and heads wrapped in black bandannas, machine guns slung over their shoulders. They crept into the modest houses, squat installations of one or two rooms teeming with sleeping families curled under quilts and covers. Mothers and children and fathers and grandfathers all woke to a storm of strangers and bullets. The assassins weaved in and out of the houses of factory workers and vegetable sellers, day laborers and stone masons. They were bound in death by their common origins as refugees from India, the trailing wreckage of Partition. The gunmen went from Qasba Colony to Aligarh Colony, named after the university town too deep in India to be given to Pakistan. When they didn’t go into homes they went into shops, armed with Kalashnikovs, gifts of the Russians, smuggled across another border. They knew the unmarked paths well and had an ordered plan of mayhem, some invisible checklist that told them who was to be killed and who spared. Their mission lasted for hours, and when they were done it was past midday, a day’s work of bloodshed accomplished with diligence, leaving piles of bodies strewn on the streets and across doorways. According to the newspapers the next day, fifty people had been killed in the massacre in Qasba Colony on that winter day. Written in the sedate, edgeless prose of newspapermen who had now endured nearly seven years of martial law, the story said only that “an unprecedented massacre of innocent civilians took place in Qasba Colony, Aligarh Colony and Orangi sector 1-D.” It noted that the marauders had been armed with “Kalashnikovs and 7mm rifles.”
==========

The massacre in Qasba Colony, unprecedented in 1986, would be the first in multiepisodic saga of vengeance, of massacres that would pile one atop another until it would be hard to tell them apart.
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The Pakistan that Benazir returned to had changed particularly in regard to its treatment of women, who had borne the weight of an Islamization campaign intended to legitimize the rule of a military dictator. In the five years that Benazir had been gone, hobnobbing with world leaders and sharpening the oratorical and political skills she would need, General Zia ul Haque had passed law after law designed to cut women out of public life and disable them in private.
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The military government of General Zia ul Haque, perhaps too secure in its longevity, perhaps secretly anxious about the crowds that young Benazir could command, watched and waited, interfering only now and then, denying a license for a rally, spiriting away a party worker. Perhaps they underestimated the power of the fragile-looking Benazir,
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Toddlers waddled among the adults’ legs, hawkers screamed at doors, and women gave birth.
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the British Parliament signed the Indian Independence Act of 1947, which divided India and gave birth to two separate nations. It was the middle of the night in Bombay when the BBC reported the news, the street outside the hospital erupting into a chaos of firecrackers and shouts and slogans. The women inside were a mix of Hindu and Muslim, tended to by Catholic nuns in a hospital that had been built by a Zoroastrian businessman and was still run by the British.
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In a land the British had ruled for more than two hundred years, these acts of export consumption conferred quite a bit of status. Every can of coffee, every tin of biscuits was kept long after the contents had been consumed. They stood at attention, looking down on the family and their guests from the top shelves of cupboards: brightly painted Cadbury candy boxes and red tins of Ovaltine holding rice and lentils and garam masala long after the chocolate was gone.
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If India threatened their borders, the women agreed, polygamy threatened their marriages. An Islamic Republic could not be allowed to be a Republic of men, men who could secretly wed again and again and yet again.
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The Muslim Family Law Ordinance of 1961 was delivered to General Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan, by a procession of chanting, victorious women. At the head of the crowd of women was the president’s daughter Nasim, who handed over the proposed ordinance to her father, who then promptly signed it into law.
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Not all the men who came to the new country relished the possibility of many wives. Pakistan’s first governor, General Mohammad Ali Jinnah, came fleeing the memory of one who had, for just a few moments, lit his solitary life with laughter.
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For Jinnah, Ruttie left her dilettante freedoms, the whirl of parties and adulation and admirers. She also left the name that her parents had given her, transforming from Ruttie, the ravishing girl rebel of Bombay society, to Maryam, the Muslim wife at the side of the leader of the Muslims.
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Daughter of one of the richest Parsi businessmen in the city, Sir Dinshaw Petit, she met Jinnah, already a middle-aged man, and fell in love with him. To marry him, she defied her family, who thought he was too old, too stern, and too Muslim. He too defied the expectations of many Muslims by not picking a Muslim girl from a Muslim family.
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At first it was just as it should be. She moved in and changed the décor of his dour bachelor quarters. He tried to be home earlier and to indulge her little whims. But before long he was taken by the demands of leadership, by the drama of driving out the British colonialists, by concerns larger than the world of two that she wished to inhabit. The bloom on the new Maryam began to fade and with it the marriage began to wither. The birth of a child could not save it; Pakistan and Ruttie both seemed to want all of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and perhaps Mohammad Ali Jinnah believed that Ruttie would still be there after he had won Pakistan.
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In her last letter to him she wrote, When one has been as near to the reality of Life (which after all is Death) as I have been dearest, one only remembers the beautiful and tender moments and all the rest becomes a half veiled mist of unrealities. Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon . . . . Darling I love you—I love you—and had I loved you just a little less I might have remained with you—only after one has created a very beautiful blossom one does not drag it through the mire. The higher you set your ideal the lower it falls. I have loved you my darling as it is given to few men to be loved. I only beseech you that the tragedy which commenced in love should also end with it. . . . Ruttie Jinnah died on February 20, 1929.
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She was buried in one of Bombay’s Muslim cemeteries. It was here that Mohammad Ali Jinnah visited her in August 1947, in the days before he left for Karachi, the last days he would ever spend in Bombay. Here at the grave of the woman he had lost, for the sake of the country he had to create, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was said to have wept. One year later, he too would lie dying, far away in newborn Pakistan.
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Mohammad Ali Jinnah had gained a country but lost his love. He was buried in the center of Karachi, and over his grave a pristine white mausoleum of marble was built. Its unblemished dome could be seen far and wide. Mohammad Ali Jinnah came to Pakistan to die, and in death, he belonged to Pakistan. The children of Pakistan learned a lot about him, about his education, his political acumen, his strategic prowess; but we never ever learned about his (non-Muslim) wife, about the woman he had loved.
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From here she would make her last heroic effort, contesting elections against the military general Ayub Khan. This woman who was running for office against men could not, however, command the support of other powerful women.
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The Pakistan she had heralded at the side of her brother as an independent, democratic, and progressive republic for the subcontinent’s Muslims was ruled by a military dictator and rife with ethnic enmities. The spats with India, in 1948 and again in 1965, fomented an attitude of permanent siege that justified routine suspensions of the law and an unquestioning worship of the military. The generals hated her because she touted democracy, and the mullahs now denounced her because she, once merely the sister of a leader, had had the audacity to try to be one herself.
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It could have been given to Dina, the daughter of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. But she had stayed in India after the birth of Pakistan, stayed an Indian and then married a non-Muslim against her father’s wishes. Under the inheritance calculations of the laws of the Islamic Republic, she was not entitled to what either her father or her aunt left behind.
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The darker, smaller Bengali was to many an alien. Bengalis spoke a different language: neither the brash Punjabi that echoed through the barracks of Pakistan’s growing army nor the pedigreed Urdu, peppered with Persian and Arabic, that was spoken by the bureaucrats and industrialists fattened from the spoils of Partition.
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When elections were held on December 7, 1971, thirty-one million East Pakistanis went to the polls to choose 169 members of Pakistan’s Parliament.
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Nearly everyone in East Pakistan had voted for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali leader who had given voice to their discontent and talked of an identity all their own, one that did not force another language down their throats, another unconcerned leader over their heads. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had failed to win a single seat in East Pakistan but had managed a majority in the West.
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It was named after Begum Rokeya Hussain, a woman who had been one of the first Indian women to write a story in English. Her work, “Sultana’s Dream,” told of a world where men and not women were sequestered.
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On the night of March 24, 1971, Rokeya Hall was suddenly silent, standing dark and severe against the rise of the smoke that engulfed it. Nearly all the girls had left for safer places as the news of an operation by the Pakistani military reached campus. Ordered to do so by their bosses in West Pakistan, the Pakistani military were out to capture Bengali nationalists they believed were hiding on the Dhaka University campus. Warned of the coming raid, the girls of Rokeya Hall had left as if they would return, trailing smells of the coconut oil that they used to smooth the braids and knots of their hair and the tea they made in the middle of the night.
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It was late evening when they finally arrived. The men in khaki from the Pakistan Army had already been to Rokeya Hall, hoping for a bounty of virgin spoils. They had ravished the empty rooms, turning over the beds and stripping the cupboards and roughly pushing the tables and chairs against the walls. When they arrived at the door of the provost, they came with the rage of men denied and duped. They fired through the gate and shattered the frail lock on the front door and the glass on the windows. At the entrance to the house they confronted Begum Akhtar Imam, their guns cocked and ready. The girls hid in the back rooms of the house and heard the men say, “Where are the girls?” once, twice, and then a third time. “The girls are gone,” Begum Akhtar replied, “the girls are all gone.” They left without coming inside. It was not over. A few hours later another storm of khaki prowling the dark campus appeared at the house of the provost.
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It had been almost six months since the December elections, six months since Sheikh Mujib and his party had won the majority of seats in Pakistan’s Parliament. According to Pakistani law, this meant that then president General Yahya Khan could invite Sheikh Mujib to form a majority government in Islamabad. His party members would then be able to elect him as leader of Parliament, making him the first prime minister to hail from East Pakistan. Six months had passed, and the invitation from the president had not come.
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If Mujibur Rahman did not become prime minister, Benazir’s father would ascend instead. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s most persuasive victory had come earlier that year. It was rumored that in March it was he who had convinced General Yahya Khan, the overseer of Pakistan’s transition to democracy, to order military operations against the Bangla secessionists. This latter option, he had argued, was better than to ask Sheikh Mujib to form a coalition to create a united Pakistan’s democratic government. It was allegedly at Bhutto’s home that General Yahya Khan had given the orders to initiate the operation.
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Within hours, the Pakistani military had poured into the streets and villages of East Pakistan, rounding up insurgents and anyone who looked threatening—and many others who didn’t. There was war in East Pakistan, and that summer its intensity had reached a frenetic pitch. But only bits and pieces of it reached the faraway public of West Pakistan. Thousands had already been killed by that summer, their bodies bayoneted and filled with bullets and dumped in mass graves by Pakistani soldiers egged on by their superiors. Pakistan had been won for Muslims, but it had now splintered in two. To motivate the soldiers, the generals told them that those fighting for independence were forsaking Pakistan, the Muslim country for which they had fought so ardently only decades earlier. If they didn’t stand their ground against the insurgents, they simply were not Muslim.
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On June 21, 1971, Benazir Bhutto turned twenty-one, a coming-of-age in the impending storm that was her father’s anointment. A few months later, when the summer had released its hold on Karachi and the coiffed wives and tanned sons of Pakistan’s elite had returned from the retreats where they had escaped the tumult of summertime secession, Benazir flew back to the United States to continue her education at Harvard University. When she returned to Pakistan for the winter break, she found her country reduced by half, with her father presiding as prime minister over what remained.
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The fates of all women were attached to those of other women.
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NOVEMBER 14, 1971 The PNS Ghazi had come from America. She was a submarine built decades earlier by steelworkers under the gray, misty skies of the naval shipyard in Kittery, Maine. Back then, in her other life guarding other shores, she had been called something else. But in West Pakistan she was reborn. Her new name, Ghazi, was the Arabic word for “commander,” and she was the first submarine to be commissioned to any South Asian navy, a new Pakistan’s pride and joy, a real bit of the military prowess the new nation believed was crucial for its existence. As a submarine she was not only powerful but also secret, and secret weapons, everyone knows, are the most powerful. By November 1971 the battle that had started between the two halves of Pakistan over the election of a prime minister had become a war between Pakistan and India, which viewed Pakistan as provinces lost from its own pre-British wholeness. In Pakistan’s telling it, the Indians were the ones who had sheltered Sheikh Mujib and his supporters and had poured guns and bombs on the passion of jilted East Pakistanis, eventually transforming a political disagreement between two halves of a country into a battle for an independent Bangladesh. As a year full of bad news threatened to deliver yet more, the PNS Ghazi was given a crucial mission. It was to snake into the depths of the Bay of Bengal to do reconnaissance on the Indian naval ship Vikrant. The ultimate mission was to thwart the Indian effort to hack off a chunk of Pakistan. The captain of the PNS Ghazi was a fresh-faced commander by the name of Zafar Mohammad Khan, part of the hopeful, young cadre of Pakistani patriots who had risen quickly to the top of the military leadership. He left the familiar lights of Karachi Harbor on November 14, 1971. On the Muslim calendar, it was the twenty-seventh of Ramzan, an especially holy day that falls during the last fasts of the month when the Holy Quran was believed to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Around Karachi the mosques were lit up and crowded with men deep into the night, their white, gray, and blue backs swaying with the rhythm of Quranic verses read aloud. It was time for Taraweeh prayers, an extra set offered only during Ramzan after the compulsory Isha prayers, and often stretching deep into the night as the faithful took stock of the year, asking for forgiveness for the sins accumulated over its course. If the imams standing on pulpits did not know the details of the fighting, they had been assured of the villainy of the secessionists; they didn’t need to be convinced of the meddlesome malice of India. From loudspeakers that bellowed out over hundreds of hunched men, from marble-floored mosques in newly sprung suburbs to the bamboo-matted floors of the one on Manora Island far out to sea, they asked Pakistanis to pray for the victory of their troops against India, against the traitors who wished to divide and destroy Pakistan. So secret was Captain Khan’s mission, and so pressing the threat of interception, that he had been instructed not to open the orders until the submarine was well on its way toward the Bay of Bengal. The Ghazi had only recently been equipped by the Turkish Navy to lay mines deep under the surface of the peaceful sea. The first days of the mission went well, the ninety-three crew members following the rigid rhythms they had learned in training, waking and sleeping and praying while Captain Khan charted the coordinates with the precision he was famous for. On November 16, 1971, two days and nights after it had descended into the ocean, the PNS Ghazi was reported to be four hundred miles off the coast of Bombay. Later that day it reported coordinates off the coast of Sri Lanka, very close to its destination. Finally, on November 20, 1971, it entered the silent waters of the Bay of Bengal. The envelope detailing their mission to plant mines throughout the bay had by then been opened. With the bay teeming with explosive mines, the Indian Navy Ship Vikrant would not stand a chance. Once India was weakened, the Bengalis wishing for secession from Pakistan would have no allies, thus preserving the territorial integrity of Pakistan. This, at least, was the tale told to the crew. But the crew of the PNS Ghazi knew only half the story. While they silently scoured the ocean looking for Indian warships, the Indians were planning their own attack on Karachi. By December 4, 1971, Indian ships waited, just out of radar range but close enough to see through their scopes the unassuming tumult of a day in Karachi Harbor, the fishing trawlers emptying their catch, cargo containers being lifted on and off the berths of merchant ships, the call to prayer booming across the harbor and over the sea. The Indians had planned to attack Karachi at night while the city slept and the military entrusted with guarding them could not respond as effectively. A night attack would stun everyone, from the fishermen and the businessmen to the politicians and the pilots. The Pakistani Air Force would not be able to immediately arm their planes and bombard Indian cities in retaliation. At 11:30 p.m., the Indian naval ships eyeing the shores of Karachi finally launched their missiles, aiming them at the city’s Keamari Harbor and warships stationed off the coast of Pakistani naval bases. The explosions could be heard deep inside the city, waking groggy men and bleary-eyed children. Only a few could see the fires that erupted from the oil tankers and warships that had been hit, spewing clouds of black smoke that dissipated into the night sky. Servicemen from the navy ship Khyber, having been pummeled by the missile, plunged into the sea to their deaths. Karachi was under attack. At nearly the same time on the other side of the Indian Peninsula, the wearied crew of the PNS Ghazi, now nearly two weeks into their sojourn in the cramped, metal capsule, still searched for its target knowing nothing of the attack on Karachi. Theirs had been a long silence, tense and all-encompassing. They had looked so long and wanted so badly to accost their target that they began to believe what they may have otherwise questioned. The short bursts of commands filtering over the static of their radio controls must be coming from the elusive Vikrant. They must be close, they began to think. They had to be close, they argued. But suddenly amid this confusion came an explosion. Investigators would not be able to detect the origin of the explosion until its scraps floated to the surface several hours later. One such piece bore the crucial clue, the fading words “USS Diablo,” a name from the past life of the destroyed submarine. It was the PNS Ghazi.
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DECEMBER 14, 1971 It was above all an act of military theater, the first and only public surrender in modern military history. The official ceremony in which Pakistan gave up East Pakistan was held at Ramna Racecourse in Dhaka, and every detail of its orchestration was meant to humiliate.
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DECEMBER 14, 1971 It was above all an act of military theater, the first and only public surrender in modern military history. The official ceremony in which Pakistan gave up East Pakistan was held at Ramna Racecourse in Dhaka, and every detail of its orchestration was meant to humiliate. From the crowds of Indian soldiers, who stood leering behind the Pakistani general signing the document to the single, rickety table placed in the middle of the racecourse ground, all the visuals arranged to insure that the defeated indeed looked as vanquished as they were. The Pakistani general who had been given the task of representing a conquered Pakistan seemed eager to end the ordeal, while the neatly turbaned Indian general seated beside him was deliberately unhurried. Even the land participated in the jeers; the racecourse was where Bangladeshis had celebrated the birth of Pakistan twenty-four years ago, certain then that a single homeland for all the subcontinent’s Muslims was possible. On that same ground Sheikh Mujib had announced the end of that dream and the beginning of the quest for Bangladesh. Now the surrender had to happen on this land that had been three different countries in fewer than three decades.
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The Pakistanis’ roles were parts in a play, allowing no deviation from a ceremony that summarized defeat in a single photograph and a single signature. General Abdullah Khan Niazi, the face of Pakistan’s national loss, seemed uninterested in posing for the camera, his tiny eyes focused elsewhere.
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The language of surrender was simple: “The Pakistani Eastern command agree to surrender all Pakistani armed forces in Bangladesh to Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, General Officer Commanding in Chief of the Indian and Bangladesh forces in the Eastern Theatre. This surrender includes all Pakistan land, air and naval forces.”
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A few days later, another surrender ceremony was held, as if the victors could not sate themselves with this new form of theater that made their victory tangible. This one involved even more Pakistani soldiers, not just the one sitting at a rickety table. This time they were lined up, all still in uniform, in a long queue whose length hinted at the entirety of their twenty-four-thousand-man presence in East Pakistan. On cue, the Indian forces arranging the show told them they must put down their weapons and jog backward, moving backward to convince their foes that they were indeed going home.
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Not only the soldiers turned their heels to Karachi that December. In the shadow of defeat were also hundreds of thousands of Bihari Muslims, who had never fought but had doggedly supported the Pakistani dream their fellow citizens had abandoned for Bangladesh. In the drama of Pakistan’s defeat and Bangladesh’s independence, they did not fit, their story too messy to include in the black and white of winning and losing, jogging backward and forward. These living casualties of war, who had already propelled themselves from one home in the Indian province of Bihar to the independent East Pakistan, now staggered to Karachi. There, in the craggy northwestern edge of another strange city, far from the ocean they had heard it bordered, and in lanes already puddled with refuse, they founded Orangi Town, a slum that would in the following decades become one of the largest in the world. In its unpaved lanes and open sewers, the people who had been discarded by two countries set up shanties and pinned them with nostalgic names—Usmanabad and Ghaziabad and Hanifabad—harkening back to India or East Pakistan or Bangladesh, a first, a second, or a third migration. They kept coming, with bedrolls and broken trunks filled with carefully wrapped copies of the Holy Quran and bridal gowns and deeds to land they would never see again. They kept coming, until Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan who lived by the sea, said they could come no more, that Karachi was full and had no more room for the migrants of defeat.
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where others stood smoking and chatting, oblivious.
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It did not mention the blasts at all, only that the president, General Zia ul Haque, would be visiting Karachi the next day. The morning paper reported the details of the Bohri Bazaar blasts, the first of their kind in Karachi, now a city of eight million.
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her period arrived every month like a red flag of failure.
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On their way to these boys, the Stinger missiles stopped to rest in the city of Rawalpindi, just south of the small capital city of Islamabad, and set deep inside Pakistan in a cozy circle of green-topped hills. None of the ordinary citizens who lived in Rawalpindi knew then that the Stingers were stopping there, and those who did decided not to tell anyone. Rawalpindi served as general headquarters of the Pakistani military, from whose manicured lawns General Zia ul Haque, the president of Pakistan, ruled the country. At 10:00 a.m. on April 10, 1988, when the local housewives were just beginning to fry the onions for their daily curries and the schoolchildren had started to squirm in their seats in anticipation of recess, the blasts began. They came from a place known as Ojhri Camp, a depository for military weapons in the middle of Rawalpindi.
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why an arms depot sat among millions of unsuspecting civilians.
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In the days that followed, more stories and even more bodies were extracted from beneath the shattered glass and twisted pieces of metal, bits of flesh still stuck to them. Tales of the dead were smuggled to newspaper offices, where editors published them in bits and pieces. One official body count was one hundred. The body count based on these unofficial accounts was estimated to be anywhere between one thousand and four thousand people, felled by weapons intended for another place altogether.
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The Ojhri Camp massacre showed ordinary Pakistanis just how little they knew about the deals their military rulers reached with the United States. The country that had been wrested from the British as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims was now a convoy for funneling arms to the Afghan mujahideen, so they could fight the Soviet Union for the United States. The people in the middle, Pakistanis, were an afterthought it seemed to all involved. In the aftermath of that tragedy, few knew what had really happened at Ojhri Camp.
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Military bases were magical places where children, even girls, could ride their bikes to the cantonment store alone. Little reminders of its specialness were everywhere: on the tree trunks outfitted in painted uniforms of green and white stripes and in every bush and flower standing at attention. There, you would never be confronted by boil-covered beggars pressing their palms into your face or glimpse Afghan refugee children picking through the trash heaps.
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In fact, no trash heaps at all were to be found inside the military bases, the rubbish having been carted away magically to some faraway place, where neither smell nor offensive sight could assault the senses of Pakistan’s warriors.
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There was scant mention of the thirty-one other men who had also died that day. One of them was General Akhtar Abdul Rehman, the general of Ojhri Camp and the chief caretaker of the Stingers that had killed so many others a few months earlier, but no one commented aloud on the coincidence.
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Bushra Zaidi
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Like all girls colleges in Karachi, Sir Syed Girls College was a fortress of high walls and gates designed to enclose girls yearning to learn and to keep out the men yearning for them.
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This was Karachi, and there was too little of everything. One or two people died in the path of the buses every day, their deaths either forgotten or forgiven or both.
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Hours after Bushra Zaidi died on the street outside Sir Syed Girls College, the girls came out into the heat, into the hordes of men that still waited at the gates, into the blood puddles that marked the spot where their friends were hit. The police who had surrounded the college after the incident, the police who were refusing to register a report against the driver, now panicked. They had never before seen girls emerge into a street, young girls, college girls shouting slogans.
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few hours after Bushra Zaidi’s death, in the scorching late afternoon heat of a Karachi April, the street was full of angry, young girls. Slowly, the demonstration inched toward a police van parked outside the gate, their every step forward marked with their collective chant for justice for the dead Bushra.
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The policemen in the van were outnumbered. Rather than standing by, allowing the wispy, unarmed girls their protest, they charged at them with the police van. It was mayhem. One girl at the front of the line folded to the ground in the first frontal assault of the van. Then the policemen in their black and khaki uniforms stormed the crowd of chanting girls and began to beat them with batons. These were untouched girls who never spoke to strange men, girls who were permitted to leave their homes only to get an education, girls who asked shopkeepers to place objects on counters to avoid even the barest brush of a male hand, girls who had never protested.
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The policemen didn’t care. They grabbed and groped the girls, their breasts, faces, and hair, intent on teaching them a lesson. They were being taught not to leave the boundaries of their campus, not to ask for something the men did not want to give them; they were being taught the consequences for speaking up.
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Crumpled by their numbers and their guns, the weeping, beaten girls retreated inside the college walls and the terrified college administration shut the gates to hold back the swarm of armed police. But the military assault on the girls continued. Shells were lobbed over the college walls, streaming tear gas through the open windows of the buildings and leaving hundreds of girls crouched on the ground, coughing, sputtering, and crying.
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After the killing of Bushra Zaidi, Karachi erupted. The story of the dead girl and the man who murdered her were whittled down to their ethnicities. She was Muhajir and he was Pashtun; she was dead and he was free.
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NOVEMBER 16, 1988
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Angry Muhajir mobs set fire to Pashtun buses, their burned-out carcasses left charred and sulking at every intersection. Orangi Town, the slum that housed the children and grandchildren of the refugees, became the center of conflict, with Muhajirs fighting Pashtuns and gangs of Pashtuns striking back.
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It was the beginning of an ethnic war that would outlive them all. In the days that followed, hundreds died, and from their blood a fifth ethnicity emerged in Pakistan. There were no longer Sindhis, Punjabis, Balochis, and Pashtuns, each neatly attached to a province in a country that then had four of them. This new ethnicity was called “Muhajir,” or “refugee,” an umbrella name for all those whose families migrated to Pakistan post-1947, all those who now lived in a Karachi straining at its seams.
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Justice for Bushra Zaidi’s death did not come until almost two years later, and it was a justice erected on the shoulders of ethnicity, of who belonged where. On November 16, 1988, national elections were held all over Pakistan. It was the first time Pakistanis had voted since 1971 and they were electing a prime minister after more than a decade of military rule.
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On the eve of the election Karachi vacillated between two powerful women. On one end, at her tree-lined mansion by the sea, was the newlywed Benazir Bhutto, whose party won a national majority of seats. As the sun set that day, she knew her party was the only one with a majority and that for the first time in history a woman would serve as prime minister of a Muslim country. But on the inner edges of the city, in the slums of Orangi, in the squat houses of Nazimabad, in the teeming flats of Gulshan-e-Iqbal and Gulistan-e-Jauhar, another celebration reigned. Benazir had won the country, but she had lost Karachi. The city and nearly every electoral seat in it had been swept by the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (a political movement to obtain equal rights for Muhajirs, migrants from India). Their victory was a victory for another woman, the dead but not forgotten Bushra Zaidi.
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Just when the women from the sky had been covered by the earth, brown trucks with green and white flags arrived, full of soldiers in crisp khaki shouting commands in Urdu and Punjabi, which neither the men nor the women could understand. They corralled the men away from the still smoldering wreckage, their commander conferring with the elder in a terse conversation that reminded all of past promises that had been made between the tribe and the military. This was the Pakistani military’s catastrophe to manage, and the tribe would be compensated. The men held back and watched, unsure but grounded in their places, as twenty-eight bodies were carried from the wreckage into the vans. They did not tell the military men about the two bodies they had buried; perhaps they were scared by what they might do. For three months the military men would not say what happened in Parachinar. The people who witnessed the incident would not tell their story for years. The bodies from the Afghan transport plane carrying thirty passengers that was shot down by a Pakistani F-16 would not be returned until the military could come up with an explanation. The Pakistan Ministry of Defense issued a statement saying “that a plane had been shot down by ground fire near Parachinar and that everyone on board had died.” A press report issued later quoted a spokesperson from the ministry as saying that the plane had been asked to identify itself, and when it did not, it was destroyed.
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Three months later a Red Cross plane carried twenty-eight bodies over Parachinar and back to Afghanistan, finally taking them home to be buried. They took with them a message from Pakistan to Afghanistan. With the Soviets gone and Zia dead, a new Pakistani military was in charge. In this new arrangement, the border straddled by Parachinar was real when the Pakistanis said so, and the night when the Bangash celebrated the return of their victorious fighters was the night when Pakistan had deemed that a lost Afghan plane was an enemy Afghan plane.
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DECEMBER 2, 1988 Dressed in a satiny green shalwar kamiz, her head demurely covered in a white headscarf, Benazir Bhutto, at thirty-five years of age, took the oath of office, the youngest and first female prime minister of Pakistan. The image of her standing next to President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who had fewer than six months earlier announced the death of General Zia ul Haque, was splashed across newspapers all around the world. A woman, young and beautiful, recently married and not yet a mother, was about to lead an Islamic Republic that had for more than a decade been ruled by a military dictator who had executed her father. In the front row of the Grand Reception Hall of the National Assembly Building, where the ceremony was held, sat her mother, Nusrat Bhutto; her sister, Sanam Bhutto; and Asif Ali Zardari, the husband she had married a year earlier. It began, as official ceremonies always do, with a recitation from the Holy Quran. The man who recited the verses looked down at the Quran and never once looked up at the woman who would lead him. It all seemed unbelievable in its speed and cruel serendipity. Just before Zia had died, the most prominent religious clerics had slapped their palms together and smoothed their beards in triumph as General Zia ul Haque had promulgated the Shariat Ordinance of 1988, saturating the bureaucracy of Pakistan with religious clerics. A new court had been created to enforce this law. The Federal Shariat Court’s sole function was to police every jurisdiction in the country for any departure from the word of the Holy Quran and the Sunnah. This June decree was a victory for the mullahs, as they declared that Pakistan had finally been reclaimed for Islam. And now in December they were confronted with a catastrophe worse than they could have foreseen. A woman, who under the dictates of Shariat law could not be allowed to lead prayer and whose testimony in court would be counted as only half of a man’s, was now taking the oath of office to lead the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. While the mullahs squirmed and wept, her political opponents, also defeated men, wondered at the path of compromises that had got Benazir Bhutto to that podium. The oath itself had to begin with a series of assurances that, while she may be a woman, she was still a good Muslim and believed that the Holy Quran was supreme. The headscarf she wore that day, and every day in office that would follow, was yet another assurance. Everyone knew that Benazir Bhutto had not covered her hair until she became a contender for her father’s political legacy, the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party, and now Pakistan itself. The headscarf, like the husband, could have been a compromise meant to make Benazir, an icon of female power, a little more familiar and feminine. Asif Zardari, the scion of a feudal family and who seemed to have little of her ideological fervor or her affinity for the people, grinned widely from under his curly moustache as his wife took the oath of office. Perhaps it didn’t matter to him whether it was money or marriage that made him powerful; all that mattered was the smug comfort that he indeed was.
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DECEMBER 1988 In the dark inner rooms of the women’s wing of Karachi’s Central Jail, twenty-six-year-old Shahida Parveen could not see the new prime minister take the oath of office. The new prime minister had herself spent some time in the jail, between the episodes of house arrest and exile that had filled her life after her father’s execution and before she left the country. But on that day, Benazir Bhutto was far from the grim realities of the life of a woman prisoner like Shahida. Inside prison walls, this day passed like any other, with Shahida and the other women taking care of the children they had been allowed to bring with them. Mothers nursed their babies and played with the toddlers dressed in donated hand-me-downs. The prison remained suspended in the endless monotony and degradations of punished life—time spent waiting for relatives who never came, and always at the mercy of the abusive male guards who did as they pleased with the women, especially those imprisoned for sex-related crimes. Shahida Parveen was on death row, awaiting execution by stoning. A year earlier, she and her husband Mohammad Sarwar had been found guilty of adultery and sentenced by a trial court under the Zina and Hudood Ordinance that had been promulgated by General Zia ul Haque in 1979 to Islamize Pakistan. Their crime was the failure to register Shahida’s divorce from her first husband, which in the opinion of the trial court made her relations with her new husband automatically adulterous. The old marriage law, which was still on the books as part of Pakistan’s civil code, clashed with the general’s Islamic additions; Shahida Parveen had not known that divorces had to be registered, and so for the crime of marrying again, she had been declared an adulteress. The fact that she was pregnant counted as evidence of the act. Shahida Parveen had not known about any of these laws, the old ones or the new ones. When her first husband attacked her in a fit of rage in his father’s house and yelled, “I divorce you,” once, twice, and then three times, and dragged her by the hair to the door, she had taken him at his word. So had everyone else—his parents, her parents, all their relatives and prying neighbors; everyone thought these words sufficient for a divorce. It was what they knew, what the imams in the neighborhood mosques told them: saying “I divorce you” three times was sufficient to get rid of a wife. But the Federal Shariat Court expressed a different opinion. The absence of a registered divorce meant that Shahida had been married when she took up with another man, and this errant wife must be disciplined. In prison Shahida recalled a time when she believed her luck had changed, when a new marriage proposal had arrived a year after she had been forsaken by her husband. The suitor, Mohammad Sarwar, had been a simple man, and perhaps she would not have considered him back when she was young and whole and a virgin. But as a woman abandoned by her husband she was just grateful that her fate had not been sealed. How ironic it was, she thought as she lingered in prison, that by accepting this new opportunity for marriage she would be walking into an even more dire predicament. But her new-found happiness was too much to bear for her first husband, Khushi Mohammad. As soon as he learned that she had married again, he raged and bellowed at anyone who would listen. A woman once his was always his, he declared. One of the men listening to his rants suggested he visit a lawyer. Khushi Mohammad found one who enlightened him about the laws, these weapons he could use to insure that the misery he had mandated could not be undone. With his lawyer’s help he now told a new story. He had never divorced Shahida, he now insisted; he had never registered the divorce, or even said the words three times. The woman was still his. Shahida’s statement in own her defense ended up indicting her, because she could not provide documentary proof of her divorce from Khushi Mohammad. Under the Zina and Hudood Ordinance, her testimony amounted to a confession of adultery, because it did not deny her relationship with Mohammad Sarwar. Once she and Mohammad Sarwar, the man who had chosen to take a divorced woman as his wife, had admitted that they believed they were married, the case was closed, because no further proof that they were having intercourse was required. They were adulterers, and the punishment, they now knew, was death by stoning. But suddenly, just a few days after Benazir Bhutto took office, Shahida Parveen and the women in Karachi Central Jail received news that an amnesty for all women prisoners had been granted by the new prime minister. All women except those imprisoned on charges of murder were to be released. It was a momentous announcement and the women who read it in the paper, the women who knew the laws and cared about rights, could almost hear the cheers going up in prisons, the droves of jubilant women cheering the young woman prime minister who had set them free. At Shahida Parveen’s prison, however, there was only confusion. The released women sat on the steps, waiting and wailing. They had nowhere to go, as the families they had left behind did not wish to take them back. In their eyes these women were “dirty,” and no one knew what to do with them. “Think of your sisters,” one mother said over the telephone in the warden’s office. “Who will marry them if you return and remind everyone of your sins?” So the freed women sat on the steps, and some of them begged the wardens to take them back. Shahida was one of the women who had nowhere to go. If she went back to her neighborhood, Khushi Mohammad stood waiting, ready to exact the bloody revenge the new prime minister had forestalled. The women would be freed, but the law responsible for their imprisonment remained defiantly on the books of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
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Since only the men went to the mosques, they were the only ones to hear the Friday sermons, which during the winter of 1990 kept stubbornly coming back to the subject of women. To the purely male congregation the imam of Masjid-e-Siddiqia and other mosques named for blessings and righteousness and Mecca and Medina, the men preached about the horror of having a woman lead the country. They poised their sermons on the backs of a single hadith from Bukhari: “Those who entrust their affairs to women will never know prosperity.”
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JANUARY 1990 It was not enough to be born in Karachi to be from Karachi. It was not enough to live in Karachi to be from Karachi. It was also not enough to be born in Karachi and to live in Karachi to be from Karachi. To be from Karachi, you had to prove that your father, and preferably his father before him, had been born in Karachi and lived in Karachi, and therefore were from Karachi. If you were from Karachi by these markers, you could claim to be from Sindh, the province in which Karachi was located. If you could claim to be from Sindh, you could claim a lot more—a larger quota for government jobs, a larger quota for seats in government colleges, a larger quota on belonging and so a greater chance of making your life in Karachi as comfortable as possible.
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The domicile noted your ethnicity and hence also whether you belonged to one of Pakistan’s four major ethnic groups: Balochi, Pashtun, Punjabi, or Sindhi. If, like the millions of Muhajirs, you could not prove ancestry in Pakistan, you were left to compete for the tiny number of “merit” seats available in Pakistan’s public universities. In effect it meant that millions of students from Karachi, the children of Muhajirs, competed for a few thousand seats in the city’s government universities, while the rest were taken up by students who could claim Balochi, Pashtun, Punjabi, or Sindhi ethnicity based on their ancestors having been born, before Partition, in one of the four provinces of what would become Pakistan. Everyone else was a migrant, and so were their children and grandchildren.
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On the first day, Said managed only ten minutes in the line before discovering that a permission slip was required, which itself entailed navigating another line and obtaining a piece of paper that proclaimed official permission to stand and wait in this one. This took all day. He returned on the second day and managed to get about halfway, from the scorched courtyard to the stairs under the awning that cast the slightest shade over the waiting men. He had almost stepped inside the corridor when surprise struck again. A top official was visiting, and the higher-ups of the high-ups had decided the corridors were too crammed for making a good impression. “Clear them of people,” they told their peons, who in turn cursed the crowd and cast them away. The domicile window was shut early that day.
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It was he who had pointed out a gross deficiency in the domicile application Said wished to file: all the documents were official but not “attested.” Attestation required a further official stamp without which they meant nothing. “Get them attested,” he told Said. “It can be done with the payment of a few hundred rupees to any one of the men sitting under the trees outside.” Said had long wondered what these men with the stamps at the makeshift tables were
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On the third day, he reached the clerk. It was the chatty one, exuding fumes of coconut hair oil. Slick but nevertheless amiable, he was a man whose position at the window was still new enough to accommodate consideration for the supplicants that appeared before him. It was he who had pointed out a gross deficiency in the domicile application Said wished to file: all the documents were official but not “attested.” Attestation required a further official stamp without which they meant nothing. “Get them attested,” he told Said. “It can be done with the payment of a few hundred rupees to any one of the men sitting under the trees outside.” Said had long wondered what these men with the stamps at the makeshift tables were there to do, and he was about to find out.
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The government-issue clock sitting on top of the picture of the founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and behind the clerk struck 11:45 just as Said took his place before the domicile application window. This particular quarter hour was a delicate one, suspended between the clerks’ tea break and the coming lunch break, but Said did not know its significance. He also might not have been able to tell if the clerk who stood before him was particularly susceptible to the smells of the dal fry and the steaming chicken qorma special already being delivered by the restaurant boy on heaped trays. Behind the clerk the clack of domicile-producing typewriters had already ceased.
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Later it would be reckoned that ten men had been killed for every man that had been freed to obtain the release of Rubaiya Sayeed.
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Hyderabad, Pakistan, had served as the capital of Sindh for centuries, back when the now bustling Karachi was little more than a nameless fishing village. In 1843, when the British annexed Sindh to create another trade route to India, they focused their expansive energy on Hyderabad. It was in this humid city, a few hundred miles inland, where Amir Talpur fought the invading British forces. Rich and river-flanked, Hyderabad had been much beloved by the Talpurs. Descended from Mir Tala Khan, they had arrived in the region with the conquering Nader Shah. Their leader, Mir Fateh Ali Khan, had been declared Nawab of Sindh and hence the ruler of the mud fort that sat in the city’s center. They would come to rule the region for at least a hundred years.
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When the British came, they bought guns with them, so thick walls and strong forts were no longer needed. Pacco Qillo, and the whole city of Hyderabad, languished after the British annexation of Sindh. To ship what they had plucked from the land, the British needed a port. This inland river town did not fit into their plans, so Hyderabad was forgotten, and the attention of the British shifted to Karachi.
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According to some counts, more than eighty people died that day, most of them women and children. The residents of the illfated Pacco Qillo said there had been many more, bodies carried off by the police to unmarked mass graves when they realized they had killed those who never could have fought them. Years later, the Sindh policemen who had been carrying out the orders would also tell their versions, each one insisting that they had been told that a group of terrorists with a cache of illegal weapons had been hiding inside Pacco Qillo. They had believed that snipers were hiding behind the women and children, so they had fired and fired and fired again. The Sindhis and Muhajirs had long had differences of custom and language, but until the incident at Pacco Qillo, few would have imagined the fault line between the two becoming so bloody.
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On the afternoon of May 27, 1991, less than a year after Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi, had taken office, unexpected visitors took the residents of Pacco Qillo by surprise.
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Dream, Royal Garden, and Sea Breeze Castle.
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Paradise Dream, Royal Garden, and Sea Breeze Castle. At these venues, festivities could be bought in packages and guests feted in hefty numbers, increasing the debts of aging fathers and requiring loans against the future paychecks of graduating brothers.
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But if Altaf Hussain was too far away to be caught, most others were not. Ten months after the February speech Altaf Hussain’s elder brother and young nephew were picked up by the military for interrogation near the headquarters of the MQM in the constantly curfewed suburb of Azizabad. Their bodies were discovered in a ditch in the industrial town of Gadap four days later. The marks on them indicated that they had been tortured.
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But in Karachi the searches and the disappearances, the killings and the discoveries of bodies went on and on. The military, it seemed, was not at all in a hurry. On February 16, 1994, in the midst of Operation Clean Up, the dark-skinned, clean-shaven Altaf Hussain addressed a crowded rally in Karachi. In just twelve years he had organized a minority that had not until then had a name. As a student leader he had rallied the children of migrants to organize against the politics of feudalism, patronage, and military domination. Now in his thirties, he could not speak to the gathering in person. As the leader of the MQM, he had been forced to flee the city after a record three thousand criminal cases were registered against him. But even by telephone he was a firebrand. “We sacrificed two million people to achieve Pakistan, not to see our children killed and elders humiliated by the law-enforcing agencies,”
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For every MQM worker whose body was found in some ditch or empty lot, the army released pictures of “torture chambers” run by the MQM, justifying their crackdown on the party. These pictures of dank inner rooms with exposed electrical wires hanging from ceilings appeared in national newspapers and magazines, lulling into silence those who wondered about the army’s intentions in Karachi. Barbarity breeds barbarity, readers may have thought, as they mulled over the news in Lahore or Peshawar or Islamabad over another cup of tea.
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The cranes unloading the American ships stood out against the dwarfish buildings around the port and the worn rags fluttering on the fishing boats. One by one, they unloaded the metal boxes full of materials for war. As was customary, an illicit trade soon began among the crane operators and the customs officials, and soon the American military gear could be bought at one of the many markets that stretched on the road between the port and the city. If the officers of the Pakistan Navy knew about this, they did not say anything. After all, everybody had to make a living.
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Despite these realities of commerce in Karachi, Tariq Road remained the dream palace for hopeful brides and hopeless housewives, maybe not the prettiest or the richest, but those most determined to replicate the patterns popularized in the Sunday newspapers.
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The possibilities came so fast that she could not order them or even taste the individual flavors of each against the more familiar tastes of her own hopes.
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wading through the foul waters left by the monsoon of 2006, the maker of the master plan of 2020 realized that Karachi’s problem was not the absence of a master plan but the presence of too many masters.
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Perhaps then, wading through the foul waters left by the monsoon of 2006, the maker of the master plan of 2020 realized that Karachi’s problem was not the absence of a master plan but the presence of too many masters.
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Schooled well in the art of fighting a living opponent, she battled a dead one, a woman whose every failing had been erased by death and whose every endearment was embellished by an absolute absence. At the store together, if he reached for a jar of jam whose flavor she disliked, she decided immediately that she must have liked it. If he paused for too long in the middle of a conversation, she felt the presence of the dead woman’s words. The assault of the second wife was constant.
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In an instant, there was darkness. The lights on the streets outside the Aiwan-e-Sadr, where Pervez Musharraf, the army chief turned president lived, grew dark. The high-voltage bulbs that shot bolts of blue light outside the Supreme Court of Pakistan went out. The lone bulb in the shop that sold cigarettes just outside the diplomatic enclave also stopped shining. Suddenly, on the evening of September 24, 2006, in the middle of newscasts on television, while dinner was just beginning to be served to senior bureaucrats, and lesser bureaucrats were complaining to their wives about not being invited to meetings where dinners were served, and the clerks of the lesser bureaucrats were wondering why their wives had not yet served dinner, all Islamabad went dark.
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It took a few minutes for the TV and radio stations with their own power generators to realize that this was no ordinary outage; that the lights had dimmed not simply over Karachi or Lahore, for that was not news, or Peshawar, for that was certainly not news, but over the whole country. This was news.
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The cheering banished easily the memories of the two times she had been dismissed for corruption, the millions she had been accused of stealing, and the hundred-thousand British-pound diamond necklace she had bought with the money of Pakistani taxpayers.
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Baitullah Mehsud’s home base was Makeen, a rough-hewn town now sitting in the middle of the two militant volcanoes of North and South Waziristan. By the time he had become a fighter, Makeen was an ideal headquarters for recruiting and training followers and for planning operations. It was these Pakistani troops who would pave Baitullah’s ascent. On August 30, 2007, thousands of men he had culled from the nameless hills and unheard of towns of Pakistan’s northwest fought the Pakistani Army, which was armed by America and charged with flushing out militants from the northwest frontiers of their country. After a battle both bloody and loud, with gunfire and death and uncertainty echoing through the dry, gray horizon, Baitullah Mehsud’s men vanquished their opponents. Not only were they victorious but their army of foreigners and tribal boys also took not one or two but two hundred forty Pakistani soldiers hostage.
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The victory would change everything for Baitullah Mehsud; he became a household name in a country whose multitudes of militants rendered most of them nameless. The vanquished men were counted, recorded, and kept as hostages for two months. For the entire time it was Baitullah Mehsud, short, unassuming, and polite, who negotiated with the Pakistani military over what he wanted, what they wanted, and what sort of agreement might be reached to insure the release of the soldiers. During the entire time, his men guarded the two-hundred-odd prisoners in the massive training facility they and their foreign financiers had built for the purpose of jihad.
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At the end of September 2007 a deal was reached. Its stipulations mandated that the two hundred forty captive soldiers would be exchanged for twenty-five Taliban militants being held by the Pakistani authorities. The exchange happened one afternoon at the end of September, and Baitullah Mehsud himself was said to have welcomed back the freed captives. Each one of the released men, as the Pakistani government would later acknowledge, was a trained suicide bomber. They would not stay in Waziristan for long, for Baitullah Mehsud had given them missions all over Pakistan.
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He did not look at her, and for a long while he did not say anything. Then he cleared his throat and with the softest of voices poured out in words venom more deathly than blows. “You know, Amina, twenty years ago when I married her, I learned for the first time what it was to be happy, to be with someone I truly understood and who truly understood me.” He looked directly at her now, over the empty plates of curry and the almost full bowl of pudding. “I could have left you then, as so many men do. We did not have children and your father could have given you a home.” He stared at Amina, her face flushed as if freshly slapped, and he kept on, his eyes glassy and his lips wet. “I did not leave you because I did not want you to be disgraced, to live like an abandoned woman, and so I . . . we put up with you, put up with you when we did not have to, when we did not need an interloper, someone watching and hearing and listening and blaming. Now she is gone and I am left here with you. . . . Leave me be. We will never move to the first floor, or to the second floor. They are sacred for me, for they are what I shared with her, and even if she is gone I will not let you take what was hers.”
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On December 15, 2007, Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud called together a shoora, a meeting of commanders and allies from all over the tribal areas of Pakistan. The men came from the seven tribal agencies as well as from the “settled areas” of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in northwestern Pakistan.
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They came from North and South Waziristan, from Khurram and Orakzai, from Mohmand and Bajaur. They came also from Kohistan and Buner and the Malakand Division. Maulana Fazlullah’s men came from Swat, they were the men who had descended from the mountains after the earthquake and vowed to restore the rule of Islam to the little village.
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After hours of negotiation, all the members of the shoora agreed to unite under the leadership of the little man from Makeen who had brought them there. Under his leadership, they decided the consolidated organization would be called the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
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the new arrivals who came from Uzbekistan or Yemen or Libya,
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Before the men of the Tehreek-e-Taliban departed to make the journey back to their homes, Mullah Omar, the newly selected Tehreek spokesman, issued an ultimatum to the Pakistan Army. Reported the next day in newspapers and television channels all across Pakistan, the declaration gave the Pakistan Army “ten days to cease all operations in Swat, withdraw all troops from the region, and close all military checkpoints between North and South Waziristan.” Mullah Omar wrote, “Our main aim is to target US allies in Afghanistan but the Government of Pakistan’s ill strategy has forced us to launch a defensive jihad in Pakistan.” If their words went unheeded, Baitullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, said, “the Government of Pakistan will be paid back in the same coin.” The ultimatum’s ten days would be up on December 26, 2007. The news reporters who wrote down the date, and the readers who read it in the paper, did not know then it would be a significant one. No one knew that the day after, December 27, 2007, would be the day Benazir Bhutto, the freest woman we knew, would be assassinated. EPILOGUE FEBRUARY 2014 My grandmother Surrayya died on a Sunday while I was visiting my parents’ home on my frequent trips to Karachi from America.
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Since September 2013, nearly thirteen thousand people have been swept up in an operation to “clean” the city of militants, gathered during more than ten thousand raids into the city’s alleged militant strongholds. Army Rangers, who have now made Karachi their near-permanent home, carry out the raids. They are helped by the Karachi police, whose string of constantly changing chiefs reflects the uncertainty about who really controls the city. There have been five chiefs since 2013. One of them, Chaudhry Aslam, was killed by a huge bomb planted on the ramp of a major Karachi highway. The explosion was forceful enough to catapult the multi-ton bulletproof SUV he was riding into the air. He was killed instantly and the Taliban took responsibility.
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Charles Bukowski was an alcoholic, a womanizer, a chronic gambler, a lout, a cheapskate, a deadbeat, and on his worst days, a poet. He’s probably the last person on earth you would ever look to for life advice or expect to see in any sort of self-help book. Which is why he’s the perfect place to start.
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Bukowski had a day job as a letter-filer at a post office. He got paid shit money and spent most of it on booze. He gambled away the rest at the racetrack. At night, he would drink alone and sometimes hammer out poetry on his beat-up old typewriter. Often, he’d wake up on the floor, having passed out the night before. Thirty years went by like this, most of it a meaningless blur of alcohol, drugs, gambling, and prostitutes. Then, when Bukowski was fifty, after a lifetime of failure and self-loathing, an editor at a small independent publishing house took a strange interest in him.
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Upon signing the contract, Bukowski wrote his first novel in three weeks. It was called simply Post Office. In the dedication, he wrote, “Dedicated to nobody.”
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See, despite the book sales and the fame, Bukowski was a loser. He knew it. And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was.
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This is the real story of Bukowski’s success: his comfort with himself as a failure.
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Bukowski didn’t give a fuck about success. Even after his fame, he still showed up to poetry readings hammered and verbally abused people in his audience. He still exposed himself in public and tried to sleep with every woman he could find. Fame and success didn’t make him a better person. Nor was it by becoming a better person that he became famous and successful.
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Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that’s likely to save the planet one day.
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You stand in front of the mirror and repeat affirmations saying that you’re beautiful because you feel as though you’re not beautiful already.
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You follow dating and relationship advice because you feel that you’re unlovable already.
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After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.
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There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident. A rich woman doesn’t feel a need to convince anybody that she’s rich. Either you are or you are not. And if you’re dreaming of something all the time, then you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not that.
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The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more.
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You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time. Give a fuck about a new TV. Give a fuck about having a better vacation than your coworkers. Give a fuck about buying that new lawn ornament. Give a fuck about having the right kind of selfie stick.
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The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
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You get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you’re so anxious. Now you’re becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh no! Doubly anxious! Now you’re anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Quick, where’s the whiskey?
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Or let’s say you have an anger problem. You get pissed off at the stupidest, most inane stuff, and you have no idea why. And the fact that you get pissed off so easily starts to piss you off even more. And then, in your petty rage, you realize that being angry all the time makes you a shallow and mean person, and you hate this; you hate it so much that you get angry at yourself. Now look at you: you’re angry at yourself getting angry about being angry. Fuck you, wall. Here, have a fist.
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Or you feel so guilty for every mistake you make that you begin to feel guilty about how guilty you’re feeling.
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Or you get sad and alone so often that it makes you feel even more sad and alone just thinking about it.
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Welcome to the Feedback Loop from Hell.
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“God, I do the Feedback Loop all the time—I’m such a loser for doing it. I should stop. Oh my God, I feel like such a loser for calling myself a loser. I should stop calling myself a loser. Ah, fuck! I’m doing it again! See? I’m a loser! Argh!”
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But now? Now if you feel like shit for even five minutes, you’re bombarded with 350 images of people totally happy and having amazing fucking lives, and it’s impossible to not feel like there’s something wrong with you.
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Now here’s the problem: Our society today, through the wonders of consumer culture and hey-look-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours social media, has bred a whole generation of people who believe that having these negative experiences—anxiety, fear, guilt, etc.—is totally not okay. I mean, if you look at your Facebook feed, everybody there is having a fucking grand old time.
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By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell; you say to yourself, “I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?” And then, as if sprinkled by magic fuck-giving fairy dust, you stop hating yourself for feeling so bad.
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George Orwell said that to see what’s in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle. Well, the solution to our stress and anxiety is right there in front of our noses, and we’re too busy watching porn and advertisements for ab machines that don’t work, wondering why we’re not banging a hot blonde with a rocking six-pack, to notice.
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We joke online about “first-world problems,” but we really have become victims of our own success. Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.
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The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
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The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make.
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As the existential philosopher Albert Camus said (and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on LSD at the time): “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
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Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
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Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
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To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.
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In my life, I have given a fuck about many things. I have also not given a fuck about many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.
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Meanwhile, our credit cards are maxed out, our dog hates us, and Junior is snorting meth in the bathroom, yet we’re getting pissed off about nickels and Everybody Loves Raymond.
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We give too many fucks when a show we liked was canceled on TV.
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Look, this is how it works. You’re going to die one day. I know that’s kind of obvious, but I just wanted to remind you in case you’d forgotten. You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon.
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Look, this is how it works. You’re going to die one day. I know that’s kind of obvious, but I just wanted to remind you in case you’d forgotten. You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.
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Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
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People who are indifferent are lame and scared. They’re couch potatoes and Internet trolls.
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They reserve their fucks for what truly matters.
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They reserve their fucks for what truly matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. Burritos. And an occasional lawsuit or two.
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Mark Manson)
– Your Highlight on Location 252-253 | Added on Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:24:25 AM

The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.
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Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
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Imagine you’re at a grocery store, and you watch an elderly lady scream at the cashier, berating him for not accepting her thirty-cent coupon. Why does this lady give a fuck? It’s just thirty cents. I’ll tell you why: That lady probably doesn’t have anything better to do with her days than to sit at home cutting out coupons. She’s old and lonely. Her kids are dickheads and never visit. She hasn’t had sex in over thirty years. She can’t fart without extreme lower-back pain. Her pension is on its last legs, and she’s probably going to die in a diaper thinking she’s in Candy Land. So she snips coupons. That’s all she’s got.
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The problem with people who hand out fucks like ice cream at a goddamn summer camp is that they don’t have anything more fuck-worthy to dedicate their fucks to.
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I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some. I think what most people—especially educated, pampered middle-class white people—consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.
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It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.
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Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
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Rejections that were painful in the moment have actually worked out for the best.
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Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.
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life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention.
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“The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.”
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Emotions Are Overrated
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negative emotions are a call to action.
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Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.
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we shouldn’t always trust our own emotions. In fact, I believe we should make a habit of questioning them.
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Remember, pain serves a purpose.
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Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.
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else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate.
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This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.
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A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”
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Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles. Whether you suffer from anxiety or loneliness or obsessive-compulsive disorder or a dickhead boss who ruins half of your waking hours every day, the solution lies in the acceptance and active engagement of that negative experience—not the avoidance of it, not the salvation from it.
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You can’t win if you don’t play.
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I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly.
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I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.
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It turns out that teaching people to believe they’re exceptional and to feel good about themselves no matter what doesn’t lead to a population full of Bill Gateses and Martin Luther Kings. It leads to a population full of Jimmys.
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After all, it takes a lot of energy and work to convince yourself that your shit doesn’t stink, especially when you’ve actually been living in a toilet.
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My family stonewalls the way Warren Buffett makes money or Jenna Jameson fucks: we’re champions at it.
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My trauma had revolved around intimacy and acceptance, so I felt a constant need to overcompensate, to prove to myself that I was loved and accepted at all times. And as a result, I soon took to chasing women the same way a cocaine addict takes to a snowman made out of cocaine: I made sweet love to it, and then promptly suffocated myself in it.
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It wasn’t so much the sex I craved, although the sex was fun. It was the validation. I was wanted; I was loved; for the first time since I could remember, I was worthy. My craving for validation quickly fed into a mental habit of self-aggrandizing and overindulgence. I felt entitled to say or do whatever I wanted, to break people’s trust, to ignore people’s feelings, and then justify it later with shitty, half-assed apologies.
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The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways: 1.   I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment. 2.   I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
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We can then say that it’s a statistical improbability that any single person will be an extraordinary performer in all areas of life, or even in many areas of their life. Brilliant businesspeople are often fuckups in their personal lives. Extraordinary athletes are often shallow and as dumb as a lobotomized rock. Many celebrities are probably just as clueless about life as the people who gawk at them and follow their every move.
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We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people.
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Having the Internet, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and access to five hundred–plus channels of television is amazing. But our attention is limited. There’s no way we can process the tidal waves of information flowing past us constantly. Therefore, the only zeroes and ones that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional pieces of information—those in the 99.999th percentile.
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Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. Others do it by taking off across the world to save starving babies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning every award. Others do it by shooting up a school. Others do it by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes.
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Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.
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Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve. When a culture’s standard of success is to “be extraordinary,” it then becomes better to be at the extreme low end of the bell curve than to be in the middle, because at least there you’re still special and deserve attention. Many people choose this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miserable, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized.
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It has become an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary. Celebrities say it. Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even Oprah says it (so it must be true). Each and every one of us can be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness. The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory—after all, if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary—is missed by most people. And instead of questioning what we actually deserve or don’t deserve, we eat the message up and ask for more.
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Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless. And this mindset can quickly turn dangerous, to both yourself and others.
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All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s
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In the closing months of 1944, after almost
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These men both chose how they wished to suffer. Hiroo Onoda chose to suffer for loyalty to a dead empire. Suzuki chose to suffer for adventure, no matter how ill-advised. To both men, their suffering meant something; it fulfilled some greater cause. And because it meant something, they were able to endure it, or perhaps even enjoy it.
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If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
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Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times.
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HER. What’s wrong? ME. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all. HER. No, something’s wrong. Tell me. ME. I’m fine. Really. HER. Are you sure? You look upset. ME, with nervous laughter. Really? No, I’m okay, seriously. [Thirty minutes later . . . ] ME. . . . And that’s why I’m so fucking pissed off! He just acts as if I don’t exist half the time.
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Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. “This is when I feel happy.” “This makes me feel sad.” “This gives me hope.”
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The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions.
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The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?
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Take a moment and think of something that’s really bugging you. Now ask yourself why it bugs you. Chances are the answer will involve a failure of some sort. Then take that failure and ask why it seems “true” to you. What if that failure wasn’t really a failure? What if you’ve been looking at it the wrong way?
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He’d bathe in the tears of his betrayers, each tear wiped dry by a crisp, clean hundred-dollar bill.
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In 1983, a talented young guitarist was kicked out of his band in the worst possible way. The band had just been signed to a record deal, and they were about to record their first album. But a couple days before recording began, the band showed the guitarist the door—no warning, no discussion, no dramatic blowout; they literally woke him up one day by handing him a bus ticket home. As he sat on the bus back to Los Angeles from New York, the guitarist kept asking himself: How did this happen? What did I do wrong? What will I do now? Record contracts didn’t exactly fall out of the sky, especially for raucous, upstart metal bands. Had he missed his one and only shot? But by the time the bus hit L.A., the guitarist had gotten over his self-pity and had vowed to start a new band. He decided that this new band would be so successful that his old band would forever regret their decision. He would become so famous that they would be subjected to decades of seeing him on TV, hearing him on the radio, seeing posters of him in the streets and pictures of him in magazines. They’d be flipping burgers somewhere, loading vans from their shitty club gigs, fat and drunk with their ugly wives, and he’d be rocking out in front of stadium crowds live on television. He’d bathe in the tears of his betrayers, each tear wiped dry by a crisp, clean hundred-dollar bill. And so the guitarist worked as if possessed by a musical demon. He spent months recruiting the best musicians he could find—far better musicians than his previous bandmates. He wrote dozens of songs and practiced religiously. His seething anger fueled his ambition; revenge became his muse. Within a couple years, his new band had signed a record deal of their own, and a year after that, their first record would go gold. The guitarist’s name was Dave Mustaine, and the new band he formed was the legendary heavy-metal band Megadeth. Megadeth would go on to sell over 25 million albums
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Unfortunately, the band he was kicked out of was Metallica, which has sold over 180 million albums worldwide. Metallica is considered by many to be one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
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And because of this, in a rare intimate interview in 2003, a tearful Mustaine admitted that he couldn’t help but still consider himself a failure. Despite all that he had accomplished, in his mind he would always be the guy who got kicked out of Metallica.
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We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And because we are apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status. The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
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Dave Mustaine, whether he realized it or not, chose to measure himself by whether he was more successful and popular than Metallica. The experience of getting thrown out of his former band was so painful for him that he adopted “success relative to Metallica” as the metric by which to measure himself and his music career.
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If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
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It was 1962 and there was a buzz around an up-and-coming band from Liverpool, England. This band had funny haircuts and an even funnier name, but their music was undeniably good, and the record industry was finally taking notice. There was John, the lead singer and songwriter; Paul, the boyish-faced romantic bass player; George, the rebellious lead guitar player. And then there was the drummer.
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He was considered the best-looking of the bunch—the girls all went wild for him, and it was his face that began to appear in the magazines first.
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His name was Pete Best.
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And in 1962, after landing their first record contract, the other three members of the Beatles quietly got together and asked their manager, Brian Epstein, to fire him.
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Epstein finally called Best to his office. There, the manager unceremoniously told him to piss off and find another band. He gave no reason, no explanation, no condolences—just told him that the other guys wanted him out of the group, so, uh, best of luck.
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As a replacement, the band brought in some oddball named Ringo Starr. Ringo was older and had a big, funny nose. Ringo agreed to get the same ugly haircut as John, Paul, and George, and insisted on writing songs about octopuses and submarines. The other guys said, Sure, fuck it, why not?
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Within six months of Best’s firing, Beatlemania had erupted, making John, Paul, George, and Pete Ringo arguably four of the most famous faces on the entire planet.
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Meanwhile, Best understandably fell into a deep depression and spent a lot of time doing what any Englishman will do if you give him a reason to: drink.
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In an interview in 1994, Best said, “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles.” What the hell? Best explained that the circumstances of his getting kicked out of the Beatles ultimately led him to meet his wife. And then his marriage led him to having children. His values changed. He began to measure his life differently. Fame and glory would have been nice, sure—but he decided that what he already had was more important: a big and loving family, a stable marriage, a simple life. He even still got to play drums, touring Europe and recording albums well into the 2000s. So what was really lost? Just a lot of attention and adulation, whereas what was gained meant so much more to him.
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These stories suggest that some values and metrics are better than others. Some lead to good problems that are easily and regularly solved. Others lead to bad problems that are not easily and regularly solved.
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Shitty Values
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1.   Pleasure. Pleasure is great, but it’s a horrible value to prioritize your life around. Ask any drug addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer who shattered her family and lost her children whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. Ask a man who almost ate himself to death how pleasure helped him solve his problems.                Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose.                And yet, pleasure is what’s marketed to us, twenty-four/seven. It’s what we fixate on. It’s what we use to numb and distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary in life (in certain doses), isn’t, by itself, sufficient.                Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right (the other values and metrics), then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product.
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2.   Material Success. Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make or what kind of car they drive or whether their front lawn is greener and prettier than the next-door neighbor’s.                Research shows that once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food, shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. So if you’re starving and living on the street in the middle of India, an extra ten thousand dollars a year would affect your happiness a lot. But if you’re sitting pretty in the middle class in a developed country, an extra ten thousand dollars per year won’t affect anything much—meaning that you’re killing yourself working overtime and weekends for basically nothing.                The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion. When people measure themselves not by their behavior, but by the status symbols they’re able to collect, then not only are they shallow, but they’re probably assholes as well.
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3.   Always Being Right.Our brains are inefficient machines. We consistently make poor assumptions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts, give in to cognitive biases, and make decisions based on our emotional whims. As humans, we’re wrong pretty much constantly, so if your metric for life success is to be right—well, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalizing
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4.   Staying Positive. Then there are those who measure their lives by the ability to be positive about, well, pretty much everything. Lost your job? Great! That’s an opportunity to explore your passions. Husband cheated on you with your sister? Well, at least you’re learning what you really mean to the people around you. Child dying of throat cancer? At least you don’t have to pay for college anymore! While there is something to be said for “staying on the sunny side of life,” the truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it.
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As Freud once said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
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On the contrary, Pete Best pulled a switcheroo. Despite being depressed and distraught by getting kicked out of the Beatles, as he grew older he learned to reprioritize what he cared about and was able to measure his life in a new light. Because of this, Best grew into a happy and healthy old man, with an easy life and great family—things that, ironically, the four Beatles would spend decades struggling to achieve or maintain.
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prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.
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These five values are both unconventional and uncomfortable. But, to me, they are life-changing. The first, which we’ll look at in the next chapter, is a radical form of responsibility: taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at fault. The second is uncertainty: the acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs. The next is failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon. The fourth is rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life. The final value is the contemplation of one’s own mortality; this one is crucial, because paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in proper perspective. CHAPTER 5 You Are Always Choosing Imagine that somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you that you have to run 26.2 miles in under five hours, or else he’ll kill you and your entire family.
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Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
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Exact same 26.2 miles. Exact same person running them. Exact same pain coursing through your exact same legs. But when you chose it freely and prepared for it, it was a glorious and important milestone in your life. When it was forced upon you against your will, it was one of the most terrifying and painful experiences of your life.
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When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.
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After touring a psychiatric facility one day, James mused in his diary that he felt he had more in common with the patients than with the doctors.
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Despite all the advantages and opportunities he’d been given in life, everything had fallen apart. The only constants in his life seemed to be suffering and disappointment. James fell into a deep depression and began making plans to take his own life. But one night, while reading lectures by the philosopher Charles Peirce, James decided to conduct a little experiment. In his diary, he wrote that he would spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he would do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. If nothing improved in that year, then it would be apparent that he was truly powerless to the circumstances around him, and then he would take his own life. The punch line? William James went on to become the father of American psychology. His work has been translated into a bazillion languages, and he’s regarded as one of the most influential intellectuals/philosophers/psychologists of his generation. He would go on to teach at Harvard and would tour much of the United States and Europe giving lectures. He would marry and have five children (one of whom, Henry, would become a famous biographer and win a Pulitzer Prize). James would later refer to his little experiment as his “rebirth,” and would credit it with everything that he later accomplished in his life.
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We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
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The point is, we are always choosing, whether we recognize it or not. Always.
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The real question is, What are we choosing to give a fuck about?
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It comes back to how, in reality, there is no such thing as not giving a single fuck. It’s impossible. We must all give a fuck about something. To not give a fuck about anything is still to give a fuck about something.
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“With great responsibility comes great power.”
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Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.
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Ultimately, while she was to blame for how I felt, she was never responsible for how I felt. I was.
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people don’t just magically cheat on somebody they’ve been with unless they are unhappy for some reason.
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And you know what? My ex leaving me, while one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had, was also one of the most important and influential experiences of my life. I credit it with inspiring a significant amount of personal growth. I learned more from that single problem than dozens of my successes combined.
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In 2008, the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley, a remote part of northeastern Pakistan. They quickly implemented their Muslim extremist agenda. No television. No films. No women outside the house without a male escort. No girls attending school. By 2009, an eleven-year-old Pakistani girl named Malala Yousafzai had begun to speak out against the school ban. She continued to attend her local school, risking both her and her father’s lives; she also attended conferences in nearby cities. She wrote online, “How dare the Taliban take away my right for education?” In 2012, at the age of fourteen, she was shot in the face as she rode the bus home from school one day. A masked Taliban soldier armed with a rifle boarded the bus and asked, “Who is Malala? Tell me, or I will shoot everyone here.” Malala identified herself (an amazing choice in and of itself), and the man shot her in the head in front of all the other passengers. Malala went into a coma and almost died. The Taliban stated publicly that if she somehow survived the attempt, they would kill both her and her father. Today, Malala is still alive. She still speaks out against violence and oppression toward women in Muslim countries, now as a best-selling author. In 2014 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. It would seem that being shot in the face only gave her a larger audience and more courage than before. It would have been easy for her to lie down and say, “I can’t do anything,” or “I have no choice.” That, ironically, would still have been her choice. But she chose the opposite.
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“Victimhood chic” is in style on both the right and the left today, among both the rich and the poor. In fact, this may be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously. And they’re all riding the highs of the moral indignation that comes along with it.
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Right now, anyone who is offended about anything—whether it’s the fact that a book about racism was assigned in a university class, or that Christmas trees were banned at the local mall, or the fact that taxes were raised half a percent on investment funds—feels as though they’re being oppressed in some way and therefore deserve to be outraged and to have a certain amount of attention.
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The current media environment both encourages and perpetuates these reactions because, after all, it’s good for business. The writer and media commentator Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from real societal problems. It’s no wonder we’re more politically polarized than ever before.
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The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. The more people there are who proclaim themselves victims over tiny infractions, the harder it becomes to see who the real victims actually are.
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When I was with my first girlfriend, I thought we would be together forever. And then, when that relationship ended, I thought I’d never feel the same way about a woman again. And then when I felt the same way about a woman again, I thought that love sometimes just wasn’t enough. And then I realized that each individual gets to decide what is “enough,” and that love can be whatever we let it be.
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Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly less wrong than that, and then to even less wrong than that, and so on. We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without actually ever reaching truth or perfection.
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Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.
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They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything.
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Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years ago, I imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our certainties today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives. They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will laugh at our rituals and superstitions, our worries and our wars; they will gawk at our cruelty. They will study our art and argue over our history. They will understand truths about us of which none of us are yet aware. And they, too, will be wrong. Just less wrong than we were.
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Try this. Take a random person and put them in a room with some buttons to push. Then tell them that if they do something specific—some undefined something that they have to figure out—a light will flash on indicating that they’ve won a point. Then tell them to see how many points they can earn within a thirty-minute period. When psychologists have done this, what happens is what you might expect. People sit down and start mashing buttons at random until eventually the light comes on to tell them they got a point. Logically, they then try repeating whatever they were doing to get more points. Except now the light’s not coming on. So they start experimenting with more complicated sequences—press this button three times, then this button once, then wait five seconds, and—ding! Another point. But eventually that stops working. Perhaps it doesn’t have to do with buttons at all, they think. Perhaps it has to do with how I’m sitting. Or what I’m touching. Maybe it has to do with my feet. Ding! Another point. Yeah, maybe it’s my feet and then I press another button. Ding! Generally, within ten to fifteen minutes each person has figured out the specific sequence of behaviors required to net more points. It’s usually something weird like standing on one foot or memorizing a long sequence of buttons pressed in a specific amount of time while facing a certain direction. But here’s the funny part: the points really are random. There’s no sequence; there’s no pattern. Just a light that keeps coming on with a ding, and people doing cartwheels thinking that what they’re doing is giving them points. Sadism aside, the point of the experiment is to show how quickly the human mind is capable of coming up with and believing in a bunch of bullshit that isn’t real. And it turns out, we’re all really good at it. Every person leaves that room convinced that he or she nailed the experiment and won the game. They all believe that they discovered the “perfect” sequence of buttons that earned them their points. But the methods they come up with are as unique as the individuals themselves.
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Everything from the words on this page, to the grammatical concepts you use to decipher them, to the dirty thoughts your mind wanders into when my writing becomes boring or repetitive—each of these thoughts, impulses, and perceptions is composed of thousands upon thousands of neural connections, firing in conjunction, alighting your mind in a blaze of knowledge and understanding.
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The comedian Emo Philips once said, “I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”
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But perhaps the answer is to trust yourself less. After all, if our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more.
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Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
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Even a behavior as simple as sneaking a peek at your boyfriend’s text messages or asking a friend what people are saying about you is driven by insecurity and that aching desire to be certain.
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You can check your boyfriend’s text messages and find nothing, but that’s rarely the end of it; then you may start wondering if he has a second phone.
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Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill up the time available for its completion.”
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Murphy’s law: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”
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Manson’s law of avoidance on them: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
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Manson’s law applies to both good and bad things in life. Making a million dollars could threaten your identity just as much as losing all your money; becoming a famous rock star could threaten your identity just as much as losing your job. This is why people are often so afraid of success—for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure: it threatens who they believe themselves to be.
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You avoid writing that screenplay you’ve always dreamed of because doing so would call into question your identity as a practical insurance adjuster. You avoid talking to your husband about being more adventurous in the bedroom because that conversation would challenge your identity as a good, moral woman. You avoid telling your friend that you don’t want to see him anymore because ending the friendship would conflict with your identity as a nice, forgiving person.
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the real potential of becoming An Artist Nobody Likes was far, far scarier than remaining An Artist Nobody’s Heard Of. At least he was comfortable with and used to being An Artist Nobody’s Heard Of.
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When someone admits to herself, “You know, maybe I’m not good at relationships,” then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage. She has no identity to protect by staying in a miserable, crappy marriage just to prove something to herself.
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When the insurance adjuster admits to himself, “You know, maybe there’s nothing unique or special about my dreams or my job,” then he’s free to give that screenplay an honest go and see what happens.
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My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
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The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.
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As a general rule, we’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves. When we’re angry, or jealous, or upset, we’re oftentimes the last ones to figure it out. And the only way to figure it out is to put cracks in our armor of certainty by consistently questioning how wrong we might be about ourselves. “Am I jealous—and if I am, then why?” “Am I angry?” “Is she right, and I’m just protecting my ego?”
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So yeah, lucky. When you’re sleeping on a smelly futon and have to count coins to figure out whether you can afford McDonald’s this week and you’ve sent out twenty résumés without hearing a single word back, then starting a blog and a stupid Internet business doesn’t sound like such a scary idea. If every project I started failed, if every post I wrote went unread, I’d only be back exactly where I started. So why not try?
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You could make plenty of money and be miserable, just as you could be broke and be pretty happy. Therefore, why use money as a means to measure my self-worth?
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When Pablo Picasso was an old man, he was sitting in a café in Spain, doodling on a used napkin. He was nonchalant about the whole thing, drawing whatever amused him in that moment—kind of the same way teenage boys draw penises on bathroom stalls—except this was Picasso, so his bathroom-stall penises were more like cubist/impressionist awesomeness laced on top of faint coffee stains. Anyway, some woman sitting near him was looking on in awe. After a few moments, Picasso finished his coffee and crumpled up the napkin to throw away as he left. The woman stopped him. “Wait,” she said. “Can I have that napkin you were just drawing on? I’ll pay you for it.” “Sure,” Picasso replied. “Twenty thousand dollars.” The woman’s head jolted back as if he had just flung a brick at her. “What? It took you like two minutes to draw that.” “No, ma’am,” Picasso said. “It took me over sixty years to draw this.” He stuffed the napkin in his pocket and walked out of the café.
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If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
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Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.
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If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.” Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who don’t do well. Another large share of it comes from overbearing or critical parents who don’t let their kids screw up on their own often enough, and instead punish them for trying anything new or not preordained. And then we have all the mass media that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while not showing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that were required to achieve that success.
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We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.
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If your metric for the value “success by worldly standards” is “Buy a house and a nice car,” and you spend twenty years working your ass off to achieve it, once it’s achieved the metric has nothing left to give you. Then say hello to your midlife crisis, because the problem that drove you your entire adult life was just taken away from you. There are no other opportunities to keep growing and improving,
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In the 1950s, a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz Dabrowski studied World War II survivors and how they’d coped with traumatic experiences in the war. This was Poland, so things had been pretty gruesome. These people had experienced or witnessed mass starvation, bombings that turned cities to rubble, the Holocaust, the torture of prisoners of war, and the rape and/or murder of family members, if not by the Nazis, then a few years later by the Soviets. As Dabrowski studied the survivors, he noticed something both surprising and amazing. A sizable percentage of them believed that the wartime experiences they’d suffered, although painful and indeed traumatic, had actually caused them to become better, more responsible, and yes, even happier people. Many described their lives before the war as if they’d been different people then: ungrateful for and unappreciative of their loved ones, lazy and consumed by petty problems, entitled to all they’d been given. After the war they felt more confident, more sure of themselves, more grateful, and unfazed by life’s trivialities and petty annoyances.
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“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
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Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
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We assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this: Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action
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quickly learned, though, that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier. If I had to redesign an entire website, I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “Okay, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of the site. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.
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I quickly learned, though, that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier. If I had to redesign an entire website, I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “Okay, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of the site. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.
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The author Tim Ferriss relates a story he once heard about a novelist who had written over seventy novels. Someone asked the novelist how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated. He replied, “Two hundred crappy words per day, that’s it.” The idea was that if he forced himself to write two hundred crappy words, more often than not the act of writing would inspire him; and before he knew it, he’d have thousands of words down on the page.
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If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely acting—when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite—we propel ourselves ahead. We feel free to fail, and that failure moves us forward.
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Now I live in New York. I have a house and furniture and an electric bill and a wife. None of it is particularly glamorous or exciting. And I like it that way. Because after all the years of excitement, the biggest lesson I took from my adventuring was this: absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.
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Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves.
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Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology.
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But we need to reject something. Otherwise, we stand for nothing.
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The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X.
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Rejection is an important and crucial life skill. Nobody wants to be stuck in a relationship that isn’t making them happy. Nobody wants to be stuck in a business doing work they hate and don’t believe in. Nobody wants to feel that they can’t say what they really mean.
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Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with “romance” in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it!
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For most of human history, romantic love was not celebrated as it is now. In fact, up until the mid-nineteenth century or so, love was seen as an unnecessary and potentially dangerous psychological impediment to the more important things in life—you know, like farming well and/or marrying a guy with a lot of sheep.
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It’s suspected by many scholars that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet not to celebrate romance, but rather to satirize it, to show how absolutely nutty it was. He didn’t mean for the play to be a glorification of love.
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But today, we all get brain boners for this kind of batshit crazy love. It dominates our culture. And the more dramatic, the better. Whether it’s Ben Affleck working to destroy an asteroid to save the earth for the girl he loves, or Mel Gibson murdering hundreds of Englishmen and fantasizing about his raped and murdered wife while being tortured to death, or that Elven chick giving up her immortality to be with Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, or stupid romantic comedies where Jimmy Fallon forgoes his Red Sox playoff tickets because Drew Barrymore has, like, needs or something.
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If this sort of romantic love were cocaine, then as a culture we’d all be like Tony Montana in Scarface: burying our faces in a fucking mountain of it, screaming, “Say hello to my lee-tle friend!”
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Most elements of romantic love that we pursue—the dramatic and dizzyingly emotional displays of affection, the topsy-turvy ups and downs—aren’t healthy, genuine displays of love. In fact, they’re often just another form of entitlement playing out through people’s relationships.
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Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.
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The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship comes down to two things: 1) how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility, and 2) the willingness of each person to
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The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship comes down to two things: 1) how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility, and 2) the willingness of each person to both reject and be rejected by their partner.
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People in a healthy relationship with strong boundaries will take responsibility for their own values and problems and not take responsibility for their partner’s values and problems. People in a toxic relationship with poor or no boundaries will regularly avoid responsibility for their own problems and/or take responsibility for their partner’s problems.
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What do poor boundaries look like? Here are some examples: “You can’t go out with your friends without me. You know how jealous I get. You have to stay home with me.” “My coworkers are idiots; they always make me late to meetings because I have to tell them how to do their jobs.” “I can’t believe you made me feel so stupid in front of my own sister. Never disagree with me in front of her again!” “I’d love to take that job in Milwaukee, but my mother would never forgive me for moving so far away.” “I can date you, but can you not tell my friend Cindy? She gets really insecure when I have a boyfriend and she doesn’t.” In each scenario, the person is either taking responsibility for problems/emotions that are not theirs, or demanding that someone else take responsibility for their problems/emotions.
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In general, entitled people fall into one of two traps in their relationships. Either they expect other people to take responsibility for their problems: “I wanted a nice relaxing weekend at home. You should have known that and canceled your plans.” Or they take on too much responsibility for other people’s problems: “She just lost her job again, but it’s probably my fault because I wasn’t as supportive of her as I could have been. I’m going to help her rewrite her résumé tomorrow.”
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Entitled people who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them, and they will receive the love they’ve always wanted. Entitled people who take the blame for other people’s emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they “fix” their partner and save him or her, they will receive the love and appreciation they’ve always wanted. These are the yin and yang of any toxic relationship: the victim and the saver, the person who starts fires because it makes her feel important and the person who puts out fires because it makes him feel important.
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If the saver really wanted to save the victim, the saver would say, “Look, you’re blaming others for your own problems; deal with this yourself.” And in a sick way, that would actually be a demonstration of love: helping someone solve their own problems.
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If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing so. If your partner is going to make a sacrifice for you, it needs to because he or she genuinely wants to, not because you’ve manipulated the sacrifice through anger or guilt. Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations.
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ask yourself, “If I refused, how would the relationship change?” Similarly, ask, “If my partner refused something I wanted, how would the relationship change?”
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It’s not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it’s about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives. That’s unconditional love, baby.
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When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good, then nobody ends up feeling good. And our relationship falls apart without our even knowing it.
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No one trusts a yes-man.
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The problem here is that most people who get caught cheating apologize and give the “It will never happen again” spiel and that’s that, as if penises fell into various orifices completely by accident. Many cheatees accept this response at face value, and don’t question the values and fucks given by their partner (pun totally intended); they don’t ask themselves whether those values and fucks make their partner a good person to stay with. They’re so concerned with holding on to their relationship that they fail to recognize that it’s become a black hole consuming their self-respect.
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If people cheat, it’s because something other than the relationship is more important to them. It may be power over others. It may be validation through sex. It may be giving in to their own impulses. Whatever it is, it’s clear that the cheater’s values are not aligned in a way to support a healthy relationship.
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if he just gives the old “I don’t know what I was thinking; I was stressed out and drunk and she was there” response, then he lacks the serious self-awareness necessary to solve any relationship problems.
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Trust is like a china plate. If you break it once, with some care and attention you can put it back together again. But if you break it again, it splits into even more pieces and it takes far longer to piece together again. If you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to the point where it’s impossible to restore.
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Consumer culture is very good at making us want more, more, more. Underneath all the hype and marketing is the implication that more is always better. I bought into this idea for years. Make more money, visit more countries, have more experiences, be with more women. But more is not always better. In fact, the opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less. When we’re overloaded with opportunities and options, we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting.
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When you’ve never left your home country, the first country you visit inspires a massive perspective shift, because you have such a narrow experience base to draw on. But when you’ve been to twenty countries, the twenty-first adds little. And when you’ve been to fifty, the fifty-first adds even less.
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The same goes for material possessions, money, hobbies, jobs, friends, and romantic/sexual partners—all the lame superficial values people choose for themselves. The older you get, the more experienced you get, the less significantly each new experience affects you. The first time I drank at a party was exciting. The hundredth time was fun. The five hundredth time felt like a normal weekend. And the thousandth time felt boring and unimportant.
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I’ve discovered is something entirely counterintuitive: that there is a freedom and liberation in commitment.
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“Seek the truth for yourself, and I will meet you there!”
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“Why do you care that I’m dead when you’re still so afraid to live?”
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if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything;
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by spending the majority of my short life avoiding what was painful and uncomfortable, I had essentially been avoiding being alive at all.
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in the face of the inevitability of death, there is no reason to ever give in to one’s fear or embarrassment or shame, since it’s all just a bunch of nothing anyway;
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Oddly, it was someone else’s death that gave me permission to finally live. And perhaps the worst moment of my life was also the most transformational.
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Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us. Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
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Because it wasn’t just his anti-establishment tendencies that got Becker into trouble; it was his odd teaching methods as well. He would use Shakespeare to teach psychology, psychology textbooks to teach anthropology, and anthropological data to teach sociology. He’d dress up as King Lear and do mock sword fights in class and go on long political rants that had little to do with the lesson plan. His students adored him. The other faculty loathed him. Less than a year later, he was fired again.
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Ernest Becker was an academic outcast. In 1960, he got his Ph.D. in anthropology; his doctoral research compared the unlikely and unconventional practices of Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis.
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Becker changed jobs four times in six years. And before he could get fired from the fifth, he got colon cancer.
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He spent the next few years bedridden and had little hope of surviving. So Becker decided to write a book. This book would be about death.
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Becker died in 1974. His book The Denial of Death, would win the Pulitzer Prize and become one of the most influential intellectual works of the twentieth century, shaking up the fields of psychology and anthropology, while making profound philosophical claims that are still influential today.
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The Denial of Death essentially makes two points: 1.    Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly. Dogs don’t sit around and worry about their career. Cats don’t think about their past mistakes or wonder what would have happened if they’d done something differently. Monkeys don’t argue over future possibilities, just as fish don’t sit around wondering if other fish would like them more if they had longer fins.
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we are also the only animal capable of imagining a reality without ourselves in it. This realization causes what Becker calls “death terror,” a deep existential anxiety that underlies everything we think or do.
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2.   Becker’s second point starts with the premise that we essentially have two “selves.” The first self is the physical self—the one that eats, sleeps, snores, and poops. The second self is our conceptual self—our identity, or how we see ourselves.
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Becker’s argument is this: We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability—on some unconscious level—scares the shit out of us. Therefore, in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. This is why people try so hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on spines of books. It’s why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence—our conceptual self—will last way beyond our physical self. That we will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist. Becker called such efforts our “immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die. Names like Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Shakespeare are just as powerful today as when those men lived, if not more so. And that’s the whole point. Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.
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Centuries of oppression and the bloodshed of millions have been justified as the defense of one group’s immortality project against another’s.
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Mark Twain, that hairy goofball who came in and left on Halley’s Comet, said, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
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Death is the only thing we can know with any certainty.
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Bukowski once wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.”
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And the primary lesson was this: there is nothing to be afraid of. Ever. And reminding myself of my own death repeatedly over the years—whether it be through meditation, through reading philosophy, or through doing crazy shit like standing on a cliff in South Africa—is the only thing that has helped me hold this realization front and center in my mind.
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There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
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for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
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but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?
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We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
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If we have only one life to live,we might as well not have lived at all.
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He understood he was not born to live side by side with any woman and could be fully himself only as a bachelor. He tried to design his life in such a way that no woman could move in with a suitcase.
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Ten years earlier, when he had divorced his wife, he celebrated the event the way others celebrate a marriage.
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If the Pharaoh’s daughter hadn’t snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the waves, there would have been no Old Testament, no civilization as we now know it! How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child!
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If Polybus hadn’t taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn’t have written his most beautiful tragedy!
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A single metaphor can give birth to love.
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Why should he feel more for that child, to whom he was bound by nothing but a single improvident night, than for any other? He would be scrupulous about paying support; he just didn’t want anybody making him fight for his son in the name of paternal sentiments!
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spending the night together was the corpus delicti of love.
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Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
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Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
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It was an allusion. The last movement of Beethoven’s last quartet is based on the following two motifs: Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein! Must it be? It must be! It must be!
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Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.
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the love story of his life exemplified not ”Es muss sein! ”(It must be so), but rather ”Es konnte auch anders sein ”(It could just as well be otherwise).
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The town had several hotels, but Tomas happened to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed. He happened to have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant. Tereza happened  to be on duty, and happened to be serving Tomas’s table. It had taken six chance happenings to push Tomas towards Tereza, as if he had little inclination to go to her on his own.
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had the same significance for her as an elegant cane
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acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable
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autodidact
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was not an extension of public life but its antithesis.
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True, he would rather have slept by himself, but the marriage bed is still the symbol of the marriage bond, and symbols, as we know, are inviolable.
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But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A.
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The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.
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”It’s a vicious circle,”  Sabina said. ”People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina’s distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
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your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were
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How nice it was to celebrate something, demand something, protest against something; to be out in the open, to be with others.
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He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.
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She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.
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Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We’ve always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That’s what enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
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”When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they’ve got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls’ Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That’s why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.”
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No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations.
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One could betray one’s parents, husband, country, love, but when parents husband, country, and love were gone—what was left to betray?
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The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
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People use filthy language all day long, but when they turn on the radio and hear a well-known personality, someone they respect, saying fuck in every sentence, they feel somehow let down.
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When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
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Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.
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What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
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Tereza could feel orgasm advancing from afar,
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Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.
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The bathroom in the old working-class flat on the outskirts of Prague was less hypocritical:
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what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
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Did her adventure with the engineer teach her that casual sex has nothing to do with love? That it is light, weightless? Was she calmer now? Not in the least.
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Sophocles’ Oedipus. The story of Oedipus is well known: Abandoned as an infant, he was taken to King Polybus, who raised him. One day, when he had grown into a youth, he came upon a dignitary riding along a mountain path. A quarrel arose, and Oedipus killed the dignitary. Later he became the husband of Queen Jocasta and ruler of Thebes. Little did he know that the man he had killed in the mountains was his father and the woman with whom he slept his mother. In the meantime, fate visited a plague on his subjects and tortured them with great pestilences. When Oedipus realized that he himself was the cause of their suffering, he put out his own eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.
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the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?
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It was the smile of two men meeting accidentally in a brothel: both slightly abashed, they are at the same time glad that the feeling is mutual, and a bond of something akin to brotherhood develops between them.
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How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what they thought of him?
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It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie. The ”Tell the truth!” imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation. It is simpler for us to argue with him or insult him (which makes no sense whatever) than to lie to his face (which is the only thing to do).
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People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
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Isn’t making love merely an eternal repetition of the same?
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What did he look for in them? What attracted him to them? Isn’t making love merely an eternal repetition of the same? Not at all. There is always the small part that is unimaginable. When he saw a woman in her clothes, he could naturally imagine more or less what she would look like naked (his experience as a doctor supplementing his experience as a lover), but between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest. And then, the pursuit of the unimaginable does not stop with the revelations of nudity; it goes much further: How would she behave while undressing? What would she say when he made love to her? How would her sighs sound? How would her face distort at the moment of orgasm?
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Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.
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The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering. The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment).
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very long time, constantly scanning her red-blotched
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Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted, ”Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!” ; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did not want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. The reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it. ”It’s not sensual pleasure I’m after,” she would say, ”it’s happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.” In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.
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I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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”I’m beginning to be grateful to you for not wanting to have children.”
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Imagine having an arm amputated and implanted on someone else. Imagine that person sitting opposite you and gesticulating with it in your face. You would stare at that arm as at a ghost. Even though it was your own personal, beloved arm, you would be horrified at the possibility of its touching you!
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Tomas noticed that when concentrating the boy slightly raised the left side of his upper lip. It was an expression he saw on his own face whenever he peered into the mirror to determine whether it was clean-shaven. Discovering it on the face of another made him uneasy.
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”Ideas can save lives, too.”
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”You know the best thing about what you wrote?” the boy went on, and Tomas could see the effort it cost him to speak. ”Your refusal to compromise. Your clear-cut sense of what’s good and what’s evil, something we’re beginning to lose. We have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn’t love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent, in his soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.”
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Is it right to raise one’s voice when others are being silenced? Yes.
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Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?
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Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.
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If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to test the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses.
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But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave.
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famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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Stalin’s son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country’s territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country’s power to the west—yes, they died for something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin’s son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.
==========

When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
==========

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.
==========

Bear in mind: There was pleasure in Paradise, but no excitement.
==========

Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes on, the world’s indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba— and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot. 21
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Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes on, the world’s indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba— and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot.
==========

can’t help thinking about the editor in Prague who organized the petition for the amnesty of political prisoners. He knew perfectly well that his petition would not help the prisoners. His true goal was not to free the prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist. That, too, was playacting.
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His choice was not between playacting and action. His choice was between playacting and no action at all.
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.
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The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need.
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Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.
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And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
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Punishing people who don’t know what they’ve done is barbaric.
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People drifted off in groups to sightsee; some set off for temples, others for brothels.
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Yes, a husband’s funeral is a wife’s true wedding! The climax of her life’s work! The reward for her sufferings!
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Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
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Men who use borrowed flats for rendezvous and never make love to the same woman twice are not so rare.)
==========

Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures.
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Man was not the planet’s master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration.
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People started being removed from their jobs, arrested, put on trial. At last the animals could breathe freely.
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True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
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Not so long before, forty years or so, all the cows in the village had names. (And if having a name is a sign of having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite Descartes.) But then the villages were turned into a large collective factory, and the cows began spending all their lives in the five square feet set aside for them in their cow sheds. From that time on, they have had no names and become mere machinae animatae. The world has proved Descartes correct.
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Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a machina animata. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in the laboratory.
==========

Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears. That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.
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life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom. As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regularly recurring seasons, they retained at least a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll. That is why Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to Paradise.
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The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.
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Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself.
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Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
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even humor is subject to the sweet law of repetition.
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how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the death of those we love!)
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Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know.
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”Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions.”
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Truth does not change, only our awareness of it.
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So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.
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It seemed that everything to eat in our house was stamped Not To Be Sold. All Welfare food bore this stamp to keep the recipients from selling it. It’s a wonder we didn’t come to think of Not To Be Sold as a brand name.
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“Malcolm,there’s one thing I like about you. You’re no good, but you don’t try to hide it. You are not a hypocrite.”
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if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn’t gambling, he’s cheating.
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As bad as I was, as much trouble and worry as I caused my mother, I loved her.
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Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”-and white people“superior”-that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.
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They’re all more ridiculous than a slapstick comedy. It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself.
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Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell you a lie, and you still won’t know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.
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We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.
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I was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was “sharp.”
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Between the way I looked and my style of talk, I made her so nervous and uncomfortable that we were both glad when I left.
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Today, all these same immigrants’ descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships.
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“Bad-looking women work harder.”
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Later on, it was chiefly the women who weren’t prostitutes who taught me to be very distrustful of most women; there seemed to be a higher code of ethics and sisterliness among those prostitutes than among numerous ladies of the church who have more men for kicks than the prostitutes have for pay.
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Many of the black ones in those wartime days were right in step with the white ones in having husbands fighting overseas while they were laying up with other men, even giving them their husbands’ money.
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And many women just faked as mothers and wives, while playing the field as hand as prostitutes-with their husbands and children right there in New York.
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Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early rush. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their men so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.
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The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don’t understand it that way, they damage and wreck a man’s ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That’s why these prostitutes had that morning rush of business. More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is _to be men_.
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That was my earliest experience at steering.
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I had learned: that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.
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the piano for Billie Holiday singing the blues.
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more sense than a lot of working hustlers
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growing operation by offering me a steerer’s
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or raincoat, with a white flower in his lapel.
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I have also read recently about groups of young white couples who gettogether, the husbands throw their house keys into a hat, then, blindfolded, the husbands draw out a key and spend the night with the wife that the house key matches. I have never heard of anything like that being done by Negroes, even Negroes who live in the worst ghettoes and alleys and gutters.
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Sophia always had given me money. Even when I had hundreds of dollars in my pocket, when she came to Harlem I would take everything she had short of her train fare back to Boston. It seems that some women love to be exploited. When they are not exploited, they exploit the man.
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A white woman might blow up at her husband and scream and yell and call him every name she can think of, and say the most vicious things in an effort to hurt him, and talk about his mother and his grandmother, too, but one thing she never will tell him herself is that she is going with a black man. That’s one automatic red murder flag to the white man, and his woman knows it.
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For that matter, all the thousands of dollars I’d handled, and _I_ had nothing. Just satisfying my cocaine habit alone cost me about twenty dollars a day. I guess another five dollars a day could have been added for reefers and plain tobacco cigarettes that I smoked; besides getting high on drugs, I chain-smoked as many as four packs a day. And, if you ask me today, I’ll tell you that tobacco, in all its forms, is just as much an addiction as any narcotic.
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Just as in New York, these were the rich, the highest society-the predominantly old men, past the age of ability to conduct any kind of ordinary sex, always hunting for new ways to be “sensitive.”
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Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with _talcum powder_, Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.
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Rudy, I remember, spoke of one old white man who paid a black couple to let him watch them have intercourse on his bed.
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It is also important to select an area of burglary and stick to that. There are specific specialties among burglars. Some work apartments only, others houses only, others stores only, or warehouses; still others will go after only safes or strongboxes.
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trying to dispose of the loot. Finding the fence
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I can give you a very good tip if you want to keep burglars out of your house. A light on for the burglar to see is the very best single means of protection. One of the ideal things is to leave a bathroom light on all night. The bathroom is one place where somebody could be, for any length of time, at any time of the night, and he would be likely to hear the slightest strange sound. The burglar, knowing this, won’t try to enter. ‘It’s also the cheapest possible protection. The kilowatts are a lot cheaper than your valuables.
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Sometimes the victims were in their beds asleep. That may sound very daring. Actually, it was almost easy. The first thing we had to do when people were in the house was to wait, very still, and pick up the sounds of breathing. Snorers we loved; they made it real easy. In stockinged feet, we’d go right into the bedrooms. Moving swiftly, like shadows, we would lift clothes, watches, wallets, handbags, and jewelry boxes.
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Gullible women often took the girls all over their houses, just to hear them exclaiming over the finery. With the help of the girls’ drawings and a finger-beam searchlight, we went straight to the things we wanted.
==========

The Christmas season was Santa Claus for us; people had expensive presents lying all over their houses. And they had taken more cash than usual out of their banks.
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If the shades were drawn full, and no lights wereon, and there was no answer when one of the girls rang the bell, we would take the chance and go in.
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whites I didn’t know had killed my
==========

A celebrity among the Norfolk Prison Colony inmates was a rich, older fellow, a paralytic, called John. He had killed his baby, one of those “mercy” killings. He was a proud, big-shot type, always reminding everyone that he was a 33rd-degree Mason, and what powers Masons had-that only Masons ever had been U. S. Presidents, that Masons in distress could secretly signal to judges and other Masons in powerful positions.
==========

He said that God had 360 degrees of knowledge. He said that 360 degrees represented “the sum total of knowledge.”
==========

“The devil has only thirty-three degrees of knowledge-known as Masonry,”
==========

“The devil uses his Masonry to rule other people.”
==========

But for me, the answer was that Masonry, actually, is only thirty- three degrees of the religion of Islam, which is the full projection, forever denied to Masons, although they know it exists.
==========

“The true knowledge,” reconstructed much more briefly than I received it, was that history had been “whitened” in the white man’s history books, and thatthe black man had been “brainwashed for hundreds of years.” Original Man was black, in the continent called Africa where the human race had emerged on the planet Earth.
==========

In one generation, the black slave women in America had been raped by the slavemaster white man until there had begun to emerge a homemade, handmade, brainwashed race that was no longer even of its true color, that no longer even knew its true family names. The slavemaster forced his family name upon this rape-mixed race, which the slavemaster began to call “the Negro.”
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And where the religion of every other people on earth taught its believers of aGod with whom they could identify, a God who at least looked like one of their own kind, the slavemaster injected his Christian religion into this “Negro.” This “Negro” was taught to worship an alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slavemaster.
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This religion taught the “Negro” that black was a curse. It taught him to hate everything black, including himself. It taught him that everything white was good, to be admired, respected, and loved. It brainwashed this “Negro” to think he was superior if his complexion showed more of the white pollution of the slavemaster. This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this “Negro” to always turn the other cheek, and grin, and scrape, and bow, and be humble, and to sing, and to pray, and to take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man; and to look for his pie in the sky, and for his heaven in the hereafter, while right here on earth the slave-master white man enjoyed _his_ heaven.
==========

And she told me that key lesson of Mr. Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, which I later learned was the demonology that every religion has, called “Yacub’s History.” Elijah Muhammad teaches his followers that, first, the moon separated from the earth. Then, the first humans, Original Man, were a black people. They founded the Holy City Mecca. Among this black race were twenty-four wise scientists. One of the scientists, at odds with the rest, created the especially strong black tribe of Shabazz, from which America’s Negroes, so- called, descend. About sixty-six hundred years ago, when seventy per cent of the people were satisfied, and thirty per cent were dissatisfied, among the dissatisfied was born a “Mr. Yacub.” He was born to create trouble, to break the peace, and to kill. His head was unusually large. When he was four years old, he began school. At the age of eighteen, Yacub had finished all of his nation’s colleges and universities. He was known as “the big-head scientist.” Among many other things, he had learned how to breed races scientifically. This big-head scientist, Mr. Yacub, began preaching in the streets of Mecca, making such hosts of converts that the authorities, increasingly concerned, finally exiled him with 59, 999 followers to the island of Patmos-described in the Bible as the island where John received the message contained in Revelations in the New Testament. Though he was a black man, Mr. Yacub, embittered toward Allah now, decided, as revenge, to create upon the earth a devil race-a bleached-out, white race of people. From his studies, the big-head scientist knew that black men contained two germs, black and brown. He knew that the brown germ stayed dormant as, being the lighter of the two germs, it was the weaker. Mr. Yacub, to upset the law of nature, conceived the idea of employing what we today know as the recessive genes structure, to separate from each other the two germs, black and brown, and then grafting the brown germ to progressively lighter, weaker stages. The humans resulting, he knew, would be, as they became lighter, and weaker, progressively also more susceptible to wickedness and evil. And in this way finally he would achieve the intended bleached-out white race of devils. He knew that it would take him several total color-change stages to get from black to white. Mr. Yacub began his work by setting up a eugenics law on the island of Patmos. Among Mr. Yacub’s 59, 999 all-black followers, every third or so child that was born would show some trace of brown. As these became adult, only brown and brown, or black and brown, were permitted to marry. As their children were born, Mr. Yacub’s law dictated that, if a black child, the attending nurse, or midwife, should stick a needle into its brain and give the body to cremators. The mothers were told it had been an “angel baby,” which had gone to heaven, to prepare a place for her. But a brown child’s mother was told to take very good care of it. Others, assistants, were trained by Mr. Yacub to continue his objective. Mr. Yacub, when he died on the island at the age of one hundred and fifty-two, had left laws, and rules, for them to follow. According to the teachings of Mr. Elijah Muhammad, Mr. Yacub, except in his mind, never saw the bleached-out devil race that his procedures and laws and rules created. A two-hundred-year span was needed to eliminate on the island of Patmos allof the black people- until only brown people remained. The next two hundred years were needed to create from the brown race the red race-with no more browns left on the island. In another two hundred years, from the red race was created the yellow race. Two hundred years later-the white race had at last been created. On the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils- savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all fours and they lived in trees. Six hundred more years passed before this race of people returned to the mainland, among the natural black people.
==========

Mr. Elijah Muhammad teaches his followers that within six months’ time, through telling lies that set the black men fighting among each other, this devil race had turned what had been a peaceful heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting. But finally the original black people recognized that their sudden troubles stemmed from this devil white race that Mr. Yacub had made. They rounded them up, put them in chains. With little aprons to cover their nakedness, this devil race was marched off across the Arabian desert to the caves of Europe. The lambskin and the cable-tow used in Masonry today are symbolic of how the nakedness of the white man was covered when he was chained and driven across the hot sand. Mr. Elijah Muhammad further teaches that the white devil race in Europe’scaves was savage. The animals tried to kill him. He climbed trees outside his cave, made clubs, trying to protect his family from the wild beasts outside trying to get in. When this devil race had spent two thousand years in the caves, Allah raised up Moses to civilize them, and bring them out of the caves. It was written that this devil white race would rule the world for six thousand years. The Books of Moses are missing. That’s why it is not known that he was in the caves. When Moses arrived, the first of these devils to accept his teachings, the first he led out, were those we call today the Jews. According to the teachings of this “Yacub’s History,” when the Bible says “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” that serpent is symbolic of the devil white race Moses lifted up out of the caves of Europe, teaching them civilization. It was written that after Yacub’s bleached white race had ruled the world for six thousand years- down to our time-the black original race would give birth to one whose wisdom, knowledge, and power would be infinite. It was written that some of the original black people should be brought as slaves to North America-to learn to better understand, at first hand, the white devil’s true nature, in modem times. Elijah Muhammad teaches that the greatest and mightiest God who appeared on the earth was Master W. D. Fard. He came from the East to the West, appearing in North America at a time when the history and the prophecy that is written was coming to realization, as the non-white people all over the worldbegan to rise, and as the devil white civilization, condemned by Allah, was, through its devilish nature, destroying itself. Master W. D. Fard was half black and half white. He was made in this way to enable him to be accepted by the black people in America, and to lead them, while at the same time he was enabled to move undiscovered among the white people, so that he could understand and judge the enemy of the blacks. Master W. D. Fard, in 1931, posing as a seller of silks, met, in Detroit, Michigan, Elijah Muhammad. Master W. D. Fard gave to Elijah Muhammad Allah’s message, and Allah’s divine guidance, to save the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, the so-called Negroes, here in “this wilderness of North America.”
==========

I was to learn later that Elijah Muhammad’s tales, like this one of “Yacub,” infuriated the Muslims of the East. While at Mecca, I reminded them that it was their fault, since they themselves hadn’t done enough to make real Islam known in the West. Their silence left a vacuum into which any religious faker could step and mislead our people.
==========

I read how, entering India-half a _billion_ deeply religious brown people-the British white man, by 1759, through promises, trickery and manipulations, controlled much of India through Great Britain’s East India Company. The parasitical British administration kept tentacling out to half of the subcontinent. In 1857, some of the desperate people of India finally mutinied-and, excepting the African slave trade, nowhere has history recorded any more unnecessary bestial and ruthless human carnage than the British suppression of the non-white Indian people.
==========

Over 115 million African blacks-close to the 1930’s population of the United States-were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade.
==========

I listen today to the radio, and watch television, and read the headlines about the collective white man’s fear and tension concerning China. When the white man professes ignorance about why the Chinese hate him so, my mind can’t help flashing back to what I read, there in prison, about how the blood forebears of this same white man raped China at a time when China was trusting and helpless. Those original white “Christian traders” sent into China millions of pounds of opium. By 1839, so many of the Chinese were addicts that China’s desperate government destroyed twenty thousand chests of opium. The first Opium War was promptly declared by the white man. Imagine! Declaring _war_ upon someone who objects to being narcotized! The Chinese were severely beaten, with Chinese-invented gunpowder.
==========

The Treaty of Nanking made China pay the British white man for the destroyed opium; forced open China’s major ports to British trade; forced China to abandon Hong Kong; fixed China’s import tariffs so low that cheap British articles soon flooded in, maiming China’s industrial development. After a second Opium War, the Tientsin Treaties legalized the ravaging opium trade, legalized a British-French-American control of China’s customs. China tried delaying that Treaty’s ratification; Peking was looted and burned. “Kill the foreign white devils!” was the 1901 Chinese war cry in the Boxer Rebellion. Losing again, this time the Chinese were driven from Peking’s choicest areas. The vicious, arrogant white man put up the famous signs, “Chinese and dogs not allowed.”
==========

Red China after World War II closed its doors to the Western white world. Massive Chinese agricultural, scientific, and industrial efforts are described in a book that _Life_ magazine recently published. Some observers inside Red China have reported that the world never has known such a hate-white campaign as is now going on in this non-white country where, present birth-rates continuing, in fifty more years Chinese will be half the earth’s population. And it seems that some Chinese chickens will soon come home to roost, with China’s recent successful nuclear tests.
==========

The Oriental philosophers were the ones I came to prefer; finally, my impression was that most Occidental philosophy had largely been borrowed from the Oriental thinkers. Socrates, for instance, traveled in Egypt. Some sources even say that Socrates was initiated into some of the Egyptian mysteries. Obviously Socrates got some of his wisdom among the East’s wise men.
==========

My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America.
==========

How is the black man going to get “civil rights” before first he wins his _human_ rights?
==========

What makes the black man think of himself as only an internal United States issue is just a catch-phrase, two words, “civil rights.”
==========

If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity-because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about.
==========

I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did.
==========

Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, naturally, I read all of those. I don’t respect them; I am just trying to remember some of those whose theories I soaked up in those years. These three, it’s said, laid the groundwork on which the Fascist and Nazi philosophy was built. I don’t respect them because it seems to me that most of their time was spent arguing about things that are not really important.They remind me of so many of the Negro “intellectuals,” so-called, with whom I have come in contact-they are always arguing about something useless.
==========

him because he advocated a pantheistic
==========

The Jews read their burial services for Spinoza,
==========

In a debate about whether or not Homer had ever existed, I threw into those white faces the theory that Homer only symbolized how white Europeans kidnapped black Africans, then blinded them so that they could never get back to their own people. (Homer and Omar and Moor, you see, are related terms; it’s like saying Peter, Pedro, and petra, all three of which mean rock. ) These blinded Moors the Europeans taught to sing about the Europeans’ glorious accomplishments. I made it clear that was the devilish white man’s idea of kicks. Aesop’s _Fables_-another case in point. “Aesop” was only the Greek name for an Ethiopian.
==========

Another hot debate I remember I was in had to do with the identity of Shakespeare. No color was involved there; I just got intrigued over the Shakespearean dilemma. The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatestpiece of literature in English. Its language supposedly represents the ultimate in using the King’s English. Well, Shakespeare’s language and the Bible’s language are one and the same. They say that from 1604 to 1611, King James got poets to translate, to write the Bible. Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If he existed, why didn’t King James use him? And if he did use him, why is it one of the world’s best kept secrets? I know that many say that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare. If that is true, why would Bacon have kept it secret? Bacon wasn’t royalty, when royalty sometimes used the _nom de plume_ because it was “improper” for royalty to be artistic or theatrical. What would Bacon have had to lose? Bacon, in fact, would have had everything to gain. In the prison debates I argued for the theory that King James himself was the real poet who used the _nom de plume_ Shakespeare. King James was brilliant. He was the greatest king who ever sat on the British throne. Who else among royalty, in his time, would have had the giant talent to write Shakespeare’s works? It was he who poetically “fixed” the Bible-which in itself and its present King James version has enslaved the world.
==========

I would talk to him about new evidence I found to document the Muslim teachings. In either volume 43 or 44 of The Harvard Classics, I read Milton’s _Paradise Lost_. The devil, kicked out of Paradise, was trying to regain possession. He was using the forces of Europe, personified by the Popes, Charlemagne, Richard the Lionhearted, and other knights. I interpreted this to show that the Europeans were motivated and led by the devil, or the personification of the devil. So Milton and Mr. Elijah Muhammad were actually saying the same thing.
==========

Conducting the class was a tall, blond, blue-eyed (a perfect “devil”) Harvard Seminary student. He lectured, and then he started in a question-and-answer session. I don’t know which of us had read the Bible more, he or I, but I had to give him credit; he really was heavy on his religion. I puzzled and puzzled for a way to upset him, and to give those Negroes present something to think and talk about and circulate. Finally, I put up my hand; he nodded. He had talked about Paul. I stood up and asked, “What color was Paul?” And I kept talking, with pauses, “He had to be black. . . because he was a Hebrew. . . and the original Hebrews were black. . . weren’t they?” He had started flushing red. You know the way white people do. He said “Yes.” I wasn’t through yet. “What color was Jesus. . . he was Hebrew, too. . . wasn’t he?” Both the Negro and the white convicts had sat bolt upright. I don’t care how tough the convict, be he brainwashed black Christian, or a “devil” white Christian, neither of them is ready to hear anybody saying Jesus wasn’t white. The instructor walked around. He shouldn’t have felt bad. In all of the years since, I never have met any intelligent white man who would try to insist that Jesus was white. How could they? He said, “Jesus was brown.” I let him get away with that compromise.
==========

“conscientious objector”
==========

“We will file by now for a last look at our brother. We won’t cry-just as we don’t cry over candy. Just as this sweet candy will dissolve, so will our brother’s sweetness that we have enjoyed when he lived now dissolve into a sweetness in our memories.”
==========

And for anyone in any kind of a leadership position, such as I was, the worst thing in the world that he could have was the wrong woman. Even Samson, the world’s strongest man, was destroyed by the woman who slept in his arms. She was the one whose words hurt him.
==========

I mean, I’d had so much experience. I had talked to too many prostitutes and mistresses. They knew more about a whole lot of husbands than the wives of those husbands did. The wives always filled their husbands’ ears so full of wife complaints that it wasn’t the wives, it was the prostitutes and mistresses who heard the husbands’ innermost problems and secrets. They thought of him, and comforted him, and that included listening to him, and so he would tell them everything.
==========

My feeling about in-laws was that they were outlaws.
==========

She said, “You are present when you are away.”
==========

when I’d been out there in the streets as a hustler.
==========

“For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the _raped_, or the wolf asking the _sheep_, ‘Do you hate me?’ The white man is in no moral _position_ to accuse anyone else of hate!
==========

“Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I’m snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing _me_ of hate-teaching?”
==========

“Well, let’s go back to the Greek, and maybe you will learn the first thing you need to know about the word ‘demagogue.’ ‘Demagogue’ means, actually, ‘teacher of the people.’ And let’s examine some demagogues. The greatest of all Greeks, Socrates, was killed as a ‘demagogue.’ Jesus Christ died on the cross because the Pharisees of His day were upholding their law, not the spirit. The modern Pharisees are trying to heap destruction upon Mr. Muhammad, calling him a demagogue, a crackpot, and fanatic. What about Gandhi? The man that Churchill called ‘a naked little fakir,’ refusing food in a British jail? But then a quarter of a billion people, a whole subcontinent, rallied behind Gandhi-and they twisted the British lion’s tail! What about Galileo, standing before his inquisitors, saying ‘The earth _does_ move!’ What about Martin Luther, nailing on a door his thesis against the all-powerful Catholic church which called him ‘heretic’? We, the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, are today inthe ghettoes as once the sect of Christianity’s followers were like termites in the catacombs and the grottoes-and they were preparing the grave of the mighty Roman Empire!”
==========

They would unearth Lincoln and his freeing of the slaves. I’d tell them things Lincoln said in speeches, _against_ the blacks.
==========

The reporters would try their utmost to raise some “good” white man whom I couldn’t refute as such. I’ll never forget how one practically lost his voice. He asked me did I feel _any_ white men had ever done anything for the black man in America. I told him, “Yes, I can think of two. Hitler, and Stalin. The black man in America couldn’t get a decent factory job until Hitler put so much pressure on the white man. And men Stalin kept up the pressure-‘
==========

You can hardly name a scientific problem he can’t solve. Here he is now solving the problems of sending men exploring into outer space-and returning them safely to earth. But in the arena of dealing with human beings, the white man’s working intelligence is hobbled. His intelligence will fail him altogether if the humans happen to be non-white. The white man’s emotions superseded his intelligence. He will commit against non-whites the most incredible spontaneous emotional acts, so psyche-deep is his “white superiority” complex.
==========

way-against even the so-called “tokenism.”
==========

In fact, history’s most tragic result of a mixed, therefore diluted and weakened, ethnic identity has been experienced by a white ethnic group-the Jew in Germany. He had made greater contributions to Germany than Germans themselves had. Jews had won over half of Germany’s Nobel Prizes. Every culture in Germany was led by the Jew; he published the greatest newspaper. Jews were the greatest artists, the greatest poets, composers, stage directors. But those Jews made a fatal mistake-assimilating.
==========

The Jew never will forget that lesson. Jewish intelligence eyes watch every neo-Nazi organization. Right after the war, the Jews’ Haganah mediating body stepped up the longtime negotiations with the British. But this time, the Stern gang was shooting the British. And this time the British acquiesced and helped them to wrest Palestine away from the Arabs, the rightful owners, and then the Jews set up Israel, their own country-the one thing that every race of man in the world respects, and understands.
==========

the awesomeness of my reason to revere
==========

Wallace Muhammad helped me to review the Quran and the Bible for documentation. David’s adultery with Bathsheba weighed less on history’s scales, for instance, than the positive fact of David’s killing Goliath. Thinking of Lot, we think not of incest, but of his saving the people from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Or, our image of Noah isn’t of his getting drunk-but of his building the ark and teaching people to save themselves from the flood. We think of Moses leading the Hebrews from bondage, not of Moses’ adultery with the Ethiopian women. In all of the cases I reviewed, the positive outweighed the negative.
==========

“I’m David,” he said. “When you read about how David took another man’s wife, I’m that David. You read about Noah, who got drunk-that’s me. You read about Lot, who went and laid up with his own daughters. I have to fulfill all of those things.”
==========

A judge’s signature on a piece of paper can grant to a couple a physical divorce-but for either of them, or maybe for both of them, if they have been a very close marriage team, to actually become _psychologically_ divorced from each other might take years.
==========

The thing to meworse than death was the betrayal. I could conceive death. I couldn’t conceive betrayal-not
==========

The first thing you know traffic was blocked in four directions by a crowd whose mood quickly grew so ugly that I really got apprehensive. I got up on top of a car and began waving my arms and yelling at them to quiet down. They did quiet, and then I asked them to disperse-and they did. This was when it began being said that I was America’s only Negro who “couldstop a race riot-or start one.”
==========

The black man in North America was spiritually sick because for centuries he had accepted the white man’s Christianity-which asked the black so-called Christian to expect no true Brotherhood of Man, but to endure the cruelties of the white so-called Christians. Christianity had made black men fuzzy, nebulous, confused in their thinking. It had taught the black man to think if he had no shoes, and was hungry, “we gonna get shoes and milk and honey and fish fries in Heaven.”
==========

For instance, annually, the black man spends over $3 billion for automobiles, but America contains hardly any franchised black automobile dealers. For instance, forty per cent of the expensive imported Scotch whisky consumed in America goes down the throats of the status-sick black man; but the only black-owned distilleries are in bathtubs, or in the woods somewhere. Or for instance-a scandalous shame-in New York City, with over a million Negroes, there aren’t twenty black-owned businesses employing over ten people. It’s because black men don’t own and control their own community’s retail establishments that they can’t stabilize their own community. The black man in North America was sickest of all politically. He let the white man divide him into such foolishness as considering himself a black “Democrat,” a black “Republican,” a black “Conservative,” or a black “Liberal” . . . when a ten-million black vote bloc could be the deciding balance of power in American politics, because the white man’s vote is almost always evenly divided. The polls are one place where every black man could fight the black man’s cause with dignity, and with the power and the tools that the white man understands, and respects, and fears, and cooperates with.
==========

The farmer, through his lobby, is the most government-subsidized special-interest group in America today, because a millionfarmers vote, not as Democrats, or Republicans, liberals, conservatives, but as farmers.
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U.S. politics is ruled by special-interest blocs and lobbies. What group has a more urgent special interest, what group needs a bloc, a lobby, more than the black man? Labor owns one of Washington’s largest non-government buildings-situated where they can literally watch the White House-and no political move is made that doesn’t involve how Labor feels about it. A lobby got Big Oil its depletion allowance.
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Doctors have the best lobby in Washington. Their special-interest influence successfully fights the Medicare program that’s wanted, and needed, by millions of other people.
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Twenty-two million black men! They have given America four hundred years of toil; they have bled and died in every battle since the Revolution; they were in America before the Pilgrims, and long before the mass immigrations-and they are still today at the bottom of everything!
==========

I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that’s what Allah wanted him to do.
==========

“Ella,” I said, “I want to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.” Ella said, “How much do you need?”
==========

They asked me what about the Hajj had impressed me the most. One of the several who spoke English asked; they translated my answers for the others. My answer to that question was not the one they expected, but it drove home my point. I said, “The _brotherhood_!
==========

They asked me what about the Hajj had impressed me the most. One of the several who spoke English asked; they translated my answers for the others. My answer to that question was not the one they expected, but it drove home my point. I said, “The _brotherhood_! The people of all races, colors, from all over the world coming together as _one_! It has proved to me the power of the One God.”
==========

“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered ‘white’-but the ‘white’ attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen _sincere_ and _true_ brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color.
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“The people don’t know what the vote means! It is the job of the enlightened leaders to raise the people’s intellect.”
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“I’ve never _seen_ so many whites so nice to so many blacks as you white people here in Africa. In America, Afro-Americans are struggling for integration. They should come here-to Africa-and see how you grin at Africans. You’ve really got integration here. But can you tell the Africans that in America you grin at the black people? No, you can’t! And you don’t honestly like these Africans any better, either-but what you _do_ like is the _minerals_ Africa has under her soil. . . .”
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“I’m not anti-American, and I didn’t come here to _condemn_ America-I want to make that very clear!” I told them. “I came here to tell the truth-and if the _truth_ condemns America, then she stands condemned!”
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We passengers filed off the plane and toward Customs. When I saw the crowd of fifty or sixty reporters and photographers, I honestly wondered what celebrity I had been on the plane with. But I was the “villain” they had come to meet.
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New York white youth were killing victims; that was a “sociological” problem. But when black youth killed somebody, the power structure was looking to hang somebody. When black men had been lynched or otherwise murdered in cold blood, it was always said, “Things will get better. ”When whites had rifles in their homes, the Constitution gave them the right to protect their home and themselves. But when black people even spoke of having rifles in their homes, that was “ominous.”
==========

I knew I was back in America again, hearing the subjective, scapegoat- seeking questions of the white man.
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“In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I never will be guilty of that again-as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.
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Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism, until they face some test, and then their racism emerges in one form or another.
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“Listen! The white man’s racism toward the black man here in America is what has got him in such trouble all over this world, with other non-white peoples.
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And the non-white peoples of the world are sick of the condescending white man!
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On the African continent, even, the white man has maneuvered to divide the black African from the brown Arab, to divide the so-called ‘Christian African’ from the Muslim African.
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“I don’t mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?”
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Negroes would not rush to follow me into the orthodox Islam which had given me the insight and perspective to see that the black men and white men truly could be brothers.
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In my thirty-nine years on this earth, the Holy City of Mecca had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.
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remembered there in the Holy World how I used to lie on the top of Hector’s Hill, and look up at the sky, at the clouds moving over me, and daydream, all kinds of things. And then, in a funny contrast of recollections, I remembered how years later, when I was in prison, I used to lie on my cell bunk-this would be especially when I was in solitary: what we convicts called “The Hole”-and
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I realized how very dangerous it is for people to hold any human being in such esteem, especially to consider anyone some sort of “divinely guided” and “protected” person.
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“I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda,”
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“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever andwhatever benefits humanity _as a whole_.”
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“It takes no one to stir up the sociological dynamite that stems from the unemployment, bad housing, and inferior education already in the ghettoes. This explosively criminal condition has existed for so long, it needs no fuse; it fuses itself; it spontaneously combusts from within itself.
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“I _believe_ in anger. The Bible says there is a _time_ for anger.”
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Well, I believe it’s a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself.
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Well, I believe it’s a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. If that’s how “Christian” philosophy is interpreted, if that’s what Gandhian philosophy teaches, well, then, I will call them criminal philosophies.
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“I _am_ for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem-just to _avoid_ violence. I don’t go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution. To me a delayed solution is a non-solution.
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If it must take violence to get the black man his human rights in this country, I’m _for_ violence exactly as you know the Irish, the Poles, or Jews would be if they were flagrantly discriminated against. I am just as they would be in that case, and they would be for violence-no matter what the consequences, no matter who was hurt by the violence.”
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When the white man came into this country, he certainly wasn’t demonstrating any “non- violence.”
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During his entire advance through history, he has been waving the banner of Christianity . . . and carrying in his other hand the sword and the flintlock.
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It has brought the non-white two-thirds of the human population to rebellion. Two-thirds of the human population today is telling the one-third minority white man, “Get out!” And the white man is leaving. And as he leaves, we seethe non-white peoples returning in a rush to their original religions, which had been labeled “pagan” by the conquering white man. Only one religion-Islam- had the power to stand and fight the white man’s Christianity for a _thousand years_! Only Islam could keep white Christianity at bay.
==========

As the Christian Crusade once went East, now the Islamic Crusade is going West.
==========

With the East- Asia-closed to Christianity, with Africa rapidly being converted to Islam, with Europe rapidly becoming un-Christian, generally today it is accepted that the “Christian” civilization of America- which is propping up the white race around the world-is Christianity’s remaining strongest bastion.
==========

And what is the greatest single reason for this Christian church’s failure? It is its failure to combat racism. It is the old “You sow, you reap” story. The Christian church sowed racism- blasphemously; now it reaps racism.
==========

It is exactly as when God gave Pharaoh a chance to repent. But Pharaoh persisted in his refusal to give justice to those whom he oppressed. And, we know, God finally destroyed Pharaoh.
==========

I told him then right to his face he was a fool, that he didn’t know me, or what I stood for, so that made him one of those people who let somebody else do their thinking; and that no matter what job a man had, at least he ought to be able to think for himself.
==========

and it burned me up to be so often called “anti- Semitic” when I spoke things I knew to be the absolute truth about Jews.
==========

“Conservatism” in America’s politics means “Let’s keep the niggers in their place.” And “liberalism” means “Let’s keep the _knee_-grows in their place-but tell them we’ll treat them a little better; let’s fool them more, with more promises.” With these choices, I felt that the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the “liberal” fox or the “conservative” wolf-because both of them would eat him.
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How would some sheriff sound, declaring himself so against bank robbery-and Jesse James his best friend?
==========

The Negroes aren’t the racists. Where the really sincere white people have got to do their “proving” of themselves is not among the black _victims_, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really _is_-and that’s in their own home communities; America’s racism is among their own fellow whites. That’s where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.
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have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way tosalve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are “proving” that they are “with us.”
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have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way tosalve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are “proving” that they are “with us.” But the hard truth is this _isn’t_ helping to solve America’s racist problem.
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I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way tosalve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are “proving” that they are “with us.” But the hard truth is this _isn’t_ helping to solve America’s racist problem.
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I mean nothing against any sincere whites when I say that as members of black organizations, generally whites’ very presence subtly renders the black organization automatically less effective.
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But, anyway, I know that every time that whites join a black organization, you watch, pretty soon the blacks will be leaning on the whites to support it, and before you know it a black may be up front with a title, but the whites, because of their money, are the real controllers.
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Working separately, the sincere white people and sincere black people actually will be working together.
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The goal has always been the same, with the approaches to it as different as mine and Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent marching, that dramatizes the brutality and the evil of the white man against defenseless blacks. And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody’s guess which of the“extremes” in approach to the black man’s problems might _personally_ meet a fatal catastrophe first-“non-violent” Dr. King, or so-called “violent” me.
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To come right down to it, if I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred per cent dedication I have to whatever I believe in-these are ingredients which make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.
==========

it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.
==========

I would try to learn Chinese, because itlooks as if Chinese will be the most powerful political language of the future.
==========

“I have less patience with someone who doesn’t wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious,”
==========

“Coffee is the only thing I like integrated.”
==========

“You never can fully trust any woman,” he said. “I’ve got the only one I ever met whom I would trust seventy-five per cent. I’ve told her that,” he said. “I’ve told her like I tell you I’ve seen too many men destroyed by their wives, or their women.
==========

“Woman who cries all the time is only because she knows she can get away with it,”
==========
EPILOGUE ALEX HALEY
==========

“If Christianity had asserted itself in Germany, six million Jews would have lived.”
==========

“I don’t _completely_ trust anyone,”
==========

You think of the hardest-looking, meanest-acting woman you know, one of those women who never smiles. Well, every day you see that woman you look her right in the eyes and tell her ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ and you watch what happens. The first day she may curse you out, the second day, too-but you watch, you keep on, after a while one day she’s going to start smiling just as soon as you come in sight.”
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“I have wife who understands, or even if she doesn’t she at least pretends.”
==========

“Let me tell you how I’d get those white devil convicts and the guards, too, to do anything I wanted. I’d whisper to them, ‘If you don’t, I’ll start a rumor that you’re really a light Negro just passing as white.’ That shows you what the white devil thinks about the black man. He’d rather die than be thought a Negro!”
==========

“In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to gooduse. I’d put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he’s _motivated_, in prison he can change his life.”
==========

“Learn wisdom from the pupil of the eye that looks upon all things and yet to self is blind. Persian poet.”
==========

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by _one_ book.”
==========

Now, you take ‘Caesar,’ it’s Latin, in Latin it’s pronounced like ‘Kaiser,’ with a hard C. But we anglicize it by pronouncing a soft C. The Russians say ‘Czar’ and mean the same thing. Another Russian dialect says ‘Tsar.’
==========

“My mind had closed about our mother. I simply didn’t feel the problem could be solved, so I had shut it out. I had built up subconscious defenses. The white man does this. He shuts out of his mind, and he builds up subconscious defenses against anything he doesn’t want to face up to. I’ve just become aware how closed my mind was now that I’ve opened it up again. That’s one of the characteristics I don’t like about myself. If I meet a problem I feel I can’t solve, I shut it out. I make believe that it doesn’t exist. But it exists.”
==========

“She’s sixty-six, and her memory is better than mine and she looks young and healthy. She has more of her teeth than those who were instrumental in sending her to the institution.”
==========

The only time that I have ever heard Malcolm X use what might be construed as a curse word, it was a “hell” used in response to a statement that Dr. Martin Luther King made that Malcolm X’s talk brought “misery upon Negroes.” Malcolm X exploded to me, “How in the hell can my talk do this? It’s always a Negro responsible, not what the white man does!”
==========

“Yes, I’m an extremist. The black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention!”
==========

Once when he said, “Aristotle shocked people. Charles Darwin outraged people. Aldous Huxley scandalized millions!” Malcolm X immediately followed the statement with “Don’t print that, people would think I’m trying to link myself with them.”
==========

“These Uncle Toms make me think about how the Prophet Jesus was criticized in his own country!”
==========

‘The white man doesn’t know how to laugh. He just shows his teeth. But _we_ know how to laugh. We laugh deep down, from the bottom up.’
==========

“The white man is afraid of truth. The truth takes the white man’s breath and drains his strength-you just watch his face get red anytime you tell him a little truth.”
==========

“I’m the only black man they’ve ever been close to who they know speaks the _truth_ to them,” Malcolm X once explained to me. “It’s their guilt that upsets them, not me.” He said another time,
==========

One call that I never will forget came at close to four A.M., waking me; he must have just gotten up in Los Angeles. His voice said, “Alex Haley?” I said, sleepily, “Yes? Oh, _hey_, Malcolm!” His voice said, “I trust you seventy per cent”-and then he hung up.
==========

“There’s an art to listening well,” he told me. “I listen closely to the sound of a man’s voice when he’s speaking. I can hear sincerity.”
==========

“He’s the most genuinely unprejudiced white man I ever met,”
==========

“He’s the most genuinely unprejudiced white man I ever met,” Malcolm X said to me, speaking of Handler months later.
==========

I had objected to the immorality of the man who professed to be more moral than anybody.”
==========

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. Goethe,”
==========

“Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”
==========

“I’m _not_ a racist. I’m not condemning whites for being whites, but for their deeds. I condemn what whites collectively have done to our people collectively.”
==========

“I’ll explain it this way, sir. If some men are in a car, driving with a destination in mind, and you know they are going the wrong way, but they are convinced they are going the right way, then you get into the car with them, and ride with them, talking-and finally when they see they are on the wrong road, not getting where they were intending, then you tell them, and they will listen toyou _then_, what road to take.”
==========

And the only thing that he ever indicated that he wished had been different in his life came when he was reading the chapter “Laura.” He said, “That was a smart girl, a _good_ girl. She tried her best to make something out of me, and look what I started her into- dope and prostitution. I wrecked that girl.”
==========

“Only the unasked question is stupid,”
==========

“You know,” he said once, “why I have been able to have some effect is because I make a study of the weaknesses of this country and because the more the white man yelps, the more I know I have struck a nerve.”
==========

What astonished me here was that I knew that on that day, Malcolm X’s schedule had been crushing, involving both a television and radio appearance and a live speech, yet he had gone to find out something about the aardvark.
==========

“Whether you use bullets or ballots, you’ve got to aim well; don’t strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer.”
==========

“Anyone who wants to follow me and my movement has got to be ready to goto jail, to the hospital, and to the cemetery before he can be truly free.”
==========

“do you realize that some of history’s greatest leaders never were recognized until they were safely in the ground!”
==========

“A home is really the only thing I’ve ever provided Betty since we’ve been married,” he had told me, discussing the court’s order, “and they want to take that away. Man, I can’t keep on putting her through changes, all she’s put up with-man, I’ve _got_ to love this woman!”
==========

“You know,“ he said after a while, ”this isn’t something I’m proud to say, but I don’t think I’ve ever bought one gift for my children. Everything they play with, either Betty got it for them, or somebody gave it to them, never me. That’s not good, I know it. I’ve always been too _busy_.” ***
==========

He said “the so-called moderate” civil rights organizations avoided him as “too militant” and the “so-called militants” avoided him as “too moderate.”“They
==========

admission-“Haley, my nerves are shot, my brain’s tired.”
==========

Just a couple of days of peace and quiet, that’s what I need.”
==========

“I don’t advocate violence, but if a man steps on my toes, I’ll step on his.”
==========

But he was formally advised that he would not be permitted to speak and, moreover, that he could consider himself officially barred forever from France as “an undesirable person.”
==========

“There are hunters; there are also those who hunt the hunters!”
==========

“I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now, but I’m flexible.”
==========

”Brother, nobody can protect you from a Muslim but a Muslim-or someone trained in Muslim tactics. I know. I invented many of those tactics.”
==========

He said to a little group of his assistants that he wasn’t going to talk about his personal troubles, “I don’t want that to be the reason for anyone to come to hear me.”
==========

The Pakistan _Hurriyet of Karachi_ said: “A great Negro leader”; the _Pakistan Times_ said, “His death is a definite setback to the Negro movement for emancipation.”
==========

“A silent tongue does not betray its owner.”
==========

The night fell over the earthly remains of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who had been called Malcolm X; who had been called Malcolm Little; who had been called “Big Red” and “Satan” and “Homeboy” and other names-who had been buried as a Moslem. “According to the Koran,” the _New York Times_ reported, “the bodies of the dead remain in their graves until the Last Day, the Day of Judgment. On this day of cataclysm the heavens are rent and the mountains ground to dust, the graves open and men are called to account by Allah.
==========

After signing the contract for this book, Malcolm X looked at me hard. “A writer is what I want, not an interpreter.” I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can’t quite conceive him dead. It still feels to me as if he has just gone into some next chapter, to be written by historians.
==========
OSSIE DAVIS ON MALCOLM X
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White folks do not need anybody to remind them that they are men. We do! This was his one incontrovertible benefit to his people.
==========

Protocol and common sense require that Negroes stand back and let the white man speak up for us, defend us, and lead us from behind the scene in our fight. This is the essence of Negro politics. But Malcolm said to hell with that! Get up off your knees and fight your own battles. That’s the way to win back your self-respect. That’s the way to make the white man respect you.
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And if he won’t let you live like a man, he certainly can’t keep you from dying like one!
==========

He also knew that every Negro who did not challenge on the spot every instance of racism, overt or covert, committed against him and his people, who chose instead to swallow his spit and go on smiling, was an Uncle Tom and a traitor, without balls or guts, or any other commonly accepted aspects of manhood!
==========

Malcolm knew that every white man in America profits directly or indirectly from his position vis-a- vis Negroes, profits from racism even though he does not practice it or believe in it.
==========

But Malcolm kept snatching our lies away. He kept shouting the painful truth we whites and blacks did not want to hear from all the housetops. And he wouldn’t stop for love nor money.
==========

He would make you angry as hell, but he would also make you proud.
==========

But in explaining Malcolm, let me take care not to explain him away. He had been a criminal, an addict, a pimp, and a prisoner; a racist, and a hater, he had really believed the white man was a devil. But all this had changed. Two days before his death, in commenting to Gordon Parks about his past life he said: “That was a mad scene. The sickness and madness of those days! I’m glad to be free of them.”
==========

And Malcolm was free. No one who knew him before and after his trip to Mecca could doubt that he had completely abandoned racism, separatism, and hatred.
==========

But even had Malcolm not changed, he would still have been a relevant figure on the American scene, standing in relation as he does, to the “responsible” civil rights leaders, just about where John Brown stood in relation to the “responsible abolitionists in the fight against slavery. Almost all disagreed with Brown’s mad and fanatical tactics which led him foolishly to attack a Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, to lose two sons there, and later to be hanged for treason. Yet today the world, and especially the Negro people, proclaim Brown not a traitor, but a hero and a martyr in a noble cause So in future, I will not be surprised if men come to see that Malcolm X was, within his own limitations, and in his own inimitable style, also a martyr in that cause.
==========

And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
==========

Aurangzeb, emperor at the time, summoned Sarmad to his court and asked him to prove he was a true Muslim by reciting the Kalima: la ilaha illallah, Mohammed-ur rasul Allah – There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Messenger. Sarmad stood naked in the royal court in the Red Fort before a jury of Qazis and Maulanas. Clouds stopped drifting in the sky, birds froze in mid-flight and the air in the fort grew thick and impenetrable as he began to recite the Kalima. But no sooner had he started than he stopped. All he said was the first phrase: la ilaha. There is no God. He could not go any further, he insisted, until he had completed his spiritual search and could embrace Allah with all his heart. Until then, he said, reciting the Kalima would only be a mockery of prayer. Aurangzeb, backed by his Qazis, ordered Sarmad’s execution.
==========

He spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia.
==========

Mir Taqi Mir:
Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka
Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka

The head which today proudly flaunts a crown
Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown
==========

‘D’you know why God made Hijras?’ she asked Aftab one afternoon while she flipped through a dog-eared 1967 issue of Vogue, lingering over the blonde ladies with bare legs who so enthralled her. ‘No, why?’ ‘It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.’
==========

She was at the age when anything to do with shitting, pissing and farting was the high point, or perhaps the whole point, of all stories.
==========

Jisey ishq ka tiir kaari lage Usey zindagi kyuun na bhari lage For one struck down by Cupid’s bow Life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?
==========

She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.
==========

The saffron men sheathed their swords, laid down their tridents and returned meekly to their working lives, answering bells, obeying orders, beating their wives and biding their time until their next bloody outing.
==========

On the whole it was only slightly less alarming than the previous arrangement.
==========

This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendour had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.)
==========

The advantage of the guest house in the graveyard was that unlike every other neighbourhood in the city, including the most exclusive ones, it suffered no power cuts. Not even in the summer. This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendour had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.)
==========

The streets were busy. Goatskins, goat horns, goat skulls, goat brains and goat offal were being collected, separated and stacked. Shit was being extruded from intestines that would then be properly cleaned and boiled down into soap and glue. Cats were making off with delectable booty. Nothing went to waste.
==========

You will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better.
==========

It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans. Anjum waited to die. Saddam waited to kill. And miles away, in a troubled forest, a baby waited to be born …
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In what language does rain fall over tormented cities? PABLO NERUDA
==========

When they finished chanting, the People of the World bowed low and joined their palms in greeting. Namaste, they said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with Maharaja moustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels. And with that, in the advertisement at least, history was turned upside down. (Who was bowing now? And who was smiling? Who was the petitioner? And who the petitioned?) In their sleep India’s favourite citizens smiled back. India! India! they chanted in their dreams, like the crowds at cricket matches. The drum major beat out a rhythm … India! India! The world rose to its feet, roaring its appreciation. Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy.
==========

In slums and squatter settlements, in resettlement colonies and ‘unauthorized’ colonies, people fought back. They dug up the roads leading to their homes and blocked them with rocks and broken things. Young men, old men, children, mothers and grandmothers armed with sticks and rocks patrolled the entrances to their settlements. Across one road, where the police and bulldozers had lined up for the final assault, a slogan scrawled in chalk said, Sarkar ki Maa ki Choot. The Government’s Mother’s Cunt.
==========

Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s
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‘Where shall we go?’ the surplus people asked. ‘You can kill us, but we won’t move,’ they said. There were too many of them to be killed outright. Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s work, the expression in their eyes, were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia. (Ditch Witch, they were called, the ’dozers.) They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.
==========

Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as ‘Breaking News’. Nobody pointed out the irony. They unleashed their untrained, but excellent-looking, young reporters, who spread across the city like a rash, asking urgent, empty questions; they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless. ‘Bhai Sahib, yeh bataaiye, aap ko kaisa lag raha hai …?’ Tell me, brother, how does it feel to be …? The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair.
==========

Experts aired their expert opinions for a fee: Somebody has to pay the price for Progress, they said expertly.
==========

Begging was banned. Thousands of beggars were rounded up and held in stockades before being shipped out of the city in batches. Their contractors had to pay good money to ship them back in. Father John-for-the-Weak sent out a letter saying that, according to police records, almost three thousand unidentified dead bodies (human) had been found on the city’s streets last year. Nobody replied.
==========

But the food shops were bursting with food. The bookshops were bursting with books. The shoe shops were bursting with shoes. And people (who counted as people) said to one another, ‘You don’t have to go abroad for shopping any more. Imported things are available here now. See, like Bombay is our New York, Delhi is our Washington and Kashmir is our Switzerland. It’s like really like saala fantastic yaar.’
==========

All day long the roads were choked with traffic. The newly dispossessed, who lived in the cracks and fissures of the city, emerged and swarmed around the sleek, climate-controlled cars, selling cloth dusters, mobile phone chargers, model jumbo jets, business magazines, pirated management books (How to Make Your First Million, What Young India Really Wants), gourmet guides, interior design magazines with colour photographs of country houses in Provence, and quick-fix spiritual manuals (You Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness … or How to Be Your Own Best Friend …). On Independence Day they sold toy machine guns and tiny national flags mounted on stands that said Mera Bharat Mahan, My India Is Great. The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice.
==========

On the city’s industrial outskirts, in the miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colourful plastic bags, where the evicted had been ‘re-settled’, the air was chemical and the water poisonous. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from thick green ponds. Surplus mothers perched like sparrows on the debris of what used to be their homes and sang their surplus children to sleep.
==========

The surplus children slept, dreaming of yellow ’dozers.
==========

The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of scams – coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, insurance scams, stamp-paper scams, phone-licence scams, land scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and ammunition scams, petrol-pump scams, polio-vaccine scams, electricity-bill scams, school-book scams, god-men scams, drought-relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity-card scams – in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities of public money.
==========

People who would normally have nothing to do with each other (the left-wing, the right-wing, the wingless) all flocked to him.
==========

He had something for everyone. He electrified Hindu chauvinists (who were already excited by the Mother India map) with their controversial old war cry, Vande Mataram! Salute the Mother! When some Muslims got upset, the committee arranged a visit from a Muslim film star from Bombay who sat on the dais next to the old man for more than an hour wearing a Muslim prayer cap (something he never usually did) to underline the message of Unity in Diversity. For traditionalists the old man quoted Gandhi. He said that the caste system was India’s salvation. ‘Each caste must do the work it has been born to do, but all work must be respected.’ When Dalits erupted in fury, a municipal sweeper’s little daughter was dressed up in a new frock and seated by his side with a bottle of water from which he sipped from time to time. For militant moralists the old man’s slogan was Thieves must have their hands cut off! Terrorists must be hanged! For Nationalists of all stripes he roared, ‘Doodh maangogey to kheer dengey! Kashmir maangogey to chiir dengey!’ Ask for milk, we’ll give you cream! Ask for Kashmir, we’ll rip you open seam to seam!
==========

Nobody had seen frenzy like this, at least not since twenty years ago, when, on the Day of the Concurrent Miracle, idols of Lord Ganesh in temples all over the world were reported to have simultaneously started drinking milk.
==========

The toilet lights stayed on, night and day. It cost one rupee for a piss, two for a shit and three for a shower. Not many on the pavement could afford these rates. Many pissed outside the toilet, against the wall. So, though the toilet was spotlessly clean inside, from the outside it gave off the sharp smoky smell of stale urine. It didn’t matter very much to the management; the toilet’s revenue came from elsewhere. The exterior wall doubled up as a billboard that advertised something new every week.
==========

Chheen li tumne garib ki rozi roti
Aur laga diye hain fees karne pe tatti

You’ve snatched poor folks’ daily bread
And slapped a fee on their shit instead
==========

His mother didn’t work as a sweeper in a dam-engineer’s house that was built on the land that she once owned. She didn’t have to steal mangoes from her own trees. She didn’t live in a resettlement colony in a tin hut with tin walls and a tin roof that was so hot you could fry onions on it.
==========

Opposite the toilet, back on the TV-crew side of the road (but some serious ideological distance away), was what people on the pavement called the Border: Manipuri Nationalists asking for the revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which made it legal for the Indian Army to kill on ‘suspicion’; Tibetan refugees calling for a free Tibet; and, most unusually (and most dangerously, for them), the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared, whose sons had gone missing, in their thousands, in the war for freedom in Kashmir.
==========

They weren’t all mothers; the wives, sisters and a few young children of the Disappeared had come too. Each of them carried a picture of their missing son, brother or husband. Their banner said: The Story of Kashmir DEAD = 68,000 DISAPPEARED = 10,000 Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy? No TV camera pointed at that banner, not even by mistake.
==========

They had told their stories at endless meetings and tribunals in the international supermarkets of grief,
==========

Sometimes a single person’s clarity can unnerve a muddled crowd.
==========

He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body. He, raging at a world in which the balance sheets did not tally. She, raging at her glands, her organs, her skin, the texture of her hair, the width of her shoulders, the timbre of her voice. He, fighting for a way to impose fiscal integrity on a decaying system. She, wanting to pluck the very stars from the sky and grind them into a potion that would give her proper breasts and hips and a long, thick plait of hair that would swing from side to side as she walked, and yes, the thing she longed for most of all, that most well stocked of Delhi’s vast stock of invectives, that insult of all insults, a Maa ki Choot, a mother’s cunt. He, who had spent his days tracking tax dodges, pay-offs and sweetheart deals. She, who had lived for years like a tree in an old graveyard, where, on lazy mornings and late at night, the spirits of the old poets whom she loved, Ghalib, Mir and Zauq, came to recite their verse, drink, argue and gamble. He, who filled in forms and ticked boxes. She, who never knew which box to tick, which queue to stand in, which public toilet to enter (Kings or Queens? Lords or Ladies? Sirs or Hers?). He, who believed he was always right. She, who knew she was all wrong, always wrong. He, reduced by his certainties. She, augmented by her ambiguity. He, who wanted a law. She, who wanted a baby. A circle formed around them: furious, curious, assessing the adversaries, picking sides. It didn’t matter. Which tight-arsed Gandhian accountant stood a chance in hell in a one-to-one public face-off against an old, Old Delhi Hijra?
==========

Dil cheez kya hai, aap meri jaan lijiye
Why just my heart, take my whole life too
==========

Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying.
==========

The government feeds us useless little pieces of hope through the bars of this iron railing. Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying.
==========

Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein
Keh gayee sayyaad se
Apni sunehri gaand mein
Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar

She died in her cage, the little bird,
These words she left for her captor –
Please take the spring harvest
And shove it up your gilded arse
==========

Even some of the street mongrels have coats and show traces of pedigreed lineage. Trickledown. Ha! Ha!
==========

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.
==========

If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.
==========

It would have easily made the Before part of a Before-and-After shampoo commercial.
==========

That both rumours were true. Her mother was indeed her real mother, but had first abandoned her and then adopted her.
==========

He noticed Tilo and switched on his (considerable) charm, like you might switch on the headlights of a car, only because she didn’t pay attention to him. He wasn’t used to that.
==========

He was a great showman; boisterous, witty, a bit of a bully, and utterly, hilariously merciless with the people he chose to publicly pick on. He was nice-looking, slim, boyish, a good cricketer (off-spinner), with floppy hair and glasses – very much the cool, intellectual sportsman. But more than his looks, it was his roguish appeal that girls seemed to love. They flocked around him giddily, hanging on to his every word, giggling at his jokes even when they weren’t funny. It was hard to keep track of his string of girlfriends. He had that chameleon-like quality that good actors have – the ability to alter his physical appearance, not superficially, but radically, depending on who he had decided to be at that particular moment in his life.
==========

Her main responsibility at work, she told me, was to take the blame for other people’s mistakes.
==========

A ginger tomcat yowled in sexual desperation for the female who had barricaded herself inside a nest of loose wicker that had come undone from the seat of a broken chair. I probably remember him so clearly because he reminded me of myself.
==========

‘I’m not marrying anybody.’ When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.
==========

I have never understood how that storm of dull, misguided vanity – the absurd notion that Kashmir could have ‘freedom’ – swept him up as it did a whole generation of young Kashmiri men.
==========

Even in the most uneventful of lives, we are called upon to choose our battles, and this one wasn’t mine.
==========

But who was to explain that to a crusading journalist who wrote his copy with the sound of applause permanently ringing in his ears?
==========

Today, as the saffron tide of Hindu Nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another,
==========

Even my colleagues in the Bureau don’t seem to be able to see the difference between religious faith and patriotism. They seem to want a sort of Hindu Pakistan.
==========

That none of us who were fighting over it – Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese (they have a piece of it too – Aksai Chin, which used to be part of the old Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir), or for that matter Pahadis, Gujjars, Dogras, Pashtuns, Shins, Ladakhis, Baltis, Gilgitis, Purikis, Wakhis, Yashkuns, Tibetans, Mongols, Tatars, Mon, Khowars – none of us, neither saint nor soldier, had the right to claim the truly heavenly beauty of that place for ourselves.
==========

The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.
==========

The militants who managed to make it through rarely survived in the Valley for more than two or at most three years. If they weren’t captured or killed by the security forces, they slaughtered each other. We guided them along that path, although they didn’t need much assistance – they still don’t.
==========

Yesterday a Pakistani friend forwarded me this – it’s making the mobile phone rounds, so you may have seen it already: I saw a man on a bridge about to jump. I said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He said, ‘Nobody loves me.’ I said, ‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are you a Muslim or a non-Muslim?’ He said, ‘A Muslim.’ I said, ‘Shia or Sunni?’ He said, ‘Sunni.’ I said, ‘Me too! Deobandi or Barelvi?’ He said, ‘Barelvi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi or Tafkeeri?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Azmati or Tanzeehi Farhati?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Uloom Ajmer, or Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat.’ I said, ‘Die, kafir!’ and I pushed him over.
==========

The only thing that keeps Kashmir from self-destructing like Pakistan and Afghanistan is good old petit bourgeois capitalism. For all their religiosity, Kashmiris are great businessmen. And all businessmen eventually, one way or another, have a stake in the status quo – or what we call the ‘Peace Process’, which, by the way, is an entirely different kind of business opportunity from peace itself.
==========

(Ah yes, there was a time when a Muslim courtesan could so hauntingly invoke a Hindu deity.)
==========

Their cordon-and-search operations were always ‘massive’, everybody they picked up was always ‘dreaded’, seldom less than ‘A-category’, and the recoveries they made from those they captured were always ‘war-like’.
==========

The irony was – is – that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slitting each other’s throats.
==========

The irony was – is – that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slitting each other’s throats. And yet it would be a mistake to chalk this down to confusion. Their problem is not confusion, not really. It’s more like a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict, especially us, exploited this fault line mercilessly. It made for a perfect war – a war that can never be won or lost, a war without end.
==========

The thinking was that permitting the population to vent its feelings and shout its slogans from time to time would prevent that anger from accumulating and building into an unmanageable cliff of rage. So far, in this more than quarter-century-long conflict in Kashmir, it has paid off. Kashmiris mourned, wept, shouted their slogans, but in the end they always went back home.
==========

Retirement is rarely kind to powerful men.
==========

‘Get them by the balls, Barber. Hearts and minds will follow.’ Kashmir did this to us.
==========

It’s true we did – we do – some terrible things in Kashmir, but … I mean what the Pakistan Army did in East Pakistan – now that was a clear case of genocide. Open and shut. When the Indian Army liberated Bangladesh, the good old Kashmiris called it – still call it – the ‘Fall of Dhaka’. They aren’t very good at other people’s pain. But then, who is? The Baloch, who are being buggered by Pakistan, don’t care about Kashmiris. The Bangladeshis whom we liberated are hunting down Hindus. The good old communists call Stalin’s Gulag a ‘necessary part of revolution’. The Americans are currently lecturing the Vietnamese about human rights. What we have on our hands is a species problem. None of us is exempt. And then there’s that other business that’s become pretty big these days. People – communities, castes, races and even countries – carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market. Unfortunately, speaking for myself, on that count I have no stock to trade, I’m a tragedy-less man. The upper-caste, upper-class oppressor from every angle. Cheers to that.
==========

‘shape up or ship out’.
==========

As for their death, need I tell you about it? It will be, for all of them, the death of him who, when he learned of his from the jury, merely mumbled in a Rhenish accent, ‘I’m already way beyond that.’ Jean Genet
==========

Then, as she had already died four or five times, the apartment had remained available for a drama more serious than her own death. JEAN GENET
==========

She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died.
==========

‘Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion.’
==========

‘Schopenhauer on the other hand believed that Pity is and ought to be the supreme weevil virtue. But long before them, Socrates asked the key question: Why should we be moral?’
==========

A lizard on TV. Hello and welcome, you’re watching Lizard News at Nine. There’s been a blizzard on lizard island.
==========

There’s trouble in the city – you must have heard – protests, firings, killings, funerals … Our usual Srinagar Special.
==========

We follow our own rules Ferocious we are Lethal in any form Tamer of tides We play with storms U guessed it right We are Men in Uniform
==========

Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho
Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho
Gumaan tum ko ke rasta katt raha hai
Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho

Bullets you sow instead of love
Our homeland you wash with blood
You imagine you’re showing the way
But I believe you’ve gone astray

Habib Jalib
==========

‘And after Azadi? Has anyone thought? What will majority do to the minority? Kashmiri Pandits have already gone. Only us Muslims remain. What will we do to each other? What will Salafis do to Barelvis? What will Sunnis do to Shias? They say they will go to Jannat more surely if they kill a Shia than if they kill a Hindu. What will be the fate of Ladakhi Buddhists? Jammu Hindus? J&K is not just Kashmir. It’s Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. Has any Separatist thought of this? The answer, I can tell you, is a big “No”.’
==========

It was an instinctive gesture of solidarity with a prisoner against a jailer – regardless of the reasons that had made the prisoner a prisoner and the jailer a jailer.
==========

‘No. I was trained here. In Kashmir. We have everything here now. Training, weapons … We buy our ammunition from the army. It’s twenty rupees for a bullet, nine hundred for –’ ‘From the army?’ ‘Yes. They don’t want the militancy to end. They don’t want to leave Kashmir. They are very happy with the situation as it is. Everybody on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris. So many of the grenade blasts and massacres are done by them.’
==========

Still, of all the women in the world, to have this woman’s hand in his made him indescribably happy.
==========

She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete – a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity.
==========

He always referred to people as ‘parties’. ‘At the end of the day’ was his favourite launching pad for all his advice and insights, just as when he wanted to belittle someone he always began by saying, ‘With all due respect.’
==========

Popular Bollywood song:
Duniya khatam ho jayegi
Chudai khatam nahi hogi

The world will end,
But fucking never will.
==========

Being seen as ‘successful’ gave him the pick of a range of women, some single and far younger than him, and some his age or older, married and looking for variety, or divorced and looking for a second chance.
==========

(whose job it was to know everything about everybody and to let everybody know that he knew everything about everybody)
==========

When you look out behind those curtains, do you feel there’s a crowd of people? I feel there is. There’s definitely a smell. A crowd smell. A bit rotten, like the sea.
==========

I feel I am surrounded by eunuchs. Am I?
==========

On most mornings, anyone who put an ear to her door would have heard her. No one put an ear to her door.
==========

How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated. Even after the rest of their bodies had turned to ash, two lung-shaped slabs of stone remained behind, unburned.
==========

I don’t know where to stop, or how to go on. I stop when I shouldn’t. I go on when I should stop. There is weariness. But there is also defiance. Together they define me these days. Together they steal my sleep, and together they restore my soul. There are plenty of problems with no solutions in sight. Friends turn into foes. If not vocal ones, then silent, reticent ones. But I’ve yet to see a foe turning into a friend. There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have …
==========

‘These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.’
==========

In battle, Musa told Tilo, enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.
==========

THE BRAVEHEART Mehmood was a tailor in Budgam. His greatest desire was to have himself photographed posing with guns. Finally a school friend of his who had joined a militant group took him to their hideout and made his dream come true. Mehmood returned to Srinagar with the negatives and took them to Taj Photo Studio to have prints made. He negotiated a 25-paisa discount for each print. When he went to pick up his prints the Border Security Force laid a cordon around Taj Photo Studio and caught him red-handed with the prints. He was taken to a camp and tortured for many days. He did not give away any information. He was sentenced to ten years in jail. The militant commander who facilitated the photography session was arrested a few months later. Two AK-47s and several rounds of ammunition were recovered from him. He was released after two months.
==========

THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER Manohar Mattoo was a Kashmiri Pandit who stayed on in the Valley even after all the other Hindus had gone. He was secretly tired of and deeply hurt by the barbs from his Muslim friends who said that all Hindus in Kashmir were actually, in one way or another, agents of the Indian Occupation Forces. Manohar had participated in all the anti-India protests, and had shouted Azadi! louder than everybody else. But nothing seemed to help. At one point he had even contemplated taking up arms and joining the Hizb, but eventually he decided against it. One day an old school friend of his, Aziz Mohammed, an intelligence officer, visited him at home to tell him that he was worried for him. He said that he had seen his (Mattoo’s) surveillance file. It suggested that he be put under watch because he displayed ‘anti-national tendencies’. When he heard the news Mattoo beamed and felt his chest swell with pride. ‘You have given me the Nobel Prize!’ he told his friend. He took Aziz Mohammed out to Café Arabica and bought him coffee and pastries worth Rs 500. A year later he (Mattoo) was shot by an unknown gunman for being a kafir.
==========

In Kashmir when we wake up and say ‘Good Morning’ what we really mean is ‘Good Mourning’.
==========

All they have to do is to turn around and shoot. All the people have to do is to lie down and die. When the last soldier has gone, the people climb over the debris of the burnt house. The tin sheets that were once the roof are still smouldering. A scorched trunk lies open, flames still leaping out of it. What was in it that burns so beautifully?
==========

There’s too much blood for good literature.
==========

What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?
==========

The hair on her head was dead white. The triangle of hair between her legs was jet black. What did that mean? Was she old or still young? Was she dead or still alive?
==========

P.S. I have learned that scientists working in the poultry industry are trying to excise the mothering instinct in hens in order to mitigate or entirely remove their desire to brood. Their goal, apparently, is to stop chickens wasting time on unnecessary things and thereby to increase the efficiency of egg production. Even though I am personally and in principle completely against efficiency, I wonder whether conducting this sort of intervention (by which I mean excising the mothering instinct) on the Maaji – The Mothers of the Disappeared in Kashmir – would help. Right now they are inefficient, unproductive units, living on a mandatory diet of hopeless hope, pottering about in their kitchen gardens, wondering what to grow and what to cook, in case their sons return. I’m sure you agree this is a bad business model. Could you propose a better one? A doable, realistic (although I’m against realism too) formula to arrive at an efficient Quantum of Hope? The three variables in their case are Death, Disappearance and Familial Love. All other forms of love, assuming that they do indeed exist, do not qualify and should be disregarded. Barring of course the Love of God. (That goes without saying.)
==========

And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. JAMES BALDWIN
==========

But then the algebra of infinite justice was never so rude.
==========

When the fighting began and the Occupation tightened its grip, for ordinary people the consolidation of their dead became, in itself, an act of defiance.
==========

Cynics said it was the army again, always looking for ways to keep gullible people busy and out of trouble. There were rumours and counter-rumours. There were rumours that might have been true, and truths that ought to have been just rumours. For instance, it really was true that for many years the army’s Human Rights Cell was headed by a Lieutenant Colonel Stalin – a friendly fellow from Kerala, son of an old communist. (The rumour was that it was his idea to set up Muskaan – which means ‘smile’ in Urdu – a chain of military ‘Good Will’ centres for the rehabilitation of widows, half-widows, orphans and half-orphans. Infuriated people, who accused the army of creating the supply of orphans and widows, regularly burned down the ‘Good Will’ orphanages and sewing-centres. They were always rebuilt, bigger, better, plusher, friendlier.)
==========

They ran their sly fingers over the cold-metal bumps on their quota of grenades that was being distributed so generously, like parcels of choice mutton at Eid. They grafted the language of God and Freedom, Allah and Azadi, on to their murders and new scams. They made off with money, property and women. Of course women. Women of course. In this way the insurrection began. Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living.
==========

Tourists flew out. Journalists flew in. Honeymooners flew out. Soldiers flew in.
==========

Please Sir, have you seen my boy anywhere? Have you seen my husband? Has my brother by any chance passed through your hands? And the Sirs swelled their chests and bristled their moustaches and played with their medals and narrowed their eyes to assess them, to see which one’s despair would be worth converting into corrosive hope (I’ll see what I can do), and what that hope would be worth to whom. (A fee? A feast? A fuck? A truckload of walnuts?)
==========

One of the things that S. Murugesan had secretly enjoyed about being in Kashmir was that fair-skinned Kashmiris would often taunt Indian soldiers by mocking their dark skins and calling them ‘Chamar nasl’ (Chamar breed). He was amused by the rage it provoked among those of his fellow soldiers who considered themselves upper caste and thought nothing of calling him a Chamar, which was what North Indians usually called all Dalits, regardless of which of the many Untouchable castes they belonged to. Kashmir was one of the few places in the world where a fair-skinned people had been ruled by a darker-skinned one. That inversion imbued appalling slurs with a kind of righteousness.
==========

In some countries, some soldiers die twice.
==========

As the war progressed in the Kashmir Valley, graveyards became as common as the multi-storey parking lots that were springing up in the burgeoning cities in the plains. When they ran out of space, some graves became double-deckered, like the buses in Srinagar that once ferried tourists between Lal Chowk and the Boulevard.
==========

Some Kashmiris die twice too.
==========

Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.
==========

Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections.
==========

So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that’s all the little procession really amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace.
==========

It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death. Mourning relatives who had backed away were asked to return into frame. Their sorrow was to be archived. In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir’s grief and loss.
==========

Non-actionable intelligence is as good as garbage,’
==========

‘How are unarmed villagers supposed to turn away a group of men with guns who knock on their doors in the middle of the night? Regardless of whether they are militants or military?’
==========

Dekho mian, mein Bharat Sarkar ka lund hoon, aur mera kaam hai chodna. Look, brother, I am the Government of India’s dick and it’s my job to fuck people.
==========

(these ‘permissions’ never came in the form of orders to kill, but usually as an absence of orders not to kill)
==========

He was not a brooder though, and got over things quickly.
==========

In our Kashmir the dead will live for ever; and the living are only dead people, pretending.
==========

In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing – walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home – they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier. And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing – walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home – they were a legitimate target.
==========

Tilo didn’t know that Musa was married. He hadn’t told her. Should he have? Why should he have? And why should she mind? It was she who had walked away from him. But she did mind. Not because he was married, but because he hadn’t told her.
==========

There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous.
==========

In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.
==========

He hadn’t changed very much, and yet he was almost unrecognizable.
==========

He knew that she knew that he knew that she knew. That’s how it was between them.
==========

‘Our stomachs are graveyards.’
==========

‘Here it’s the same thing. Only the dead are free.’
==========

‘Did you love her?’ ‘I did. I wanted to tell you that.’ ‘Why?’ Musa finished his cigarette and lit another. ‘I don’t know. Something to do with honour. Yours, mine and hers.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier, then?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Was it an arranged marriage?’ ‘No.’
==========

He was deliberately digressing, circling around a story that was as hard – harder – for him to tell as it was for her to hear.
==========

‘You don’t really know me. I’m a patriot. I get goosebumps when I see the national flag. I get so emotional I can’t think straight. I love flags and soldiers and all that marching around stuff.
==========

Trav’ling lady, stay awhile until the night is over. I’m just a station on your way, I know I’m not your lover.
==========

It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one, because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates. Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving. In matters of the heart, they had a virtual forest of safety nets.
==========

‘You know what the hardest thing for us is? The hardest thing to fight? Pity. It’s so easy for us to pity ourselves … such terrible things have happened to our people … in every single household something terrible has happened … but self-pity is so … so debilitating. So humiliating. More than Azadi, now it’s a fight for dignity. And the only way we can hold on to our dignity is to fight back. Even if we lose. Even if we die.
==========

Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Was it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?
==========

Death cleaner, misfortune saltier, And the earth more truthful, more awful.
==========

They spent the night together on a purely secular basis.
==========

When she woke she felt better prepared to go home and face the rest of her life.
==========

As always, history would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.
==========

They accuse you of eating beef and then take over your house and your land and send you to a refugee camp. It’s all about property, not cows.
==========

As a keeper of secrets, she was nothing short of Olympic class.
==========

All the cars that had stopped at the lights had their windows rolled up. The people in them were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the Hijras.
==========

Saeeda said that because sexual-reassignment surgery was becoming cheaper, better, and more accessible to people, Hijras would soon disappear. ‘Nobody will need to go through what we’ve been through any more.’ ‘You mean no more Indo–Pak?’ Nimmo Gorakhpuri said.
==========

But when they took an exit road off it, they saw that the world underneath the flyover was an entirely different one – an unpaved, unlaned, unlit, unregulated, wild and dangerous one, in which buses, trucks, bullocks, rickshaws, cycles, handcarts and pedestrians jostled for survival. One kind of world flew over another kind of world without troubling to stop and ask the time of day.
==========

And Sarmad – Hazrat of Utmost Happiness, Saint of the Unconsoled and Solace of the Indeterminate, Blasphemer among Believers and Believer among Blasphemers – did.
==========

I must sound like those army generals who wage war all their lives and then suddenly become pious, anti-nuke peaceniks when they retire.
==========

The paramilitary are using pellet guns that end up blinding people – which is better than killing them, I suppose. Although in PR terms it’s worse. The world is inured to the sight of piled-up corpses. But not to the sight of hundreds of living people who have been blinded. Pardon my crudeness, but you can imagine the visual appeal of that. But even that doesn’t seem to be working. Boys who’ve lost one eye are back on the street, prepared to risk the other. What do you do with that kind of fury?
==========

Every evening as I watch the news I marvel at the ignorance and idiocy on display. And to think that all my life I have been a part of it.
==========

‘One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz,
==========

Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein Keh gayee sayyaad se Apni sunehri gaand mein Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar
==========

How   to   tell     a shattered     story?       By       slowly         becoming everybody.       No.       By slowly becoming everything.
==========

She died in her cage, the little bird,/These words she left for her captor–/Please take the spring harvest/And shove it up your gilded arse.
==========

O God, thou art the giver of life
Remover of pain and sorrow
Bestower of happiness
O Creator of the Universe
May we receive thy supreme sin-destroying light
May thou guide our intellect in the right direction.
==========

“Nazi theory . . . specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists . . . If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”
==========
By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly—and this is much more important—I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
==========

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them.”
==========

“I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better”
==========

“The first thing that we ask of a writer is that he shan’t tell lies.”
==========

You cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.
==========

The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates; and the real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the Army.
==========

Given the Army, the officials and the business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools.
==========

Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends.
==========

Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.
==========

‘In England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen’
==========

Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression.
==========

Thus in England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen;
==========

All over India there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part; and just occasionally, when they are quite certain of being in the right company, their hidden bitterness overflows.
==========

The result is that every Anglo-Indian is haunted by a sense of guilt which he usually conceals as best he can, because there is no freedom of speech, and merely to be overheard making a seditious remark may damage his career.
==========

But we had been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple.
==========

‘Let’s all get together and have a good hate.’
==========

You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy.
==========

Every thinking person nowadays is stiff with fright.
==========

But it isn’t the war that matters, it’s the afterwar.
==========

The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it?
==========

‘It is known that the newspapers are habitually untruthful, but it is also known that they cannot tell lies of more than a certain magnitude’
==========

review of The Invasion from Mars by Hadley Cantril, The New Statesman and Nation, 26 October 1940 NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO Mr. Orson Welles produced on the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York a radio play based on H. G. Wells’s fantasia The War of the Worlds. The broadcast was not intended as a hoax, but it had an astonishing and unforeseen result. Thousands mistook it for a news broadcast and actually believed for a few hours that the Martians had invaded America and were marching across the countryside on steel legs a hundred feet high, massacring all and sundry with their heat rays. Some of the listeners were so panic-stricken that they leapt into their cars and fled. Exact figures are, of course, unobtainable, but the compilers of this survey (it was made by one of the research departments of Princeton) have reason to think that about six million people heard the broadcast and that well over a million were in some degree affected by the panic.
==========

It is known that the newspapers are habitually untruthful, but it is also known that they cannot tell lies of more than a certain magnitude and anyone seeing huge headlines in their paper announcing the arrival of a cylinder from Mars would probably believe what he read, at any rate for the few minutes that would be needed to make some verification.
==========

The survey does not reveal any single allembracing explanation of the panic. All it establishes is that the people most likely to be affected were the poor, the ill-educated and, above all, people who were economically insecure or had unhappy private lives. The evident connection between personal unhappiness and readiness to believe the incredible is its most interesting discovery. Remarks like ‘Everything is so upset in the world that anything might happen,’ or ‘So long as everybody was going to die, it was all right,’ are surprisingly common in the answers to the questionnaire. People who have been out of work or on the verge of bankruptcy for ten years may be actually relieved to hear of the approaching end of civilisation. It is a similar frame of mind that has induced whole nations to fling themselves into the arms of a Saviour.
==========

It is true that the Fascists, with their bolder methods of propaganda, also use when it suits them the aristocratic argument that Democracy ‘brings the worst men to the top,’ but the basic contention of all apologists of totalitarianism is that Democracy is a fraud.
==========

Once in five years he may get the chance to vote for his favourite party, but for the rest of the time practically every detail of his life is dictated by his employer. And in practice his political life is dictated as well.
==========

The monied class can keep all the important ministerial and official jobs in its own hands, and it can work the electoral system in its own favour by bribing the electorate, directly or indirectly.
==========

Even when by some mischance a government representing the poorer classes gets into power, the rich can usually blackmail it by threatening to export capital. Most important of all, nearly the whole cultural and intellectual life of the community—newspapers, books, education, films, radio—is controlled by monied men who have the strongest motive to prevent the spread of certain ideas.
==========

The citizen of a democratic country is ‘conditioned’ from birth onwards, less rigidly but not much less effectively than he would be in a totalitarian state.
==========

In theory a Labour government could come into office with a clear majority and proceed at once to establish socialism by Act of Parliament. In practice the monied classes would rebel, and probably with success, because they would have most of the permanent officials and the key men in the armed forces on their side.
==========

Political ‘liberty,’ it is said, is simply a bribe, a bloodless substitute for the Gestapo.
==========

Again, it is often argued that the whole façade of democracy—freedom of speech and assembly, independent trade unions and so forth—must collapse as soon as the monied classes are no longer in a position to make concessions to their employees.
==========

Democracy as we know it has never existed except in maritime or mountainous countries, i.e. countries which can defend themselves without the need for an enormous standing army.
==========

Democracy accompanies, probably demands, favourable conditions of life; it has never flourished in poor and militarised states.
==========

A democratic country fighting a desperate war is forced, just as much as an autocracy or a Fascist state, to conscript soldiers, coerce labour, imprison defeatists, suppress seditious newspapers; in other words, it can only save itself from destruction by ceasing to be democratic.
==========

Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country;
==========

How dangerous do you feel it to be to go into the nearest pub and express your opinion that this is a capitalist war and we ought to stop fighting?
==========

They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.
==========

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.
==========

Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not 46 million individuals, all different?
==========

Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
==========

In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities.
==========

The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory.
==========

English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats.
==========

There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore’s army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rear-guard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory.
==========

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.
==========

The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round and say that war is wicked?
==========

Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.
==========

What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots.
==========

Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word ‘Prussian’ had much the same significance in England as ‘Nazi’ has to-day. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British Army, in peace-time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.
==========

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a divebomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim.
==========

Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.
==========

Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.
==========

In the British army the drill is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.
==========

And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms.
==========

Our criminal law is as out of date as the muskets in the Tower.
==========

In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them.
==========

In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them. People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they accept the weather. They are part of ‘the law’, which is assumed to be unalterable.
==========

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
==========

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.
==========

But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ‘They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England.
==========

They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.
==========

The English electoral system, for instance, is an all-but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt.
==========

You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard.
==========

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.
==========

Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not only forbids you to express—even to think—certain thoughts but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. The totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it controls their actions.
==========

In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It didn’t tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. And the same is more or less true of any orthodox Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Moslem today.
==========

Now, with totalitarianism exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it doesn’t fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it can’t avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics.
==========

To take a crude, obvious example, every German up to September 1939 had to regard Russian Bolshevism with horror and aversion, and since September 1939 he has had to regard it with admiration and affection.
==========

Whoever feels the value of literature, whoever sees the central part it plays in the development of human history, must also see the life and death necessity of resisting totalitarianism, whether it is imposed on us from without or from within.
==========

And that is the chief reason why I suggest that if totalitarianism triumphs throughout the world, literature as we have known it is at an end. And in fact, totalitarianism does seem to have had that effect so far. In Italy literature has been crippled, and in Germany it seems almost to have ceased. The most characteristic activity of the Nazis is burning books. And even in Russia the literary renaissance we once expected hasn’t happened, and the most promising Russian writers show a marked tendency to commit suicide or disappear into prison.
==========

One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro-Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten. So also with Franco, Mussolini, etc., should they ultimately come over to us.
==========

In the last twenty years there were really two policies open to us as a nation living on coloured labour. One was to say frankly: We are the master-race—and remember, that is how Hitler talks to his people, because he is a totalitarian leader and can speak frankly on certain subjects—we are the master-race, we live by exploiting inferior races, let’s all get together and squeeze as much out of them as we can.
==========

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.
==========

‘Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side’
==========

Atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection.
==========

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
==========

At any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
==========

Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942.
==========

Unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen.
==========

They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened.
==========

They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads—they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.
==========

These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads—they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.
==========

The Struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda—that is to say, lies. The broad truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.
==========

I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.
==========

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.
==========

I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories;
==========

I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.
==========

saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
==========

The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship.
==========

Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point—the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not.
==========

truthful history of the war, but
==========

often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.
==========

How will the history of the Spanish War be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence.
==========

For, as I have pointed out already, the Government also dealt extensively in lies.
==========

So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
==========

The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past.
==========

If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.
==========

there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.
==========

Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does?
==========

‘Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history.’
==========

French had countered the German propaganda chiefly by means of jamming, a bad method, because it either does not work or, if it does work, gives the impression that something is being concealed.
==========

You ask whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade and instance the fact that they are not apparently growing in this country and the USA. I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase.
==========

All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take nondemocratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system.
==========

‘Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.’
==========

By ‘Nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
==========

By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.
==========

Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.
==========

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.
==========

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.
==========

The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
==========

To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them the objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.
==========

Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist.
==========

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.
==========

A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency.
==========

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them.
==========

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians—which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.
==========

The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.
==========

History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irish-women’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in ‘the right’ cause.
==========

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
==========

For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald.
==========

And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia.
==========

In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.
==========

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should—in
==========

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should—in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918—and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible.
==========

In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The realignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened.
==========

Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.
==========

More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
==========

The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.
==========

The nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world.
==========
All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory.
==========

Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.
==========

They knew that life nowadays was harsh and bare, that they were often hungry and often cold, and that they were usually working when they were not asleep. But doubtless it had been worse in the old days. They were glad to believe so. Besides, in those days they were slaves and now they were free, and that made all the difference,
==========

In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face,
==========

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.
==========

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.
==========

Famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’
==========

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.
==========

In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.
==========

Revivalist hymn: Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone; Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to make it known.
==========

Revivalist hymn: Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone; Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to make it known.
To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don’t’ at the beginning of each line.
==========

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.
==========

The writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist.
==========

Each of them tacitly claims that ‘the truth’ has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of ‘the truth’ and merely resists it out of selfish motives.
==========

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
==========

Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying a historical fact.
==========

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts, or the emotional sincerity, that literary creation demands.
==========

But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes.
==========

No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
==========

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
==========

People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
==========

Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.
==========

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
==========

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
==========

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
==========

I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.
==========

Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.
==========

A nation gets the newspapers it deserves.
==========

Still, our newspapers are not all alike; some of them are more intelligent than others, and some are more popular than others. And when you study the relationship between intelligence and popularity, what do you find?
==========

Here are the two lists:
INTELLIGENCE [newspapers]: Manchester Guardian. Times. News Chronicle. Telegraph. Herald. Mail. Mirror. Express. Graphic.
POPULARITY [newspapers]: Express. Herald. Mirror. News Chronicle. Mail. Graphic. Telegraph. Times. Manchester Guardian.
It will be seen that the second list is very nearly—not quite, for life is never so neat as that—the first turned upside down. And even if I have not ranged these papers in quite the right order, the general relationship holds good. The paper that has the best reputation for truthfulness, the Manchester Guardian, is the one that is not read even by those who admire it. People complain that it is ‘so dull’. On the other hand countless people read the Daily—while saying frankly that they ‘don’t believe a word of it’.
==========

Till then, if the news is not distorted by businessmen it will be distorted by bureaucrats, who are only one degree better.
==========

The three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
==========
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple.
==========

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.
==========

The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.
==========

Sometimes indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing.
==========

Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
==========

‘By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished?
==========

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
==========

‘Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.’
==========

A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.
==========

Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
==========

Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
==========

The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.
==========

The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.
==========

‘Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
==========

I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’ ‘In records. It is written down.’ ‘In records. And—?’ ‘In the mind. In human memories.’ ‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’ ‘But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston, again momentarily forgetting the dial. ‘It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’
==========

You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
==========

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
==========

‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’ ‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
==========

Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.
==========

Estha occupied very little space in the world.
==========

Estha would walk past, not rude, not polite. Just quiet
==========

He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Politics.
==========

They provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern.
==========

In that Christian institution, breasts were not acknowledged. They weren’t supposed to exist (and if they didn’t could they hurt?).
==========

But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.
==========

Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.
==========

Baby Kochamma loved the Ayemenem house and cherished the furniture that she had inherited by outliving everybody else.
==========

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture. She kept her doors and windows locked, unless she was using them.
==========

desperate and dispossessed people. She
==========

desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
==========

They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.
==========

His arms had goosebumps where the handcuffs touched his skin. Cold handcuffs with a sourmetal smell.
==========

a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes.
==========

choosing between her husband’s name and her father’s name didn’t give a woman much of a choice.
==========

In the way that the unfortunate sometimes dislike the co-unfortunate,
==========

She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter-according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject. The twins were too young to understand all this, so Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of high happiness when a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg hot from a hen.
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She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter-according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject.
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She had managed to persuade herself over the years that her unconsummated love for Father Mulligan had been entirely due to her restraint and her determination to do the right thing.
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as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.
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(d)All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.
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They were made to write “In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards”. A hundred times. Forwards. A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact
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nataS ni rieht seye. They were made to write “In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards”. A hundred times. Forwards. A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact
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nataS ni rieht seye. They were made to write “In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards”. A hundred times. Forwards. A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.
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“is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?”
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He was called Velutha—which means White in Malayalam—because he was so black.
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He stared straight ahead with his mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one.
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He stared straight ahead with his mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one. One cheek glistened with tears. The other stayed dry.
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Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et tu, Brute? —then fall, Caesar.”
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“You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”
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In an unconscious gesture of television-enforced democracy, mistress and servant both scrabbled unseeingly in the same bowl of nuts.
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In her mind she kept an organized, careful account of Things She’d Done For People, and Things People Hadn’t Done For Her.
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live in Ayemenem. My grandmother owns Paradise Pickles & Preserves. She’s the Sleeping Partner.” “Is she, now?” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “And who does she sleep with?”
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“I live in Ayemenem. My grandmother owns Paradise Pickles & Preserves. She’s the Sleeping Partner.” “Is she, now?” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “And who does she sleep with?”
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Estha went behind the Refreshments Counter for his Free Cold Drink. He saw the three high stools arranged in a row for the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man to sleep on. The wood shiny from his sitting. “Now if you’ll kindly hold this for me,” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, handing Estha his penis through his soft white muslin dhoti, “I’ll get you your drink. Orange? Lemon?” Estha held it because he had to. “Orange? Lemon?” the Man said. “Lemonorange?” “Lemon, please,” Estha said politely. He got a cold bottle and a straw. So he held a bottle in one hand and a penis in the other. Hard, hot, veiny. Not a moonbeam. The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s hand closed over Estha’s. His thumbnail was long like a woman’s. He moved Estha’s hand up and down. First slowly. Then fastly. The lemondrink was cold and sweet. The penis hot and hard. The piano keys were watching. “So your grandmother runs a factory?” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “What kind of factory?” “Many products,” Estha said, not looking, with the straw in his mouth. “Squashes, pickles, jams, curry powders. Pineapple slices.” “Good,” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, “Excellent” His hand closed tighter over Estha’s. Tight and sweaty. And faster still. Fast foster flies: – Never let it rest Until the fast is faster; And the faster’s fest.
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She asked him for a divorce. Those last few tortured nights before he left her, Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To ensure that when he thought of her, the child that he invoked would be accurate.
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Now he had a house and a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an issue.
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He didn’t have a How do YOU do? in him.
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She felt somehow humiliated by this public revolt in her area of jurisdiction. She had wanted a smooth performance. A prize for her children in the Indo-British Behavior Competition.
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They walked past the Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one-day hunger strike. And past the people watching the Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one-day hunger strike. And past the people watching the people watching the people. A small tin sign on a big banyan tree said For VD. Sex Complaints contact Dr. OK Joy.
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An engineer from the Ettumanoor municipality was supervising the disposal of the carcass. They had to be careful because the decision would serve as precedent for all future Government Pachyderm Carcass Disposals. Not a matter to be treated lightly. There was a fire engine and some confused firemen.
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An engineer from the Ettumanoor municipality was supervising the disposal of the carcass. They had to be careful because the decision would serve as precedent for all future Government Pachyderm Carcass Disposals. Not a matter to be treated lightly.
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She was thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age.
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Neither Mammachi nor Baby Kochamma saw any contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind and feudal libido.
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A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief.
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He walked on water. Perhaps. But could He have swum on land?
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“If you’re happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count?” Estha asked. “Does what count?” “The happiness—does it count?”
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Ammu undressed and put a red toothbrush under a breast to see if it would stay. It didn’t Where she touched herself her flesh was taut and smooth. Under her hands her nipples wrinkled and hardened like dark nuts, pulling at the soft skin on her breasts. The thin line of down from her belly button led over the gentle curve of the base of her belly, to her dark triangle. Like an arrow directing a lost traveler. An inexperienced lover She undid her hair and turned around to see how long it had grown. It fell, in waves and curls and disobedient frizzy wisps—soft on the inside, coarser on the outside—to “The God of Small Things” By Arundhati Roy 107 just below where her small, strong waist began its curve out towards her hips. The bathroom was hot. Small beads of sweat studded her skin like diamonds. Then they broke and trickled down. Sweat ran down the recessed line of her spine. She looked a little critically at her round, heavy behind. Not big in itself. Not big per se (as Chacko-of-Oxford would no doubt have put it). Big only because the rest of her was so slender. It belonged on another, more voluptuous body.
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if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, it means you’ve eaten fish).
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The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
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He still had about him the aura of rage that even murder cannot quell.
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found herself looking forward to the Rumpled
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Despite her marital troubles, she had that air of secret elation; that affection for her own body that pregnant women often have.
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Mammachi’s rage at the old one-eyed Paravan standing in the rain, drunk, dribbling and covered in mud was re-directed into a cold contempt for her daughter and what she had done. She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular Paravan smell. Like animals, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited. Like a dog with a bitch on beat. Her tolerance of “Men’s Needs,” as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter. She had defiled generations of breeding (The Little Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial Entomologist, a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its knees. For generations to come, forever now, people would point at them at weddings and funerals. At baptisms and birthday parties.
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Inspector Thomas Mathew, receding behind his bustling Air India mustache, understood perfectly. He had a Touchable wife, two Touchable daughters—whole Touchable generations waiting in their Touchable wombs…
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They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.
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Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
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quoted Chairman Mao. In Malayalam. His expression curiously like his niece’s. “Revolution is not a dinner party. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.”
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what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory.
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War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.
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It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.
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it didn’t stop the feeling that somebody had lifted off his head and vomited into his body.
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it didn’t stop the feeling that somebody had lifted off his head and vomited into his body. Lumpy vomit dribbling down his insides. Over his heart. His lungs. The slow thick drip into the pit of his stomach. All his organs awash in vomit. There was nothing that rain could do about that.
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And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
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She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.
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(When you re-create the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?)
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His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his beautiful smile. Four of his ribs were splintered, one had pierced his left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was ruptured and hemorrhaged, the blood collected in his abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places, the concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his kneecaps were shattered. Still they brought out the handcuffs. Cold.
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Nobody saw them. Bats, of course, are blind.
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There were people trapped in the glass paperweight on the policeman’s desk.
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She went to him and laid the length of her body against his. He just stood there. He didn’t touch her. He was shivering. Partly with cold. Partly terror. Partly aching desire. Despite his fear his body was prepared to take the bait. It wanted her. Urgently. His wetness wet her. She put her arms around him.
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Ammu smiled to herself in the dark, thinking how much she loved his arms—the shape and strength of them, how safe she felt resting in them when actually it was the most dangerous place she could be.
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Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other:
omorrow?
Tomorrow.
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She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin.
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They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.
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‘How can I go to the Bank, if I am under arrest?’ 
‘Ah, I see,’ said the Inspector, who had already reached the door. ‘You have misunderstood me. You are under arrest, certainly, but that need not hinder you from going about your business. You won’t be hampered in carrying on in the ordinary course of your life.’ 
‘Then being arrested isn’t so very bad,’ said K., going up to the Inspector. 
‘I never suggested that it was,’ said the Inspector. 
‘But in that case it would seem there was no particular necessity to tell me about it,’ said K., moving still closer. 
The others had drawn near too. They were all gathered now in a little space beside the door. 
‘It was my duty,’ said the Inspector. 
‘A stupid duty,’ said K. inflexibly.
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‘Most of these accused men are so sensitive,’
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It’s one of your heart attacks and it’ll pass over like all the others.
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He was feeling at ease now, at ease as one is when speaking to an inferior in some foreign country, keeping one’s own affairs to oneself and discussing with equanimity the other man’s interests, which gain consequence for the attention one bestows on them yet can be dismissed at will.
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