Not to Human Scale!

Can a mere blog-writer comment on one of the most momentous events of human history? An event that left a mammoth blot on a nation, smaller than a mole on the world map?
What must she have thought in those very last moments? That this is it? Or that she was gonna be ok? That she will fight those kafirs, those who broke the very tenets of the religion they profess to protect by aiming at a woman? Of her kids? Of her dead father? Of all the dreams she had for herself and her country? Of the vengeance she must have felt for her detractors? Or her isolation in a world full of manipulators? Or of the Heavens above?
Whodunit? Whocares? It’s not going to bring her back. The woman who was destined to die violently among faceless crowds, but on her soil, the soil that she kissed in gratification when she finally came home. Gutsy, spirited, brave, hardened, vociferous, feminine, regal, sophisticated, earthy, shrewd, lonely, homesick – a hundred words spring to mind.
Politician, leader, prime minister, campaigner, dreamer, manipulator, conspirator, woman, wife, daughter, mother – whatever she was, she is a persona who slowly descended into my consciousness through the million frames seen and words heard and read about her. So much so that when I saw her in person in New Delhi years back, all I could do was stare. So much so that the purported pic of her in a short skirt circulated in recent times offended me.

For the journo in me, she is a name often uttered, analysed and thought about. For the people-watcher in me, she was a suave woman of the world. For the human being in me, a skeletal shell that lost some parts of her flesh and life blood every time she lost a parent, a brother; when she lost precious years of her eventful life in an uneventful prison and the power that came to her as an inheritance of turmoil. And, now her life for a cause that seems like seeking Eden in a desert.

Benazir Bhutto was just one of her kind. Like Rajiv Gandhi, whose beautiful face was smashed into an unrecognizable void, they chose to hit her handsome face. So that, nothing of her remains. Not even the shell. How mean can they get!

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

..And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's