I am writing this column on a New Year's Day without that feeling that it should bring. That freshness, that crispness that winter brings, that attitude which carries a list of resolutions for the next 365 days. It is evening twilight outside and an inner uncertainty. What next? That is the paramount question.
I do not wish to add to the gloom and the sadness by pointing out what a Pakistani TV news channel said this evening that the world was celebrating the New Year with fireworks and a range of traditional celebrations, and Pakistan was enveloped in mourning. We know the reason for this.
We have suffered another monumental tragic loss in our lives. Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East, has been assassinated. What are we doing to ourselves? Where do we go from here? What does destiny have for us in store? Elections? When? What after them? But those are not the only difficult questions that accompany the trauma that we have been struck by. There are many others. Many sad thoughts and themes, and a sense of loss that seems to weigh heavily on the mind and the heart.
I do not know how to handle the sad theme of the assassination of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto, the news of which spread like wild fire on the evening of Thursday, 27th December 2007. I have written last week of the December dimension to our lives, and how the pain and the tragedy of the break-up of Pakistan come into full focus every year.
As the news of the suicide bomb attack and firing at Benazir Bhutto and her vehicle flashed on news channels on Thursday evening, many dreadful thoughts raced through the mind. What about the twice elected prime minister of Pakistan and the Chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party? Some time before this had come the news that the procession of the other twice elected prime minister, Mian Nawaz Sharif had been fired at and five people had died. But Mian Nawaz Sharif was safe. What is happening to Pakistan, one thought in desperation? A sense of loss that some of us carry came alive.
Benazir had been hit and I heard Asif Ali Zardari tell a shocked TV news channel that she was hit badly in the blast and that we should all pray for her. Then came the news that she had passed away. Like others I was stunned. In fact I have been stunned into a sort of silence, and an introspection ever since the assassination of a woman politician whose multifaceted strength made her stand out as a towering personality.
Is it not amazing that for all the character assassination that she has been subjected to from time to time, the love of the people for her has grown in the country? Not just in this city where we live, but all over the country, the Saarc region, and indeed the world over, the assassination has been mourned. And it continues.
With mixed feelings of sadness, anger and uncertainty that have remained with people since that terrible evening, one has been reminded of many sad days in the country's history filled with a sense of loss that we carry. Some of us were too young to have lived through the day when on the 16th of October the first prime minister of Pakistan Shaheed-e-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan was shot dead at the same Liaquat Bagh where Benazir Bhutto was murdered. Is that the way we run this country? A bloody long play?
And it was not far from that site, Liaquat Bagh, where Benazir's father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged. He was 51. It makes one wonder about the fabric and texture that we have woven with time. Where are we failing? I remembered the book that her father wrote "If I am assassinated" I thought of the Bhutto family. Of her brothers Shahnawaz, aged 27, and Murtaza, aged 42, who died in mysterious circumstances.
I cannot but refer to the fall of Dhaka that took place in this very month of December, on the 16th of the month in 1971. And that elections that are regarded as the fairest were also held in December 1970. And yet the outcome was that power was not handed over to the majority party, despite results that were not fought over.
I cannot but be reminded of the fact that Benazir kept stressing that her life was in danger and that on the very day that she arrived her mammoth procession was targeted with two suicide bomb blasts that took almost 150 lives, injured dozens of others. The PPP chairperson survived, but only for six weeks.
There are many dimensions to the loss of Benazir Bhutto Shaheed. There is the immediate family, that she has left behind to mourn her departure. There are those individuals whom she worked with in her capacity as a politician or a prime minister. They too will mourn. There are scores of stories told of the humane woman she was and how she reached out to the ordinary people - the compassion that she had for the common man.
Even those who did not know her, except from a distance, or through the media, have experienced a feeling of having lost something personal in the political context - people who were not affiliated with the party. That is, perhaps, something enigmatic, yet so true.
In her death there is a poignant sense of emotional bereavement that has been felt by Pakistani society. In her death Pakistanis suffer again.