Read Online Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir by Fatima Bhutto - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Fatima Bhutto
Ads: Link
eighteen-year-old,’ Bill, then the Mayor of Houston – America’s fourth-largest city – and a prominent member of the Democratic Party, told me when I met him, exactly thirty years after he and my father graduated from Harvard. ‘He had a natural dignity to him, a certain gravitas. Both of us were idealistic and populistic about what we thought of the world . . . we both had a yearning to get into politics. He had no desire towards making money – we talked about it especially as a public servant where it’s a weakness. There had been attempts on his father’s life, so he knew it was risky, but it’s just what he wanted to do. He had a genuine interest in history, ideology, policy.’ 6
But he was also just a kid, away from his family for the first time in his life. Another friend of Murtaza’s at Harvard in his freshman year remembered him as gregarious and outgoing. Milbry recognized instantly that Murtaza was someone who knew he was going somewhere in life, somewhere big, but he never showed it. She saw it, this strange glimmer of his, through time; Mir was easy-going and relaxed, not a crazed Harvard connector like so many others in their class. He was young, carefree. Two or three weeks after their first meeting, at a Woody Allen movie they both walked out of, Murtaza called Milbry up to complain that all his clothes were dirty. ‘I told him to wash them,’ Milbry recalled, laughing, ‘and he had never done his own laundry before, so I walked him through getting quarters and putting in the detergent. Two hours later Mir called me back screaming, “What did you tell me to do? All my suits have shrunk! My shoes!” he had dumped everything into the machine, expecting it to come out neatly pressed and clean!’ 7
Together with Milbry, Murtaza tried out for a Harvard letter. They joined the rifle team. Milbry had learned to shoot in Texas and Murtaza out in Larkana on occasional hunts with his father. When they turned up at the team’s practice grounds, however, they were strapped into a tiny space where whether you got a bullseye or not depended on a fraction of a centimetre. It was very professional, very little was left to chance. Milbry remembers they went back a couple of times until Mir whispered during one session, ‘This isn’t really a sport, you know’, and they decided to quit. His extracurricular activities at Harvard were thus limited. Murtaza and his friends, who all knew him as Mir, watched movies at the student centre on campus, especially the Bond films, and went out to Elsie’s for sandwiches, to Tommy’s, the local twenty-four-hour diner, for midnight snacks, and to a Chinese restaurant called the Hong Kong, which was known locally for its especially bad food.
Benazir and Murtaza overlapped at Harvard, Benazir was at Radcliffe and a year ahead of her younger brother, but what distance didn’t exist naturally was quietly created. The siblings had different friends and interests and though they knew each other’s groups and spent time together, Murtaza was content to leave Benazir in her own world. He was closer to their younger sister Sanam, who joined her siblings at Harvard two years after Murtaza. As in childhood, Sanam flitted between her brother and sister, adapting to each but promising no exclusive loyalty to either. Sanam, easy-going and not fussed about politics, was malleable and fun, whereas Benazir was prouder and more remote, even to her contemporaries. She also famously despised all her brother’s girlfriends. In one of our letters, I once asked my father to tell me about his old flames, desperate to have some dirt on my near perfect Papa. ‘Ask Wadi,’ he wrote back. ‘She hated all of them.’
‘If I hadn’t known that his father was Prime Minister at the time, I would never have suspected it,’ Peter, one of Murtaza’s three roommates from his second year onwards, told me, still surprised at the thought all these years later. ‘He was very down to earth,
But he was also just a kid, away from his family for the first time in his life. Another friend of Murtaza’s at Harvard in his freshman year remembered him as gregarious and outgoing. Milbry recognized instantly that Murtaza was someone who knew he was going somewhere in life, somewhere big, but he never showed it. She saw it, this strange glimmer of his, through time; Mir was easy-going and relaxed, not a crazed Harvard connector like so many others in their class. He was young, carefree. Two or three weeks after their first meeting, at a Woody Allen movie they both walked out of, Murtaza called Milbry up to complain that all his clothes were dirty. ‘I told him to wash them,’ Milbry recalled, laughing, ‘and he had never done his own laundry before, so I walked him through getting quarters and putting in the detergent. Two hours later Mir called me back screaming, “What did you tell me to do? All my suits have shrunk! My shoes!” he had dumped everything into the machine, expecting it to come out neatly pressed and clean!’ 7
Together with Milbry, Murtaza tried out for a Harvard letter. They joined the rifle team. Milbry had learned to shoot in Texas and Murtaza out in Larkana on occasional hunts with his father. When they turned up at the team’s practice grounds, however, they were strapped into a tiny space where whether you got a bullseye or not depended on a fraction of a centimetre. It was very professional, very little was left to chance. Milbry remembers they went back a couple of times until Mir whispered during one session, ‘This isn’t really a sport, you know’, and they decided to quit. His extracurricular activities at Harvard were thus limited. Murtaza and his friends, who all knew him as Mir, watched movies at the student centre on campus, especially the Bond films, and went out to Elsie’s for sandwiches, to Tommy’s, the local twenty-four-hour diner, for midnight snacks, and to a Chinese restaurant called the Hong Kong, which was known locally for its especially bad food.
Benazir and Murtaza overlapped at Harvard, Benazir was at Radcliffe and a year ahead of her younger brother, but what distance didn’t exist naturally was quietly created. The siblings had different friends and interests and though they knew each other’s groups and spent time together, Murtaza was content to leave Benazir in her own world. He was closer to their younger sister Sanam, who joined her siblings at Harvard two years after Murtaza. As in childhood, Sanam flitted between her brother and sister, adapting to each but promising no exclusive loyalty to either. Sanam, easy-going and not fussed about politics, was malleable and fun, whereas Benazir was prouder and more remote, even to her contemporaries. She also famously despised all her brother’s girlfriends. In one of our letters, I once asked my father to tell me about his old flames, desperate to have some dirt on my near perfect Papa. ‘Ask Wadi,’ he wrote back. ‘She hated all of them.’
‘If I hadn’t known that his father was Prime Minister at the time, I would never have suspected it,’ Peter, one of Murtaza’s three roommates from his second year onwards, told me, still surprised at the thought all these years later. ‘He was very down to earth,
Similar Books
