The writer is an author.
THE Bhuttos and tragedy share a grave. They are like the Kennedys and the Nehruvian Gandhis privileged families who invoke (to borrow Homer’s thoughts) “the envy of the gods”; their mortal appeal lies in that “they are doomed”.
That sense of genetic foreboding permeates the pages of Victoria Schofield’s touching memoir of her long friendship with the late Benazir Bhutto The Fragrance of Tears (OUP Karachi, 2021). It began when they were both Freshers at Oxford University in October 1974 and ended 33 years later with the assassination of Benazir in December 2007.
A telling image Ms Schofield includes in her book shows Benazir and Rajiv Gandhi together in December 1988, taken during Gandhi’s official visit to Islamabad. Both third-generation scions of political dynasties and by then both prime ministers of their respective countries, they smile at the cameras, exuding a naïve expectation of Indo-Pak amity that all too soon invoked