Melody Cinema

Humbling of Bhutto in Mecca, Bhutto kissing Hajar-e-Aswad, half the Bhutto cabinet in Ihram, kneeling. These were the first scenes, in the rolling newsreel of half-closed doors, of the doorjamb in the way of the twentieth century’s upstarts. A nationalization, by Bhutto, of religious piety? No, but a headlong scram into obeisance of all and everybody and everything to the stately rise of Islam in the neighboring, overbearing Arabia. That year Bhutto had appointed my father Hajj secretary, and we, the seven children and the ayah, were present at Melody Cinema in full regalia to see, to our amazement, on the screen, our father in Ihram like Bhutto, and in a tent in Mina, sitting on the ground in an ablution scene, the humbling of our mysophobic mother, who before her pilgrimage would have drunk water only from a glass washed three times by a servant and who wouldn't sit on the drawing-room sofa unless it was draped by a freshly laundered sheet.