The banyan trees of Old Clifton with their gnarled roots twisting and turning over one another, their hanging vines and tall defiance have always struck me as living witnesses to Karachi’s history. Including the assassination of my father and six other men who were gunned down by police on September 20th 1996.

My home, 70 Clifton, was just on the other side of those banyans, when 30 years ago, my father’s car was stopped by police just meters away. Mir Murtaza Bhutto, my father was an elected member of Sindh’s assembly and he exited the vehicle at which point a police lookout charged with identifying my father gave his confirmation: a single pistol shot in the air. It was an order the some 100 police officers present at the scene knew meant to begin shooting. The police, including several high ranking officers, were there to kill my father and they did, murdering 7 men that night. My father named some of his killers in a press conference he had given just that afternoon, September 20^th. Shaheed Yar Muhammad Baloch, my father’s comrade and bodyguard, jumped in front of my father to protect him, he was killed. My own father was shot four times, the last bullet fired was when he was lying down in a police mobile, fired into his mouth severing his tongue.

All these men were taken to different hospitals, none capable of dealing with gunshot wounds. Their families searched frantically for them, with some hope that they may have survived. Sabeen jatoi, Shaheed Ashiq Jatoi’s daughter remembers being outside a hospital bereaved asking, pleading with any and all staff for any word of where her father had been taken. “We’ve already killed him,” a policeman said. Our own father was taken to Mideast hospital, a medical dispensary with no trauma ward, no surgeons and no ability to save his life.

None of us could leave the house, the police stationed outside refused to allow anyone to step outside. Our aunt, my father’s sister, Benazir Bhutto was prime minister at the time and my sister, Fatima called the prime minister’s house in Islamabad. Asif Ali Zardari, her husband and current president of Pakistan picked up the phone, “I want to talk to my aunt,” Fatima demanded, “she can’t come to the phone she’s crying, don’t you know what’s happened? your father’s been killed.” That’s how we found out.

I remember sitting on the sofa in our living room. My nanny, practically my second mother, Sofi held me close as my sister cried and wailed. She paced the living room, talking to my mother through her painful tears demanding to go to the hospital to see my father. I had no idea what was happening, my sister was upset, maybe at my mother, maybe at someone else and she stormed out the door. My mother shortly followed and I was left alone with Sofi.

My father lost a great deal of blood, although alive he couldn’t speak due the wound he suffered in his mouth. My sister asked to transfuse blood to him, anything to save his life. My father succumbed to his injuries and died in Mideast hospital that night.

The site where Mideast once stood is now a shopping mall; the hospital was sold and demolished in 2005.

This incident, my father’s wound, his loss of blood, the transfusion of my sister’s blood into his body have given me over the years a certain obsession with blood, blood letting, sacrifice and martyrdom. My artwork has had a lot to do with death for a noble cause, whether it was my reimagining of fallen soldiers from a fictitious future revolution in my art series “tomorrow we inherit the earth”, to my obsession with the dolphins of the Indus, martyrs to Pakistan’s toxic obsession with dams and now my work on HIV in Pakistan. Blood as a topic continues to flow into everything I do.

I never saw my father’s body, I wouldn’t know he died till the next day. I remember my mother carrying me from our bedroom avoiding my father’s body in the drawing room to take me upstairs so I could be away from the crowd. My mother Ghinwa is a tall woman and I had a bird’s eye view of the immense uncontainable grief that filled our house, scores of women wearing black, wailing hysterically, their dupattas cast to the ground as they beat their chests. I was sat in front of the television in an empty room to watch Yogi Bear.

I was no stranger to a house full of well, strangers. It didn’t strike me as odd but the grief was unsettling and it numbed me. My sister’s school principal was given the difficult task of breaking the news to me, he was an American, he knelt so as to be eye to eye with me, his face was wrinkled but gentle, his eyes were a deep ocean blue.

“Do you know what heaven is?” He asked me.

I shook my head, I hadn’t said a word the whole day

“It’s a beautiful place we go to when we die,”

I dutifully stayed silent, listening despite not fully understanding what was being said to me.

“Your father is in heaven now.”

We flew with his body to Larkana via an Edhi helicopter ambulance. Several supporters came to see him off, one clung to the helicopter and refused to let go even as the helicopter lifted into the sky, thankfully the pilot brought the helicopter back down again so the gentlemen could safely let go

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I recently picked up my father’s short working manifesto for PPP Shaheed Bhutto, it was a radical socialist vision for Pakistan, one that mandated well equipped rural healthcare clinics, free education, land reforms, gender equality (with the death penalty for rapists) and provincial autonomy. His Harvard thesis was on nuclear deterrence and its benefits for a poor third world country like Pakistan, could he have envisioned that his theories would ring true in a post October 7th South Asia?

As a father he was a gentleman in every sense. He was often at the mercy of guests, office bearers and people who would sit on his head all day. I was always in their company, I would make papa get up and practice the latest dance routines I learnt from cartoons with me, he would always happily oblige. I once bought a Barbie dream house lego set, it was bright pink. I brought it to the drawing room where many burly manly guests sat. He lovingly assembled the whole thing with me and we played barbie. He was the gentlest man I would ever know.

Those ancient banyan trees have seen me grow up. I used to walk past them with my grandmother, Nusrat Bhutto to Clifton Park where we would go for a brisk walk, eating the gul mohar flowers from the trees. It is a perversion that the brother of a sitting prime minister, the son of Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader and a sitting MPA was killed right here and yet you would never know. The banyan trees on whose roots were splattered the blood of seven men, seven fathers, brothers and sons still weep for them, they weep for the erasure of our history and for a state that silences its own children, either via murder or imprisonment. This same state subsequently uses the blunt force of progress and gentrification to erase their memories. I will never forget my father, neither will the people and neither will the trees who saw him die as he had lived – with honour and courage.

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This article has been published on substack as no news agency was willing to publish an article that accused police of killing my father. His killers continue to sit in the highest posts of government.

Images:

1, My father and I at Garhi Khuda Bux Praying at the grave of my uncle Shaheed Shahnawaz Bhutto

2, The spot where my father was killed in old Clifton, to this date no memorial has been made in his name. The park was recently named Salman Farsi park.

3, The helicopter ambulence that took my father’s body to Larkana, supporters clung on until the captain made an emergency landing so they could safely let go.

4, My father, myself and my sister Fatima on holiday.