I was more than halfway through a description of the last seven or eight hours of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s life, picked up just prior to the Deputy Jailer’s reading of his declaration of execution. Zulfikar was apparently a man of the people, but there were those who thought otherwise, for the military, on 4 April, 1979, was responsible for his demise.
His attendant was permitted to be by his side and this is the man who kept this account I was reading of the father of Benazir Bhutto, who soon after his death became leader of her father’s country. She was deposed, and then returned just last year to reclaim what she’d lost, but she was assassinated before her election could be completed.
That left the arena stage open to a group of unsavory men who’d not distinguished themselves with their records. Begin where one will, let’s say with her husband. He’s still not clear of corruption charges, which he holds to have been falsely applied to his tenure. And in this, the past president Pervez Musharraf is still in the mix and likely still calling the shots from his prominent position in the wings. All this I vaguely knew of, had read somewhere, maybe last month.
“As Zulfikar was turning white then yellow then white again, was relaxing then freezing into an unbelieving huddling mass, the hours passed. He tried to write a will, burned it, then tried again and set the pages afire once more, and resigned himself to a fitful sleep from which he had to be awakened forcefully when his time had run out. Four guards were summoned to carry his limp body to a stretcher and from there to the gallows where he met his executioner, whom he knew.”
As the guards were leaving with their load Zulfikar’s tea arrived, and his attendant noted that his master’s life had come to this, that he couldn’t have even a cup of tea before his subsequent swinging and journey, whereas not five hundred metres outside his prison walls he could have had, one year before, anything he wanted from anywhere in the world.
As he dropped through the gallow’s floor and his bewildered neck broke, someone summoned me to my front door. I had to listen again for the chimes to be sure, then walked to the window to see whose car it was. No car, so I answered and opened, and there was a young black man, a student from McMaster University who claimed he was interested in the quality of lawn the neighbourhood had, and wondered if I’d be interested in having mine rolled. I said no, that I’d worked my way through school at a golf course, and that I looked after it myself. I asked him, after I thank him for his offer, what course he was enrolled in.
“Communications.” he said.
I wished him luck and returned to my reading, where Zulfikar’s attendant by this time was sitting within a metre of his master’s dead head watching the jail’s doctor examine for signs of life.
Soon thereafter, the body was cut down, wrapped, and crated and delivered to Lahor Airport for transport to his home in a VIP C-100 aircraft, a giant plane all but empty except for the body of a former leader of Pakistan who declared to the end he was a favorite of the people. To the last, he expected at least a stay of order, had asked for his shaving kit and to see his dentist, for some of his teeth required attention.
His whiskers, his thirst, his teeth, these were what sustained him through the few hours he had left, when all but he had realized that there was a rope for his neck, and that hope it might be spared, his sentence delayed, reprieved, had finally run out.
I didn’t see or hear the roller working, flattening rain-softened lawns, and was glad of that. The farmers of the earth, the worms, would be spared extra work.
May 17, 2009