The Exile's Return
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THE EXILE’S RETURN BEFORE HER HISTORIC HOMECOMING, BENAZIR BHUTTO, THE FIRST WOMAN TO HEAD A MODERN MUSLIM STATE, SPOKE WITH AMY WILENTZ ABOUT WHY SHE HAS BEEN WILLING TO RISK DEPORTATION, ARREST AND EVEN ASSASSINATION TO GET BACK TO PAKISTAN Illustration by CHANG PARK 144 145 soon be lifted with the approval of Pakistan’s current president, General Pervez Musharraf. Bhutto, who is the chairwoman of the prominent Pakistan Peoples Party, is seizing on a very low moment in Musharraf’s popularity to bargain with him. His long alliance with George Bush, his failed attempt at fi ring Pakistan’s popular supreme court chief justice last March and his authorization of a raid last July on an Islamabad mosque, which killed 100 people, all weigh heavily in her favor. An independent poll conducted in late August showed Musharraf with only a 38 percent approval rating, George Bush with nine percent—and Osama bin Laden with 46 percent. Bhutto held a 63 percent Caesar is barking in the courtyard. When I pass approval rating, however. She hopes to use that him, he pulls at his chain, trying to reach me, and advantage to restore democracy in her country with Cnot for a pat on the head. He’s not a big dog, but he’s herself at the helm, and then convince the Pakistani fi erce and muscular, with a mouth full of long, sharp people that America’s antiterrorism agenda is teeth. Caesar is Benazir Bhutto’s dog. He’s snarling preferable to the al-Qaeda alternative. in the background as I proceed on an afternoon in When I wonder out loud to her about the dangers early September to the front door of one of Bhutto’s of returning to Pakistan and about what could houses, this one in a Middle Eastern country that she possibly motivate her, she tells me, “In the last has asked me not to identify. election, my party took the largest number of votes, Caesar, it occurs to me, is a richly ironic name for FROM LEFT the pet of someone who considers herself a freedom Bhutto, at 19, at fi ghter and democracy advocate. But then, Bhutto’s an historic India- pets have run the gamut of appellations, and it is Pakistan summit. Bhutto’s brothers, perhaps unwise to come to conclusions, ironic or not, Shahnawaz (in based on what she chooses to name them. When she turtleneck) and Mir was a fi ery opposition leader in Pakistan in 1986, two (with mustache), leading a 1979 years before she was fi rst elected prime minister, her protest of General cat was called Sugar. Zia’s decision to “Be sure to take Sugar to the vet.” execute their father. Zulfi kar Ali Those are the last words Bhutto is reported to have Bhutto, 1972. spoken to her staff back then, as she was whisked off to jail in a police car, and not for the fi rst time. When I get past Caesar and into the house, Bhutto is in one of the broad downstairs receiving rooms giving a formal interview to reporters from Al Arabiya television. I can hear her cultured voice despite all the mudslinging that has taken place. going on in English about the need for democratic I feel I owe a debt to the people to go back.” She AFTAB government in Pakistan and about the problems mentions too that it’s not just her role in Pakistan / of the country’s increasingly active Islamic she misses, but the country itself. “I miss the scent PHOTO fundamentalist enclaves. (Extremist militias now of the rain when it falls on the dusty roads,” she AP , control much of Pakistan’s 1,500-mile border with says. “And the wheat crops in fl ower. I miss the CORBIS Afghanistan.) people; I miss all of our rituals—visiting the graves / After nearly nine years of self-imposed exile, of our forefathers.” Clearly one of the national rituals Bhutto is making plans to go home. At presstime, she Bhutto also pines for is the ritual of the push and BETTMANN had set a date of October 18. Because long-standing pull, the high-stakes dealmaking that constitutes , corruption charges against her may end up being Pakistani politics. IMAGES dropped, she will probably not risk another arrest Caesar is a better pet for Bhutto than Sugar right GETTY or deportation upon arrival. Indeed, she may well now. During her 20-year political career, she has / AFP be allowed to run for prime minister, an offi ce from been a victim of several assassination attempts; even : LEFT which she was twice ousted on a variety of charges outside Pakistan she is wise to take precautions. She (all of which she maintains were politically motivated lives now with her younger daughter, Aseefa, in FROM and false). Technically, she is not eligible to serve a the house Caesar guards; her son and older daughter , third term as premier, but that prohibition may be are off at university. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari PHOTOS 146 (from whom Bhutto is reportedly estranged), lives Maybe V. S. Naipaul and Pakistani novelists like with his dog, Maximilian, in New York. Today, her Mohsin Hamid and Hanif Kureishi. But then, when household is in fl ux, with furniture moved here she is not in her role as a former and possibly future and there to accommodate the television crew and world leader, Benazir is surprisingly unpretentious. sofas turning up in strange places, like the foot of Perhaps this is because during her life, she has the stairs. But a life spent in Pakistani politics has been not only celebrated but also humbled, as a accustomed Benazir Bhutto to chaos and disarray. central actor in a family saga that seems sometimes She thrives on it. like a Greek tragedy—with zeniths of political power and nadirs of violent death—and at other moments like a lowbrow soap opera. I remember visiting Benazir with Mir back In the front sitting room, where I’m waiting for in college, at Eliot House, a big brick dormitory Bhutto, is a little library with shelves of books labeled next to the Charles River. Her room was splashed by category: not just BIOGRAPHIES, FICTION, SPEECHES, with bright, mirrored fabric and bedspreads made RELIGION and SOUTH ASIA but also COOKING BOOKS, in Pakistan. Her nickname, given to her by her YOGA, SELF-HELP, HEALTH and ASTROLOGY. I see one father, was Pinkie, because of her fair skin. Mir section called FAMILY. Based on the quantity of was a little awed by his big sister, but they had self-help and health titles—such as Facial Workout, an easy, teasing relationship. The writer Anne The Little Book of Stress and Eat to Beat Your Age—I Fadiman, who roomed next door to Benazir then, expect the family shelves to include books on how later noted that when Bhutto arrived in Cambridge, to listen to your kids so your kids will talk to you. Massachusetts, a prodigy at the age of 16, “She Instead I discover that the 60 to 70 volumes there are had never cooked a meal, washed a blouse, walked either about the Bhutto family or include chapters more than a block without being picked up by Of herself in college, Bhutto tells me, “I give thanks to God that I was in the U.S. in those hippie days and we were all so informal. I learned to look after about a member of the family, most often her father, myself. I came a chauffeur or lifted a ringing Zulfi kar Ali Bhutto, a progressive, democratically from so privileged telephone.” She had been elected prime minister who was ousted, imprisoned a background; raised like an Indian princess and hanged in 1979 by General Muhammad Zia- during the Raj, surrounded ul-Haq, one of the presidents who preceded there, I became by lackeys and ayahs. Musharraf. Open on a small table next to the self-suffi cient. Of herself at that time, bookcases is How to Know God: The Soul’s Journey In the face of what Bhutto told me later, “I have into the Mystery of Mysteries, by Deepak Chopra. later happened, lived a life of contrasts, I knew Benazir Bhutto slightly when she and I and I give thanks to God that were at Harvard together in the early 1970s. I met I would have crum- I was in the U.S. inthose her through her younger brother, Mir, my friend and bled otherwise.” hippie days and we were all classmate. This is not exactly the library—especially so informal. I learned to look the public library—I would have expected of a after myself. I could go to graduate of Harvard and Oxford University who was airports and pick up my own luggage and make elected president of the prestigious Oxford Union my own bed. I came from so privileged a background; debating society back in 1977. I would have expected there, I became self-suffi cient. In the face of what Shakespeare, John Stuart Mill, Milton, Carlyle and later happened to me, I would have crumbled Disraeli perhaps, and possibly Trollope or Dickens. otherwise.” w 147 One of the things that happened to her was General Bhutto never doubted that a woman could be Zia, the man who orchestrated the 1986 arrest during elected in Pakistan. “I thought it was the most natural which she had to leave her cat Sugar behind, the thing in the world,” she says. “My father never made same tin-pot, mustachioed dictator who had a discrimination between the girls and the boys in the ordered the execution of her father.