But one of my broken-English pals had seen what had happened.
“Don’t worry, sister,” he whispered.
He linked arms with some friends, who formed a human protection chain. Together we walked around, and no other hands got through. I wondered where the reporters who had chartered a plane from Islamabad were, but I couldn’t call them—the Pakistani government’s one nod to security was blocking all calls in the area. Nobody checked for weapons or bombs. No government official trekked here, and the funeral hardly befitted a former head of state. Instead the funeral was probably how Bhutto would have wanted it—a public, messy, spontaneous outpouring of grief, not necessarily for the leader she was but for the leader she aspired to be.
A hole had been cut in the white marble floor next to Bhutto’s father’s grave. The ambulance backed inside the shrine, and supporters threw rose petals as her coffin, simple and wooden, was pulled out. Bhutto’s husband and son, who had flown to Pakistan after she was killed, helped lower her into the ground. They threw handfuls of sandy soil on top, helped by supporters. Slowly the coffin and Benazir Bhutto disappeared from view. She was gone. The country burned.
We eventually hitched a ride to the hotel where the other foreign journalists were staying—the chartered plane had made it to the nearest airport in time for the funeral, but the journalists had not been able to find a ride. The sold-out hotel was the only one not set on fire the previous night. It was decrepit. The pool was filled with trash and dead leaves—a BBC correspondent, talking on her phone while walking with her computer, accidentally fell in. A friend from the Washington Post loaned me his computer cord and a phone charger, and said we could stay in his room. His kindness was rewarded. When he went to the bathroom, someone flushed the toilet in the room above, which leaked on him below.
About 4 AM, after finishing my third story of the night, I shoved the Guardian reporter to one side of a mattress on the floor and laid down on the other side, wearing the same clothes I had been wearing for more than two days. I passed out for four hours. That morning, the Post reporter and I decided to flee.
“This is the worst place on earth,” he said.
“I’m never coming back here again,” I agreed.
We hitched a ride to Karachi, avoiding roadblocks of burning tires and cars and slogan-shouting men. Broken glass carpeted parts of the road. Trucks at gas stations were set on fire; so were some gas stations. Black plumes of smoke and the wreckage of grief could be seen everywhere—a torched building at a district court complex, a dozen blackened trucks near a gas station, a gas tanker, and a truck once filled with sand, still flickering with flames.
We waved a flag from Bhutto’s party out the car window, our visa on this dangerous stretch. “Bhutto lives!” we shouted as our password whenever men stopped us. “Bhutto lives!” the men shouted back. In one town, we saw hundreds of men carrying sticks and marching down the road ahead of us. We veered off, down a side street to the right. Nationwide the scene was little better. Life was at a standstill. Trains were halted; stores were closed. Some towns reported fuel and food shortages, or that only rickshaws and donkey-pulled carts could move.
We made it back to Karachi in seven hours—relatively quickly, with no traffic and no police preoccupied with pulling over speeders. In the rubble of the riots, boys already played cricket, normalcy already reasserting itself, the typical cycle of tragedy and mourning and recovery compressed because tragedy was such a usual event.
No one ever claimed responsibility for killing Bhutto, although the newly anointed Pakistani Taliban leader was again blamed, the newest bogeyman for the country. At a press conference three days after his mother died, Bhutto’s nineteen-year-old son, who had spent almost half his short life outside Pakistan, was named the future leader of the party. Until then the party would be run by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, otherwise known as Mr. Ten Percent for past corruption allegations. The choice would be controversial.
I found a pharmacy in Karachi that was somehow open, and plunked down $10 for a potpourri of sleeping pills, available over the counter. I needed instant sleep, the kind that chased away any nightmares.
CHAPTER 16
STRAY CAT STRUT
With Bhutto gone, I needed to meet the lion of Punjab, or maybe the tiger. No one seemed to know which feline Nawaz Sharif was nicknamed after. Some fans rode around with stuffed toy lions strapped to their cars. Others talked about the tiger of Punjab. By default, Sharif, a former prime minister like Bhutto, had become the most popular opposition leader in the country. He was already the most powerful politician in Punjab, which was the most powerful of Pakistan’s four provinces, home to most of the army leaders and past rulers. Some people described Sharif as the Homer Simpson of Pakistan. Others considered him a right-wing wing nut. Still others figured he could save the country.
Sharif was once considered an invention of the establishment, a protégé of the former military dictator in Pakistan, General Zia, but like all politicians here, he had become a creature of himself. During his second term, Sharif built my favorite road in Pakistan, a hundred and seventy miles of paved, multilaned bliss connecting Lahore to Islamabad; named Musharraf as chief of the army; and successfully tested the country’s first nuclear weapon. He also cozied up to the Taliban in Afghanistan and briefly considered declaring himself the “commander of the faithful,” an often-claimed Islamic title waved around by such luminaries as Taliban founder Mullah Omar. In other words, his record was mixed. Sharif’s fundamentalist phase occurred just before he bloomed into full megalomania, believing that a civilian leader of Pakistan could actually sack his army chief. He fired Musharraf in 1999 while the general was in Sri Lanka; Musharraf immediately hopped on a plane home, and Sharif followed up his original folly by refusing to allow Musharraf’s plane to land in Pakistan. Meanwhile, top generals in Pakistan, used to such shenanigans, seized power and allowed the plane to land ten minutes before it ran out of fuel. In gratitude, Musharraf jailed Sharif, accused him of attempted murder, and eventually banished him to Saudi Arabia. That would teach a civilian leader to take on the army.
While in exile, Sharif joined forces with his former nemesis, Bhutto, and reformed his fundamentalist image, going so far as to get hair plugs. Many people counted Sharif out—even Western diplomats, who typically laughed when asked if his party had a chance to regain power in the upcoming parliamentary elections. But Sharif’s party—not Bhutto’s—had become the major backer of the lawyer protests, and Sharif had gone on at length, even eloquently, about the need for justice in Pakistan. (The irony of this was lost on no one. While Sharif was in office, in 1997, his backers had actually stormed the supreme court and forced it to suspend contempt proceedings against him.)
So Sharif was now the darling of the more moderate forces in Pakistan, even if they remained slightly suspicious. One of Sharif’s friends tried to explain him to me: “He might be tilting a little to the right, but he’s not an extremist. Extremists don’t go do hair implants. He also loves singing.”
I had attempted to see Sharif when he first tried to return to Pakistan a few months earlier, in September. But commandos had stormed his plane shortly after it landed. Within five hours, he had been shipped back to Saudi Arabia, looking bewildered.
Sharif had finally flown home in late November, weeks after Musharraf declared an emergency. Samad had driven me to the airport in the eastern city of Lahore, Sharif’s home territory and the capital of Punjab Province. Tens of thousands of supporters waited behind fences across from the airport entrance. Some shouted for the lion of Punjab—others waved stuffed toy tigers or tiny cardboard Sharif cutouts. It was a classic botched media event. Reporters were herded into a tiny area in front of the airport, surrounded by barriers covered in barbed wire. Thousands of supporters eventually broke through the fences, screaming and running toward us. More and more people pushed into the journalists’ pen, squeezing everyone and driving us toward certain impalement on the barbed wire. Samad guarded a shorter friend of mine. My translator tried to protect my back. I stood in a basketball stance, an immovable force. But not for long. A Pakistani journalist from Aaj TV pushed past me, elbowed me in the ribs, and shoved me to the side. I pushed back.