It was on twitter that I got to know first about this person called Fatima Butto. The late Benazir’s daughter, Bhaktawar described her as the best fiction writer in Pakistan in one of her tweets. That was not meant to be praise for sure. Over one of my week end youtube video browsing sessions I stumbled on an interview of Fatima. It was given to one of the Indian news channels while promoting her book. She was a beauty with brains and I was hooked. I think that night I saw almost all the videos of her on youtube. My husband was visibly annoyed with me.
A few days later I searched on my local library’s site if the book “The songs of blood and sword” was available. Bingo it was! It was one of the times when I really have no regrets about immigrating to the US. The libraries here just justify it. I got the almost new looking book from the library. It was big book for a novel with four hundred odd pages. I started reading it and I could not stop. The story was such a one.
Until I read her book I never really knew much about Pakistani politics. All I knew was that one of their prime ministers was hanged and his daughter became the prime minister later. This book gave me a good incite into Pakistani politics. It starts off with the history of Bhuttos. Supposedly they were Rajput warriors who amassed large amounts of lands in the Sindh region and during the British Raj they were helping out the Brits in administration of the region. I was nearly stumped to know that Pakistan has 27 rich(or say feudal) families even to this day and the remaining country dwells in poverty.
The book tells the story of Fathima’s Dad Mir Murtaza Bhutto from the time he was born till he was murdered brutally by the Pakistani police during his sister Benazi’s regimen. It talks about his girl friends and the relationships he had in the past. It has many pages dedicated to the first love of Murtaza, Della a Greek lady whose husband was jailed by the Greek government, but Fathima has very little to say of her own mother Fawzia and the relationship her dad had with her before they were married or for that matter after marriage. May be she felt too uncomfortable to get her biological mom’s side of the story on print. Her love for her mother, Ginwa who raised her was very evident and I somehow got some new reverence for this lady who had to go through so many odds.
As much as I hate Indian politicians, after reading this book I feel that they haven’t screwed up our nation as much as our neighbors have done. She is clearly very critical about US involvement in Pakistani politics. In fact she considers Chinese better friends to Pakistan than the US. From her opinion it is the Pakistani elite or the so called feudal lords in the Pakistani government say PPP (Pakistani People’s Party) that wants to be friends with the US and it is in not helping the general public of Pakistan. In her opinion Pakistan’s very low standing in the Arab world was because of its ties with the US.
Her descriptions of all the events that follow her dad’s death are very gruesome and anyone with a heart tends to feel sympathetic towards her family. I really feel for her and hope that there won’t be anymore Bhutto deaths in the future. This is my first book on Pakistan and I am longing to learn more about this neighbor of my land which has for many centuries been our land. Even now except for the political differences people are almost the same.
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