General Musharraf has died. How upset I was that day in 1999 when he seized power. I was in university, just a few weeks in. I remember walking through Harvard Square with one of my roommates, trying to speak the mixture of anger and fear I felt, and her lack of understanding. Then, weeks or months later, saying that maybe it was all right, maybe it wasn’t too bad, and again feeling her lack of understanding. My first instinct was correct.
Years later, after 9/11 and after the Red Mosque and after Bugti’s death, after I met the GF, I remember musing to him about how Shakespearean a character he was, how incredibly flawed by the conviction that he knew what it was, what was right.
I met him only once, at a basant party hosted by Minoo Bhandara, a Parsi, MP, and the owner of Murree Brewery which I mentioned in yesterday’s post. One of his lacqueys seized me by the shoulder and pulled me to meet him (he was short and broad, almost square in shape), and said, sir, meet the future of our nation. I was wearing something rather revealing and I glared at him. He nodded and sniffed or snuffled or grunted, I glared, we both turned away. He barely noticed, probably, I felt angry. And that was that.
When Bugti was killed, a tremor passed through the country, a cold fear of what lay ahead. When Benazir died, the earth shook as it had in 2005. Tens of thousands died in the earthquake and in the War on Terror, but more in the earthquake. How many disappeared? Who knows. When the Lal Masjid was besieged, I felt the rumblings and the angry cries, the rage that he and his ilk had created. When Swat fell to the Taliban, when their forces were within a day’s march of the capital. When the bombs went off, when he made the lawyers look, briefly, like heroes. The media opened up, and fashion, and prosperity came on the backs of American tanks and fairweather accounting.
I attended more fashion shows during his rule than before or after or ever again. The social pages appeared. The media was freed and we celebrated, not realising what was to come. A middle class came into being as never before: educated, but not too much, political, but not too much, religious – that, too much. And authoritarian. Watchers of first Indian, then Pakistani, dramas that cement their authoritarianism. They and their children were those who followed Imran Khan, then still a laughing stock coasting by on the goodwill from build the Shaukat Khanam hospital. Today the clowns lead the circus, then Musharraf was the ringmaster, an old fashioned despot with a moustache and khahi fatigues. Who was mocked, once, by a Western journalist about how his military habits were so strong he gave a sort of civilian salute to those who cheered for him, and I felt anger that this person didn’t realise what he saw as a salute was how, in Pakistan, the great acknowledge the masses. A royal wave, if you will, or a gesture asking the beggar at your closed car window to excuse you, you wish to give her nothing.
Musharraf left Pakistan the same year I did, but he went to palatial residences and I to a small flat in Bloomsbury, wondering how I would find my way. He was a reason I went back to Pakistan after my degree, why the GF came there after his degree, and so why I found myself in London and today in Cambodia. His hands were wet with blood but he believed, he always seemed to believe, that he did what was right.