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?

At the office things were, again, very quiet. Normally the newsroom is thick with cigarette smoke, purple-lipped journalists talking loudly with and at each other, the endless tap of keyboards... Yesterday, they all sat at their desks, peering hard into their computer screens. When eventually there was an editorial meeting, for the first half hour nobody spoke of headline suggestions or the layout. One of my father’s colleagues was uncharacteristically bleak: “This reminds me of ’71,” he said. Nobody looked up in surprise because the gravity of the situation was felt so acutely by all. Pakistan was violently dismembered in ’71; yesterday, a former PM, assassinated. Two different and unrelated occurrences, yet with potentially similar outcomes. Pakistan’s Frontier Province has been taken over by the Taliban. There’s an insurgency in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, and now interior Sindh is erupting in flames. Vehicles are being torched, petrol pumps and banks set ablaze, PML(Q) offices set on fire by mobs throughout the country.

Yesterday the local headlines read, ‘A turning point: election imminent’; ‘Benazir Bhutto voted 2nd most influential woman of 2007’. Today, the entire country has been plunged into darkness. Half the country is in a state of paralytic mourning, the other half is out on the streets. I hope, desperately, that this is not the beginning of another end for Pakistan.