The Snow Will Melt

When I wrote a poem in 1989—its title the same as that of the story here—little did I know that Benazir Bhutto would one day read and comment on it in writing.

With Benazir removed from the political landscape by the coordinated efforts of the destructive forces within and outside this country, the poem only serves as an eerie reminder of my chance meeting with her. Indeed, the Bhuttos are the Kennedys of Pakistan. Their deaths, much like their lives, will remain shrouded in mystery and speculation.

Few—not counting the battalions of jawans at the funeral—were sorrowful in 1988 when the C-130 of a military dictator crashed in Bahawalpur. Those who perished with the ‘light of truth’ left behind silent sons who chose not to reveal the ‘hidden hand’ behind the episode; the price that grown men sometimes pay to become federal ministers.

In sharp contrast to this, a year later, the entire nation mourned when a PIA Fokker airplane vanished into the mountains of northern Pakistan. Along with all the passengers, died pilots that I knew well: Bilgrami (alias Billy) and Zubayr Shamshad (alias Dabbu).

The airplane crashed in the morning but—woe to the bureaucratic hurdles—it was not until the late afternoon that search and rescue operations commenced. By the evening, there was speculation that the Fokker, unintentionally or otherwise, had flown off-course into the prohibited Indian airspace surrounding the 8,125 metres high Nanga Parbat peak.

Some commented that the Indians, having warned the Pakistanis not to commit airspace violations, shot the plane down. While that possibility seemed unreal, the fear of neither finding the wreckage nor seeing an investigation report was quite real. In an emotionally charged atmosphere, the loved ones gathered at Islamabad airport to blame various government agencies for not doing enough. Few realised that a forty-four seat turbo-prop aircraft, while flying over peaks whose average height was 6,000 metres, was like a needle in a haystack; for it to vanish altogether was easy.

Twenty-four hours later, there were whispers that the Air Force—having conducted only a hurried high altitude survey—had expressed its inability to spare C-130s or helicopters for a closer look. The crash appeared to be a less significant matter compared with the infinitely more important job of using all resources to face the Indians at Siachin. It was impossible to believe that none of the spy satellites recorded the accident or that satellite photos were unavailable to help locate the survivors. In the bitter cold of the mountains, there would be no survivors, only statistics.

Days passed painfully, and desperation drove many to consult with spiritually gifted individuals. One of them claimed that he could ask the jinns on our side to contact the ones across the border to help locate the missing, and for the price of a few sacrificial black goats, relatives could see their loved ones again. Those who followed dubious modes of investigation never witnessed miracles.

The security concerns of those days required two commandos aboard each Fokker. Since the armed men always came with secret instructions from their superiors, and which they never shared with the pilots, some said that a failed attempt to hijack the aircraft to India had resulted in an explosive scuffle on board. In the face of this unverifiable theory, all official mouthpieces only maintained deathly silence.

By the first week of September 1989, the search was officially over, and the inexplicable accident attributed to ‘God’s will’ by the mournful public, and to ‘pilot error’ by the soulless bureaucracy. When the temporary status of ‘PK-404 delayed’ changed into a permanent ‘PK-404 cancelled’, I knew Billy and Dabbu would remain under the snow that never melted.

Billy owned Billy’s Super Market in Karachi, and the forever-smiling Dabbu grew up where I did and then joined Walton Flying Club before I could. Their words echoed in my mind during daytime, and their faces appeared at night in my nightmares. The burnt pages of the storybooks of fifty-four people lay scattered somewhere in the snow.

On 6 August 1990, Benazir Bhutto ceased to be ‘very very important’ (VVI) and became just an ordinary ‘person’ (‘P’). On 17 September 1990, as freshly deposed Prime Minister, she boarded not a VVIP flight but a scheduled commercial one, and desired to see the pilots. The captain anxiously asked the stewardess to escort mohtarma sahiba to the flight deck. An imposing figure, she entered greeting all with a smile. Diagonally across, from where I could see her well, she sat behind the captain on the ‘jump seat’. Once amidst the masses, she indulged in small talk. As the flight engineer—a Sindhi—attempted to impress her by switching from English to the native tongue, while the captain busied himself with enquiring about her political well-being.

“I’m fine but I would feel much better if I had some coffee”, replied she.

Something was whispered to the stewardess who dutifully returned with a paper-cup for the ousted ruler accustomed to using the finest porcelain. Just when I felt a strong urge to ask Benazir about the Fokker—

“So what happened to that Fokker which crashed in the mountains?” sipping coffee, she took the words right out of my mouth. Did Billy and Dabbu speak through her?

Before anybody answered, Billy and Dabbu moved my tongue to protest; I uttered the unimaginable.

“You would know better, you tell us!”

The Oxford Union-trained debater kept silent. Rhetoric, political science, philosophy, all failed there and then. She knew but could not, or perhaps did not wish to tell. I clearly saw that the counter-question embarrassed her.

What people suspected, what they truly experienced, and what I knew was true, all was woven into a poem titled: The Snow Will Melt. I quietly handed over to her the magazine on whose page fifteen it was published with the following dedication:

In memory of our lost friends of PK-404:

On August 25, 1989, PIA’s flight PK-404, operated by an F-27 aircraft on a scheduled service from Gilgit to Islamabad, was declared missing a few minutes after take-off. Fifty-four passengers, including five crewmembers, were aboard the ill-fated aircraft.

A voracious reader like her father, Benazir Bhutto read the poem silently as if reading between the lines, as if standing before the graves of the lost fifty-four. Perhaps that was the only way she knew of paying respect to the lives whose loss would forever remain unexplained. I could not tell whether the astute politician was pained. She made no verbal comments, only borrowed a ballpoint pen to note down in the border the following diplomatic words:

This is an extremely moving poem which mirrors the anguish which the nation felt. (Signed) Benazir Bhutto. 17 September, 1990.

Benazir misspelled her own name as BRNAZIR. Was it an innocent mistake or did a truthful tongue make a mighty pen falter?

Death correctly spelt BENAZIR on 27 December 2007 while reading the final line of the poem of her own life. She moved away mirroring the anguish felt by a twice bitten nation that stood unwilling to shy away from her for the third time.

No death is painless, not even the one that men face suddenly or while asleep. What is more painful than death itself is facing the sudden truth of being responsible for—directly or indirectly—the death and destruction of fellow man; it grinds one’s soul into hellish dust, it stretches into painfully hot eons the fading moments during which the snow of life melts.