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Today’s news brought some sadness with it again.  Benazir Bhutto, sometime president of Pakistan with hopes to be so in the future, had been assassinated in some sort of bombing attack. We become innured to such things, except that in this case the face was all too human for me.  Benazir, when I first met her, was all of 22.  Known by her friends and those who envied her as ‘Pinkie’ (at least in my group at Oxford) she was a charming, exasperating, wildly attractive, funny lady with a smile that took my breath away.  One could never really get close to her for long - she seemed to shy away from expressing her deepest feelings, and was a truly gifted evader of any questions of that sort, however kindly meant.  And given what her family had been through already, who could blame her?

In later years I’d read the papers to see if I could find any traces of the person I’d known so slightly, and yet who was so utterly memorable.  Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse in a photograph of what I thought might be the real Benazir, but increasingly she became so much part of the business of political posturing that I knew only what she stood for, not who she was.  I’d had the great good fortune to see something fragile and undefended in her, all those years ago, and it had been assiduously covered up from then on.

And what had I seen?  I can’t yet spell it out.  I can recall though, how she told tales of cowering in her father’s house as it was being shelled during the coup that put him out of power, and how she been afraid for the safety of her german shepherd, while her father stormed at her for feeling that way during a war situation. The way she told it turned it into a wry hilarious joke.  We all laughed. How could we not? She’d come from studying in the US, dressed and spoke in the American way, and was more than a little exotic in sleepy Oxford.

Something went underground in her as she became the practised politician of later years, winning her elections, gaining power, being ousted, going into exile, then venturing back into the situation that cost her her life.  I think it was the Innocent in her, which I was once lucky enough to see, and delight in.  That’s who I mourn today.

I don’t suppose the obituaries tomorrow will mention anything similar.