I'll Miss You, Bibi

During the eight-month-long publicly denied talks with Musharraf on the so-called power-sharing deal (a term she abhorred—she kept asking "what power?") she would update me with the unspoken caveat that what she said could never be reported. Today, I can reveal—as difficult as it is to believe—that Musharraf and she enjoyed talking to each other and that, at the end of the last tortuous talks, she and he had decided that if they could not be friends they would not be enemies. But that was not to last. The shock imposition of the Emergency tore that semblance of an agreement to shreds. When she finally turned her back on Musharraf, she said to me 24 hours before she went public that "the talks are over". And when the US Under Secretary of State, John Negroponte, arrived in Pakistan, she SMSed to say that my warning of taking care not to be seen as America's pet poodle was one of the reasons she was not going to be seen in public with him.

This is where, minus her trademark white dupatta and sporting stunning jewellery, uncut topaz and ruby earrings and chunky sapphire and diamond rings, she would hold everyone—including one charming young banker—in thrall. To my dying day I shall regret that I was in Bangalore when she called and asked me to meet her for coffee when she returned to Dubai for a well-earned rest from campaigning less than a fortnight ago.

In her last SMS to me, she complained about a hoarse throat. In the one before that, she had thanked me for an article I had written for Outlook ('I kept my word, Rajiv did not', Dec 31), saying she only objected to my use of the word 'harangue', arguing that what she said was more in the vein of complaining to a friend.

Apart from birthday wishes and the annual crates of Pakistani mangoes for Id, and unfailingly asking after my daughter, who was studying in her favourite city, London, she showed that she cared in a dozen different ways. When her husband Asif Ali Zardari was released after more than seven years in jail and flew into Dubai, she told him he could speak to no one but me. Zardari told me months later, his roguish charm switched on, that he "dared not disobey". She rang to thank me the next day for the piece I had written, and then, responding to my query about the reunion, said, "He said I had become fat, do you think I have?"

After her maiden press conference in Dubai the day before the October 18 assassination attempt, she called me and asked what I thought of her press meet. At the airport the next morning, waiting to board the flight to Pakistan, when she couldn't find me, she called to ask where I was. In Bilawal House, a day after the October 18 failed assassination, she heard that I could not get in and sent some young man to pluck me out of the throng.

Later, ensconced in Zardari's study, I overheard the debate within the party on whether her campaign should be scaled back. Bibi would not be deterred. She was also very forthcoming on the men she believed were behind the failed assassination attempt, naming names. Again, it was not for publication.

So many images crowd in. Of heads turning and realisation dawning when the waiter serving us realises who she is. Of her at my Dubai home wolfing down authentic Malayali cuisine. When I met her husband three months after they were married in 1988, I remember he said the most frustrating thing about Benazir was how she kept rearranging the furniture in Prime Minister House. It was very apt. In the three successive homes I visited in Dubai she had a stream of faith healers and feng shui experts rearranging the furniture to ward off evil. A premonition of doom perhaps?

Sadly, the many talismans that she sported around her neck, her wrists and her arm, the feng shui protection and the propitiation of deities were in the end no protection at all when death came calling, in the shape of an armed gunman.