Benazir of song and story

The rest of the world moves on, but in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, Larkana, yesterday, today and tomorrow stand still near Bhutto’s mausoleum.

Memories refuse to fade and politics change but eleven years on, Benazir inspires women, children and men in Khairpur, my hometown, and beyond, to wake up at predawn hours, wear their best clothes, huddle into minivans and trek off to Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, Larkana.

Our women’s participation generally outnumbers men’s participation by a sizeable margin. With their bright red lipsticks, sequined colorful dupattas, heeled shoes and big fat purses, carrying food and sometimes presents, the women of my village, with their daughters and sons in tow, show up without insistence, and in large numbers, for what ends up being a painfully long ride over a terribly short distance.

On any average calendar day, it takes less than two hours to drive from Khairpur to Ghari Khuda Bakhsh, and closer to one hour if you take a seasoned, Sindhi highway-style driving driver. But on December 27, we leave around 9am – or 10am, if you count getting past Jilani House’s gate – and inch towards Ghari, normally arriving well after 3pm. Sometimes we arrive just in time to catch our MPA Qaim Ali Shah’s speech, but occasionally, and more frequently, we make it after the ceremony, barely in time for the dua.

Despite best efforts, new roads, flyovers and bridges, we have never made it in time in my eight years of going, and for that the PPP has cause for neither worry nor despair. The women, children and men of northern Sindh clog the streets and highways leading to Ghari, and per estimates received from staff and volunteers their numbers increase each year.

Khairpur alone accounts for a caravan of several thousand each year. Most of our people don’t make it into the jalsa ground for reasons of security, poor planning and sometimes their own plans to watch from outside the gates, perched on their buses’ roofs. “We’re saying salam from here, adi,” they announce, when asked, and as I know now from experience, there is no point arguing when our women want to have their way.

December 27 is no longer just about Benazir’s death. It has become a celebration of her life – all she stood for and all she came to represent. Now the stuff of myth and legend, Benazir is part of the identity, story, song and dance of the generation lining the streets to Ghari Khuda Bakhsh. As Sindhi poet Hasan Mujtaba puts it, Benazir is ‘darya, des, samandar... jo tere, mere andar’ - the river, the sea, the land, living in me and you. I have seen people find her picture inscribed in trees, speak of her prophesying in their dreams, tell grandchildren about the time she came to their village and waved, and so on.

Reducing her to a saint inspiring a personality cult, however, would be disserving her memory and miniaturising her impact. While some take to heart the slogan ‘siyasi murshid, siyasi pir, Benazir’ – political teacher, political saint, Benazir – others remember her for her years of imprisonment and struggle, and yet others blame her for inept governance. Whatever people’s memory of her, eleven years on, Benazir inspires mass social mobilisation, debate, song and story in the fourth worst country in the world for women. That in itself is no small accomplishment.

The writer is a member of the law faculty at IBA Karachi.

Twitter: @MoruShah