“They were a gift. I like them.”
Curiosity satisfied, I decided to get out of Pakistan and the madness there while possible. A colleague flew in from India so I could take a week’s vacation. Dave, just back from Afghanistan, and I left for a much-deserved holiday, a beach in Thailand. Before moving to Asia, I had never liked beach vacations. I had wanted to visit historic sites, move hotels every day, run all the time. But after the past six months, all I wanted to do was sit catatonic in front of an ocean and read bad thrillers. I didn’t want to move from my reclining chair. Even ordering a drink with an umbrella or dipping my toes in the ocean seemed too demanding. I also really didn’t want to argue with Dave, even though he was upset that I only had a few days off. We had fought after the emergency was declared—I wasn’t being supportive enough. We had fought after he returned from his first trip to Afghanistan, and again after I went to visit Sharif in Lahore, both times because I was not paying enough attention to our relationship. He was probably right.
I hoped that this vacation could fix us—because all we had been doing since meeting was working harder than I could ever remember and fighting more than I ever had. Maybe having time off would stop the arguments, which I still believed were a sign of intensity, of passion. By the time we flew back to Pakistan—after hardly a week of vacation—I was still burned out, unable to think rationally, unable to comprehend that for the first time since moving overseas, I was no longer happy. My joy was gone, my soul was sapped, but I would only realize this much later. At least I had weaned myself off the sleeping pills and my nightmares had stopped. At least the fighting had calmed down. I dug into my reserves. Looked forward to when I could go back to Afghanistan, where things may have been bad but never this bad.
Once home from Thailand, I picked up my Pakistan cell phone from my colleague, who had borrowed it.
“So, you got a few phone calls,” she said. “One interesting one.”
“Who?”
“Nawaz Sharif,” she said.
I had almost forgotten about the story—I had mentioned his hair plugs, twice, and said Sharif’s genial personality made him seem more like a house cat than a tiger or lion. Ouch.
“Oh. Him. What did he say?” I asked.
“He wanted to talk to you. I said you were on vacation, and he told me to tell you that you wrote a very nice story, and he liked it.”
“Really?”
Well, that was good news, and meant Sharif was remarkably down to earth. Clearly he had a sense of humor. Bhutto had certainly never called after any story I wrote. I soon called Sharif, to see if I could campaign with him.
“You’re the most dangerous man in Pakistan, the top living opposition leader,” I told him. “I want to see what it’s like to be around you.”
“Welcome anytime, Kim,” he said.
In mid-February, I met Sharif at the government’s Frontier House, just outside the judges’ enclave, where the country’s former top justices were still under house arrest. Eventually, after slipping through the mob, I climbed into Sharif’s bulletproof black SUV, surrounded by similar SUVs, and we took off, heading for two speeches outside the capital. We left Islamabad. One of Sharif’s security officers somehow sent us down narrow, bumpy dirt roads, where we ended up in traffic jams. Not encouraging.
“That was bad planning,” Sharif muttered. He sat in the front passenger seat. I sat behind the driver, next to Sharif’s aide.
After various detours, we ended up at the dirt field where Sharif would speak. Thousands of people waited. He was mobbed when he tried to step out of his vehicle, and his bodyguards bounced around like pinballs, trying to get in between well-wishers and their charge. I stood near the dusty stage, but I didn’t want to walk out. Despite Bhutto’s killing, the security at this event resembled that of a high-school pep rally. The podium didn’t even have a bulletproof glass screen, which was supposed to be there. “I don’t know where it is,” Sharif told me, shrugging. “Sometimes the police give it to me, sometimes they give it to someone else.”
Onstage he didn’t seem to care about potential attacks, thundering against dictatorship to the crowd. But I did. This country made me feel insecure, much more than Afghanistan.
We drove to the next rally. I looked at my BlackBerry and spotted one very interesting e-mail—a Human Rights Watch report, quoting a taped conversation from November between the country’s pro-Musharraf attorney general and an unnamed man. The attorney general had apparently been talking to a reporter, and while on that call, took another call, where he talked about vote rigging. The reporter had recorded the entire conversation. I scanned through the e-mail.
“Nawaz,” I said. I had somehow slipped into calling the former prime minister by his first name. “You have to hear this.”
I then performed a dramatic reading of the message in full, culminating in the explosive direct quote from the attorney general, recorded the month before Bhutto was killed and just before Sharif flew home:
“Leave Nawaz Sharif … I think Nawaz Sharif will not take part in the election … If he does take part, he will be in trouble. If Benazir takes part she too will be in trouble … They will massively rig to get their own people to win. If you can get a ticket from these guys, take it … If Nawaz Sharif does not return himself, then Nawaz Sharif has some advantage. If he comes himself, even if after the elections rather than before … Yes …”
It was unclear what the other man was saying, but Human Rights Watch said the attorney general appeared to be advising him to leave Sharif’s party and get a ticket from “these guys,” the pro-Musharraf party, the massive vote riggers.
Sharif’s aide stared at me openmouthed. “Is that true? I can’t believe that.”
“It’s from Human Rights Watch,” I said. “There’s apparently a tape recording. Pretty amazing.”
Sharif just looked at me. “How can you get a text message that long on your telephone?”
“It’s an e-mail,” I said, slightly shocked that Sharif was unconcerned about what I had just said. “This is a BlackBerry phone. You can get e-mail on it.”
“Ah, e-mail,” he said. “I must look into this BlackBerry.”
Sharif soon whipped out a comb, pulled the rearview mirror toward him, and combed his hair. I watched, fascinated. His hair plugs were in some ways genius—not enough to actually cover his bald spot but enough to make him seem less bald. He had the perfect hair transplant for a Pakistani politician who wanted to look younger while still appearing like a man of the people. But with every pull of the comb, I counted the potential cost—$1,000, $2,000. At the next speech, Sharif spoke in front of a metal podium with a bulletproof glass screen that ended three inches below the top of his head. I wondered if Musharraf was trying to kill him.
The election was three days away. And as much as Sharif seemed to be slightly simple, he was also increasingly popular, largely because of his support of the deposed judges. While Bhutto’s widower campaigned on the memory of his dead wife, Sharif campaigned against Musharraf and for justice. Bhutto’s party would win the most votes. But I thought Sharif would perform better than anyone suspected.
The day of the election, two journalist friends and I drove to polling stations in Islamabad and neighboring Rawalpindi. Everywhere we heard the same name: Nawaz Sharif. It was rather spooky. At one point, we found a man who had spent the entire night cutting up white blankets, gluing them to his new car, and then painting them with tiger stripes. He finished the project off with black-feather trim.
“What are you going to do if it rains?” I asked the man.
“God willing, it won’t,” he said.