It's 4 am and I can’t sleep. It’s been exactly a day since Benazir’s death and the city where I live, Lahore, is like a ghost town. The police have cordoned off huge swathes of road. There are no cars on the streets and the street lamps are dim. Winter in Lahore is always foggy, but since yesterday, things have been eerily, frighteningly quiet. I went to visit my neighbour yesterday — I needed to get out desperately, having sat like a cadaver in front of the TV all day, watching the black and white tributes to Benazir. My neighbour, also a friend, was sitting in front of her TV, watching the same tributes, clutching at the tasselled corners of her shawl, crying quietly into it.

I found out about Benazir’s death when I was walking back from my grandparents’ house. We were supposed to be going to a wedding when I bumped into my mother, dressed in wedding clothes, crying, “She’s dead. She’s dead.” My father and brother were at her side, shell-shocked. We got into the car and drove to the office where my parents work as journalists. My mother continued to cry — she of all my family members have been most affected by this death. It’s not so much that Pakistan has lost an important political figure. It has. But as a woman, a working woman and mother in a patriarchal society such as ours, Benazir symbolised so much for Pakistan’s women.

Our family was never aligned with any political party, but, growing up, I remember PPP flags tied to our gate. She was the hope of the nineties — and she let us down twice. But she was back after eight years in exile, the only moderate force, the only politician openly talking about fighting terrorism, the only woman. Some of my friends have argued with me — why should she be let off the hook just because she was a woman? It’s not that. In a country like Pakistan, especially now, in her womanhood and in her liberal agenda, she posed a challenge to fundamentalism. In that, she was a unique hope for this country. Half Radcliffe woman, half Oxford, the daughter of a feudal scion, a Sindhi, the first woman to lead a post-colonial Muslim state, benazir was so many things — and thus so important for Pakistan, which is also so many things. Are we Sindhis, Balochis, Pathans, Punjabis or Pakistanis? Are we a moderate nation? Are we Pakistanis or Muslims? Can we be both?

... contd.