Postcards from her life: Lahore dust and a London sale

She was also sometimes irrational, as in her May 1990 attack on India over Kashmir. She delivered the famous speech in Muzaffarabad where she exhorted Kashmiris to cut Jagmohan (then J&K Governor) into pieces: Jagmohan ko jag-jag mo-mo han-han kar do, she said, making a furious chopping gesture with her left palm on to her right hand. She could also be stupid in speaking so openly against her army to Rajiv Gandhi in what was hailed as the “honeymoon” summit in the winter of 1988. Stupid, because she had not even cared to get her own rooms swept for bugs. As you would expect, the ISI had the room nicely wired and tapes of that damning conversation were liberally leaked to justify her sacking by the Establishment — that remarkable Pakistani institution, the trinity of the army, intelligence and bureaucracy which I have always spelt with capital E. She could be corrupt, as her fortunes overseas would tell you. And, finally, she could also be desperate for power as evident in the compromises she lately made with Musharraf.

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,...