“Whatever the world has given me, in the form of experiences and events/

I am now returning it to where it belongs”

This couplet translated from Urdu is wonderfully apt about Saeed Mehdi’s timely memoir. For a civil servant who spent much of his life observing history from within the machinery of the state, it is a particularly befitting final gesture. After a lifetime of serving his country, Mehdi shares his memories with the people whose history he witnessed. The word “returning” carries a sense of obligation: I received all this from the world; I must give it back. The memoir therefore becomes more than recollection. It is an act of testimony. What makes the book so appealing is that it is an eyewitness account told with utter humility.

What a charmed life Mehdi has had. He comes from an illustrious family in India. His father, Khan Bahadur Ali Ahmed Jafri, was a senior civil servant who made the unusual decision, at the time of Partition in 1947, to send his children to Pakistan while he and his wife remained behind. At the request of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, then Minister of Education, Mr Jafri stayed on as Director of Education in Delhi, believing that he could best serve the Muslims who had chosen to remain in India.

Lahore became the permanent home of the Mehdi family through an improbable accident. On September 26, 1947, they flew from Delhi to Lahore. Enroute to the railway station to take the train to Karachi, the leading horse in the six-tonga procession slipped and fell causing the carriages behind it to collide. The delay proved fortuitous. A family friend, out for a walk on Lahore’s grand Mall Road, happened to recognise them and insisted that they come home with him for a much-needed rest. What was meant to be a brief stop in Lahore became permanent. Sindh lost; Punjab won — and, as it turned out, Pakistan gained more than one remarkable civil servant and chronicler of its history.

The devil is in the details. The strongest parts of this book are its meticulously described accounts of the incarceration, trial, and execution of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, all witnessed firsthand by the author. These passages do more than fill important gaps in the historical record; they bring into painful focus the events surrounding a trial that, in the judgment of the overwhelming majority of historians and observers, was a sham culminating in the judicial murder of Pakistan’s most popular and beloved leader since the Quaid.

Mehdi writes with extraordinary restraint. There is no embellishment, no attempt to manufacture drama; he simply records what he saw and heard. And precisely because of that plainspokenness, these passages acquire an almost unbearable power.

He was instructed to go to the prison and inform Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that this was his final day to submit a mercy petition before the death sentence was carried out. He was also to ask whether Bhutto required the services of a stenographer, typist, or counsel — the government, he was told, was prepared to provide whatever assistance was necessary. Mehdi arrived at the jail and found Bhutto confined in a special cell that had been hastily constructed for him. The sight of a man who had once commanded the country, who remained enormously popular and charismatic, reduced to this final, lonely cell was, by Mehdi’s own account, deeply depressing.

What follows is one of the most extraordinary moments in the book. Bhutto’s answer was far from pleading. It was defiant and in perfect character:

“Do you know why this offer is being made to me? It is not to save my life, but by filing a mercy petition, I accept and confess my crime and guilt, and now be asking for a pardon”. He continued, “No, Mr Deputy Commissioner. Just forget it. I am not going to do it. Let Zia torture me, hang me. But you will go empty-handed from here. I would prefer to die at the hands of a dictator than die at the hands of History. Bhutto, dead or alive, will continue to be a threat to Zia-ul-Haq.”

There is something almost Shakespearean in the exchange. A man who knows that death is imminent is offered one final opportunity to ask for mercy and instead chooses to preserve his dignity and confront his executioner. Mehdi does not tell us how we should feel about Bhutto. He simply places us in that dark, dank, lonely cell and lets Bhutto’s own words do the work. The extraordinary courage of the moment lies precisely there: Bhutto knew he was about to die, yet he refused to surrender the meaning of his death.

Reading Mehdi’s deeply personal stories, one encounters moments in which the heart seems to have been in the right place, yet duty, obedience, or circumstance demanded a different action. Mehdi was a highly trained, ethically grounded, and deeply devoted civil servant. He followed orders conscientiously. He records, with remarkable candour, the crucial events he witnessed and, at times, helped set in motion—without posturing, self-glorification, or exaggerating his own importance. History was unfolding before his eyes and, in some instances, through his hands.

And what a history he was a witness to. Looking back over his career, Mehdi saw “only despots, dictators, and sycophants—but rarely a true democrat”. As the pages of the book turn, a haunting distraction plagues the mind: He was there. He saw it happening. What might he have done differently? Mehdi asks himself the same question and answers it at the end of the book. He quotes Mark Twain: “Knowledge is knowing what to say; wisdom is knowing when to say it.” Mehdi acknowledges that he possessed the knowledge all along, but wisdom to speak up came only after thirty-five years of service, when he found himself on the other side of the table. I presume he means the years when he was himself imprisoned and experienced firsthand how the machinery of bureaucracy could be distorted and turned against an individual.

These final reflections are among the most insightful and sobering parts of the book. Looking back, Mehdi is “disgusted and depressed” by the manipulations of the system and by his own inability to have been an agent of change.

To me, these are some of the bravest words I have encountered in the memoir of a Pakistani of Mehdi’s stature—someone who stood extraordinarily close to the highest levels of both military and political power. It takes unusual courage to look back upon a life spent inside the machinery of power and ask not only what happened, but what could I have done differently? I congratulate the author for that honesty, for the depth of his self-awareness, and above all, for having the courage to say it so candidly.

The book is filled with remarkable stories, and at times reads like a mystery novel — except that the mysteries are the real events that shaped a nation. I came away from it with a deeper respect, and a newfound admiration, for the civil servant behind the history.

Mehdi served his country with extraordinary dedication, even as he wrestled honestly with the question of whether he could, at critical moments, have been a greater instrument of change. That self-questioning only makes his memoir more powerful. I marvel at the grace with which he has led such an astonishing life, always walking a high wire between duty and conscience, yet conducting himself with exceptional civility and decency. We owe him a vote of thanks for his tireless devotion to Pakistan and for undertaking the difficult and invaluable task of putting these memories on record.

His memoir has both clarity and eloquence as explained in a couplet by Akbar Allahabadi translated from Urdu to English below:

“When the meaning comes across clearly, that is eloquence/
When it leaves an impact on those who hear it, that is resonance.”

May he have a long life and may he live to see some of his deepest hopes and wishes for Pakistan finally come true.

The writer is a Pakistani-American oncologist, researcher and author

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer