The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was in August 2007. We had tea at the Pierre Hotel in New York with her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and their teenage son, Bilawal. “Look who I brought you,” she said to me, beaming a mother’s smile. I was happy to meet in person the young man whose birth had been a delicious political deceit. As we’d written in her 1989 memoir, “Daughter of Destiny” (Simon & Schuster), General Zia instructed his intelligence agents to determine her due date so he could time the elections to coincide with her confinement. But clever Benazir never let her medical records out of her sight, and the agents were off by a month. That gave her the time to recover before hitting the campaign trail. She won that election in 1988 and, at 35, became the first woman to head a Muslim nation.
I was very anxious about her return to Pakistan, this time to confront another dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. “I must,” she said. “If democracy is not restored, Pakistan will slip into a radical Islamic State.” I asked Asif, whom I’d gotten to know quite well over the years, if he was going back with her. “I want to,” he said, “but we decided the children ought to have at least one parent at home.” I turned to Bilawal, an Oxford undergraduate who’d sat quietly through the political discussion. “Are you going to go into politics, too?” I asked. He looked uncomfortable and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
She e-mailed me the next day. “Was lovely to see u yesterday. U looked wonderful! Hard to now imagine we met before I had bilawal. I measure time by looking at trees and my children. Love to urs and to u.”
Benazir left for Pakistan on Oct. 18. That night, as her motorcade inched through the masses who’d come to greet her, the first bomb went off. “It was simply terrible,” she e-mailed. “The triumph turned into tragedy when the terrorists struck undetected due to the street lights which had been shut off to facilitate their approach. The police van blunted one attack we think and the human shield the second so we were saved but 140 others died and five hundred injured. But we can’t let the terrorists deter us.”
To my fury, I read that Musharraf’s government had not only turned down her request for an international investigation into the attack but denied her request for armed guards and other security measures. They even decreed that she could no longer travel in a car with tinted glass! Why, I asked her. “Hidden hands within the govt, and some not so hidden, are behind the militants and behind the attack on me. That’s why they don’t want me to have tinted glasses etc. Under pressure they have now verbally allowed it but not in writing. Question: why is mush not cleansing his cabinet and intelligence bureau etc of such elements? What is he frightened of that a foreign investigated inquiry will show?”
I hung on every report coming from Pakistan and scoured Dawn, Pakistan’s English-language newspaper, on the Web. I was heartened a week later when Benazir traveled safely to her ancestral home in Larkana where, in 1988, we had watched the election returns on a flickering black-and-white television set, recorded by a young boy in a copy book. Earlier in the day, we had visited the family graveyard where her father and two brothers, all of whom were murdered, are buried. The burial ground then was a simple one, surrounded by walls and tended by an old family retainer. Since then, I saw on television, a huge mausoleum had been built over it. “I saw the mausoleum for the first time and was so happy to see it rise from the dusty haze across the horizon to pay tribute to a great man,” she e-mailed me.
She was in Lahore when Musharraf declared a state of emergency last November and ordered a lockdown on all politicians. I was almost relieved. She and I had spent time there in a friend’s house during Ramadan in 1987. Police had surrounded the walls at that time, but not to protect her. Their guns were pointing in. Benazir had passed some of the time doing a makeover of me, painting my nails, fingers and toes. Henna leaves were ordered up from the village of our host, made into a paste with coffee and tied around my head. (When I was finally allowed to wash it out, twigs and pebbles fell on the shower floor.) She was pleased at the result, having explained my previous no-nonsense appearance to her friends as “She’s from women’s lib.” “Am under house arrest once again,” she e-mailed me last month. “Glad to know the press is good. Mush has hired an additional lobbying firm for dollars 650 thou to malign me. But we r fighting on. When I see Lahore I see your face amongst the crowd of people that I shared experiences with.”
Our last exchange took place on the religious holiday of Eid al-Fitr following the suicide bombing in the mosque of the former interior minister, Aftab Sherpao. He had been a colleague of Benazir’s, and I had stayed with him and his very nice family in Peshawar during my 1988 visit. “I don’t like people I know being almost blown up,” I e-mailed her. “Are you sure you want to be Prime Minister?” Her reply did not answer my question. “The attack on Sherpao, on Eid and in a Prayer place was ghastly,” she wrote on Dec. 22. “Merry Xmas and happy new year. Take care and love, Benazir.”
Five days later, she was assassinated. I never want to see another rose petal.
