But while she could be exasperating, confused, insecure, loud, immature, vicious, venal, desperate, whatever — one weakness you would never associate with Benazir was physical cowardice.

At a time when the Indian Prime Minister would not step out of the SPG’s embrace, I have seen her not only having dinner with her family in the Islamabad Marriott’s open coffee shop, but even invite me, an Indian journalist at a loose end, to join them for an ice cream at a Baskin Robbins or an equivalent on a nightly family drive.

She lived in Karachi, travelled often to Larkana and those lands are not for the lily-livered. For the most part, she showed such nonchalance for the army establishment. In the 1993 election, when she was a front-runner, one morning in her Karachi home, she told me: “So you keep saying you have never been to Larkana? Come there tomorrow with me.” I said I had no visa for Larkana and wouldn’t risk venturing so deep inside very sensitive Sindh without documentation. “What will happen? At worse, they will jail you. Then in a week I will be Prime Minister and will send you home and if I could last in Sukkur jail for so long, can’t you survive for just one week?”

I did travel with her to Larkana, perhaps the first Indian journalist to do so in a long time, the local right-wing press went to town with Benazir’s dodgy friendships in the Indian media. But she wasn’t bothered.

... contd.