Pakistan, Word by Word

Daughter of the East
An Autobiography
Benazir Bhutto
First published in 1988, the year Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan, Daughter of the East was updated in 2007. Written in a majestic manner — and with some pretty obvious obfuscation — to convey her and her family’s connection to Pakistan’s destiny, the book has some uncanny parallels. For instance, amid all the talk now about the possibility of exhuming her body to investigate the cause of her death, it is interesting to read that similar demands were made after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s burial. The official version was that he was hanged on April 4, 1979, at Rawalpindi Central Jail. But rumours and workers’ testimony at the family graveyard near Larkana, Sindh, hinted that his body showed no signs of hanging, and that he had instead been killed due to violent behaviour by officers at the jail. The surviving family patriarch too recommended that the body be exhumed so that, in Benazir’s telling, “political advantage” could be maximised. She resisted, and those rumours still simmer.
Also of interest, in the updated epilogue, are her recollections of meeting Pervez Musharraf. She says she first met him when he acted as an interpreter during visits by the Turkish military, and that she declined to have him become her military secretary. She also claims to have initially turned down his promotion. She also recounts being invited, during her second term as PM, to the army headquarters to get a security briefing from “Director of Military Operations Major-General Pervez Musharraf”. He explained that she just had to give the orders and Pakistan would take Srinagar.
And with a premonition of death that stayed with her through the book, she anticipated her return to Pakistan in 2007, wondering if she’d be felled on the tarmac itself. It wasn’t that pat, but it came close.

In the Line of Fire: A Memoir
Pervez Musharraf
Musharraf too, in this memoir that won him a handsome advance and was published in 2006 to a glitzy marketing tour, adopts a saga-like approach, tying his story to the story of Pakistan. He makes the point most emphatically by remembering how he made the journey from Delhi to West Pakistan in 1947, a little boy clutching in his arms money for the new country’s treasury. In this expansive book, he also writes about his first crush. But most of his ire is aimed at Pakistan’s politicians and he bemoans at great length the loss of the 1990s to democratically elected governments. It’s a challenge, put it next to Bhutto’s book and try to merge the two accounts of Pakistan’s recent history into a coherent narrative.

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