We Heard Everything - Family Secrets

Summary8 min read

Family Secrets — “We Heard Everything”

Podcast: Family Secrets
Host: Dani Shapiro
Guest: Fatima Bhutto
Original Air Date: June 4, 2026

Episode Overview

In this deeply personal episode of Family Secrets, writer Fatima Bhutto joins host Dani Shapiro to recount her journey through profound personal and political trauma, family enmeshment, emotional abuse, and ultimately, self-liberation and healing. Bhutto, known for her searing memoirs and political commentary, explores the impact of growing up amidst both the magic of family love and the ever-present danger of loss. She shares how secrets shaped her reality, how tragedy left enduring scars, and how unexpected sources—particularly her relationships with dogs—became the catalyst for reclaiming her life.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Childhood in Exile, Under the Shadow of Loss

Landscape of Childhood ([04:28])
- Bhutto describes early years shaped by her father—a central figure—and the ever-present absence of "home":
  
  "My father was the entire universe of my childhood, and besides him was this enormous absence of home. ... Home ... always loomed very strongly, not even in the background. It was really quite foregrounded for us." ([04:28])
- Loss was presaged by family history: her grandfather and uncle both killed by the military dictatorship.
- Childhood marked by necessary secrecy for survival: not sharing their location, leaving home suddenly, never admitting her father's absence over the phone.
Rituals with her Father ([06:26])
- A recurring exchange:
  
  “If anything ever happened to you, I would die. ... me too, Papa. I would die without you too. … We spoke that oath to each other as easily as some people say, ‘Sweet dreams.’” (narrated by Dani Shapiro, [06:26])
- This sense of fragility and threat felt “normal” to Fatima as a child.

2. Return to Karachi & the Weight of Public Identity

End of Exile ([11:10])
- At 11, Fatima leaves her familiar, safe world in Damascus for Karachi—a city of chaos and violence.
- Her family’s very public, political identity in Pakistan means she's no longer anonymous.
- The return "home" marks the beginning of her own exile from the only place she'd truly known as home.

3. The Assassination and Aftermath

Father’s Death ([17:24]–[23:37])
- At 14, Fatima's father is assassinated in a meticulously planned ambush outside their home.
- Fatima and her younger brother hear the gunfire; only later does she piece together the truth via a call with her aunt's husband.
- Painfully, the aftermath is managed as though life must go on:
  
  "I had no choice but to get on with it. … I had to live in the same house." ([24:45])
- She describes living with the constant reminders: traveling daily on the street where he was killed.
Lingering Trauma
- Fatima later suffers severe panic attacks; the body keeps the score.
  
  “I never felt far away from my anxiety. I never felt far away from fear.” ([27:23])
- She channels her grief and need for reckoning into writing, spending six years researching and writing her first book to create a record—a form of testimony—in the absence of formal justice.

4. Re-traumatization & Breakdown

Book Tour and Trauma ([29:48])
- Touring her book requires Fatima to relive traumatic events repetitively, often with insensitive interviewers.
- “Just as I’m doing now, I had to relive really the worst moment of my life over and over again.” ([30:18])
- She eventually loses her voice, a physical manifestation of emotional exhaustion:
  
  “It was just my body saying it had had enough.” ([31:43])

5. Dogs as Companions & Witnesses

Relationship with Dogs: Loss & Guilt
- Lama, her first long-haired dachshund, is neglected during Fatima’s travels and dies while she is away.
  
  “They just love us. They love us at our most negligence, at our most distant, at our most selfish and thoughtless because they can. Because they do.” ([34:07])
- Coco, her Jack Russell, becomes confidante and witness to her secret life.

6. Entering an Emotionally Abusive Relationship

The “Man” and the Cycle of Control ([37:27]–[57:01])
- Bhutto meets a charismatic, older man during her most vulnerable period.
- He offers “healing” and promise of control over suffering, yet is subtly coercive and controlling:
  
  “He would help me erase it. … It was really too seductive a promise not to jump at.” ([39:14])
- He introduces toxic secrecy, isolation, and manipulation:
  
  “He was incredibly manipulative. He gaslit me constantly. ... Abuse is in the total disrespect of your boundaries.” ([46:15])
- The relationship remains secret, fueled by Bhutto’s isolation and her belief she could change him.
- Abuse is incremental and psychological, not loud or overt:
  
  “Abuse is not in violence necessarily, but abuse is in the total disrespect of your boundaries." ([47:00])
Gaslighting Explained

“When someone is gaslighting you, the onus is on you because you're being told you're imagining things, you're being told you're crazy.” ([49:37])
- Bhutto offers a keen insight:
  
  “This type of person, emotionally abusive person, is not special… they're generic. … They are absolutely identical. … They isolate you. … They punish you for reacting. They reward you in small enough ways … that you need more of the reward.” ([48:30])

7. The Parallel of Maternal & Animal Loss

Desire for Motherhood & Coco’s Pregnancy ([57:01]–[63:54])
- The “man” is evasive and manipulative about having children with Fatima.
- In a striking parallel, Coco’s troubled pregnancy and loss mirrors Fatima’s own grief and longing for family.
- Grieving together with Coco, Fatima finds intense companionship, reflecting on the commonality of animal and human emotion:
  
  “Animals are not that different from us … They feel exactly what we do because they're capable of such enormous tenderness and love. … Why wouldn't they feel pain in the same way that we do?” ([63:41])

8. The Turn: Clarity and Escape

Witnessing Cruelty Toward Her Dog ([64:43]–[68:24])
- The relationship’s final unraveling occurs when Fatima sees the man’s cruelty directed at her beloved dog, Coco:
  
  “It’s really the first time that I see his cruelty that I’ve experienced so often turned towards someone else. … seeing him be cruel to my dog, it really took the mask off for me.” ([64:45])
- She describes loss of respect as the pivotal moment in regaining her agency.
- She recognizes how abusers strip away talismans of safety, symbolized by the man repeatedly taking a 50-pound note she kept for emergencies ([66:33]).
Advice to Others

“It's the opposite. Someone makes you feel uncomfortable, you should absolutely make a rioting scene. ... If you're wrong, you can apologize later. But you should make the biggest scene possible if you don't feel good.” ([69:09])
- She shares that talking and writing about her experience became a way to create a “safe space” for honest inquiry, for herself and others.

9. Liberation, New Beginnings, and Joy

Full Circle to Healing & Family ([70:33]–[74:09])
- Fatima cuts ties with the man, becomes a pack leader to Koko and her puppies, and enters a new, loving relationship—eventually marrying and having children.
- Her story closes with gratitude for friendship, love, and her noisy, messy, joyful household:
  
  “We have two little boys and we have the three dogs. ... It is a house filled with noise and chaos and a lot, a lot of joy.” ([74:09])

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Living with Danger:

“You know, there were a lot of secrets because survival depended on secrets. So you couldn't tell people where you were, you couldn't tell them where you weren't.” — Fatima Bhutto ([08:33])
On Anxiety after Grief:

“I never felt far away from my anxiety. I never felt very far away from my fear.” — Fatima Bhutto ([27:23])
On Gaslighting & Emotional Abuse:

“Abuse is not in violence necessarily, but abuse is in the total disrespect of your boundaries.” — Fatima Bhutto ([47:00])
“This type of person … is not special. They’re generic. … They isolate you. They punish you for reacting.” — Fatima Bhutto ([48:30])
“When someone is gaslighting you... you’re being told you’re imagining things, you’re being told you’re crazy” — Fatima Bhutto ([49:37])
On the Parallel with Dogs:

“To be cruel is a choice. You have to go out of your way. To be cruel, you know, to love is natural. It’s an instinct.” — Fatima Bhutto ([53:05])
On Healing and Writing:

“I never wanted to talk about this kind of thing, but I... wrote about it because I wish I had come across something like this when I was in this relationship...” — Fatima Bhutto ([69:44])
On New Beginnings:

“It is a house filled with noise and chaos and a lot, a lot of joy.” — Fatima Bhutto ([74:09])

Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 04:28 | Childhood, exile, reality of danger & loss | | 11:01 | Return to Karachi & loss of anonymity | | 17:24 | Father's assassination, its orchestration & aftermath | | 26:00 | Panic, trauma, therapy, and grief’s aftermath | | 29:48 | Book tour, re-traumatization, and physical breakdown | | 32:01 | The role and loss of Lama the dog | | 37:27 | Meeting “the man”; emotional abuse begins | | 42:57 | How abuse is subtle, generic, and isolating | | 49:37 | On gaslighting and the loss of self-trust | | 57:01 | Maternal longing; Coco’s traumatic pregnancy | | 63:54 | Recognizing abuse—turning point in Florence | | 70:33 | Cutting ties, puppies, finding love and joy again | | 74:09 | Ending: gratitude for family, friends, a noisy joyful life|

Takeaways

Family secrets and trauma are rarely solitary—they shape worldviews and vulnerabilities, even as they demand secrecy for survival.
Abuse can creep in slowly, especially after trauma, masked as support or healing. Its patterns are universal, not unique to the victim or the abuser.
Support, therapy, and unexpected sources of love—dogs, friends—can form the scaffolding that allows for healing and self-rescue.
Truth-telling, even if only in private or on the page, has immense power to break the pattern and invite new life.
Creating a new family—biological or chosen, human or canine—is a radical, healing choice after loss.

This episode distills the resilience and nuance of surviving trauma—how even wounds that shape a life can be transformed in the presence of love, self-awareness, and the courage to name what’s endured.

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[00:00]
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[00:02]
Fatima Bhutto
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Fatima Bhutto
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Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
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Fatima Bhutto
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[02:23]
Chase Sapphire Business Advertiser
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio.
[02:28]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
My life had been broken by grief. And then for a period it was redeemed by love. But people do not love each other in the same way. And sometimes there is terror in love. I wanted a family more than anything in the world. The man didn't but instead of acknowledging
[02:48]
Fatima Bhutto
that we wanted different things and that
[02:50]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
we might be better off in pursuit
[02:51]
Fatima Bhutto
of separate lives, we stayed together.
[02:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
It is difficult to look back now and see that I tolerated this for
[02:58]
Fatima Bhutto
as long as I did.
[03:00]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Some men take strong women as a challenge and derive a pleasure in breaking
[03:05]
Fatima Bhutto
them or trying to.
[03:07]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And when you are a strong woman, you also might not think this can happen to you, that you might be in trouble, that someone you care for
[03:16]
Fatima Bhutto
might be dangerous for you.
[03:21]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
That's Fatima Bhutto, Pakistani writer and columnist and author of several books, including the memoir Song of Blood and Sword and the recent the Hour of the Wolf. Fatima's is a story of growing up in a world filled with magic and also marked by profound fear of impending loss. When that loss becomes a reality, grief shapes her from the inside out, until finally the waves recede, her sight clears and she finds herself feeling the kind of safety that had never been her birthright. I'm Dani Shapiro, and this is family secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
[04:21]
Interviewer
Tell me about the landscape of your childhood, as early as you remember.
[04:28]
Fatima Bhutto
The earliest I remember, really, is my father. My father was the entire universe of
[04:36]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
my childhood, and besides him was this
[04:39]
Fatima Bhutto
enormous absence of home. Because, of course, I wasn't born in my country. I was born when my father was in exile. And home, this place that my father loved and adored but that we couldn't return to because of danger, because of politics, because of a dictatorship, it always loomed very strongly, not even in the background. It was really quite foregrounded for us.
[05:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it was a place of so
[05:09]
Fatima Bhutto
much promise and so much beauty, but also a threatening place.
[05:14]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I suppose somehow my father made this world seem open and wondrous and exciting. But he also didn't lie to me.
[05:26]
Fatima Bhutto
He didn't hide what was threatening about him.
[05:29]
Interviewer
That's something that really struck me, is that somehow embedded in the very atmosphere of your childhood was, it almost seems like it presaged loss.
[05:41]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yes, it was always there as well, because I was born three years after
[05:46]
Fatima Bhutto
my grandfather had been killed by a military dictatorship in Pakistan.
[05:52]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And three years after I was born,
[05:56]
Fatima Bhutto
my father's younger brother, who was only 27 at the time, was also killed.
[06:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And there was always this sense that it was close by, that my father
[06:08]
Fatima Bhutto
didn't say things like, you know, when I die, he said things like, when I'm killed. And even though it upset me as
[06:16]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
a child, when I would tell him that it upset me, he would Say,
[06:21]
Fatima Bhutto
well, you should know that that's a possibility.
[06:27]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Fatima and her father have a nighttime ritual in the dark quiet of their Damascus flat. After he reads her a bedtime story, he'll say, if anything ever happened to you, I would die. And Fatima responds by saying, me too, Papa. I would die without you too. She writes in her memoir. We spoke that oath to each other as easily as some people say. Sweet dreams.
[06:53]
Fatima Bhutto
I have two babies now and the thought of saying that to them would just fill me with so much sadness.
[07:03]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But it felt normal.
[07:06]
Fatima Bhutto
My father would tell me a story and he was a wonderful mimic, so he would do voices and, you know, it was comedic and exciting and fun to listen to him.
[07:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then he would sit there and wait for me to sleep. But his good night was always this
[07:23]
Fatima Bhutto
quite sorrowful good night.
[07:25]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I didn't really understand that there
[07:28]
Fatima Bhutto
was anything unusual about it because this
[07:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
idea of all the loss around us, it made it seem quite possible that
[07:36]
Fatima Bhutto
something bad would happen. So it seemed a kind of normal thing to say.
[07:40]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But it really was a beautiful childhood in so many ways. I mean, I knew there were bits
[07:46]
Fatima Bhutto
that were not normal about it.
[07:50]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You know, I knew as a young child, I mean, I was very chatty,
[07:54]
Fatima Bhutto
I'm still very chatty, but I was, I loved talking. And as soon as I was old enough to answer the phone, that was like incredibly exciting to me because imagine the chance we just get to talk to someone out of the blue in your own home. And I remember being told, not just by my father, but by my grandmother, who I, who I adored and who was really a stand in mother figure for me.
[08:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I remember being told, you know, when
[08:18]
Fatima Bhutto
you pick up the phone, you can't tell people everything. You know, if they ask for your father and he's not here, you can't say he's not here.
[08:26]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You have to say, oh, he's busy
[08:29]
Fatima Bhutto
with something, he'll call you back.
[08:30]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I, and I understood that was strange.
[08:32]
Fatima Bhutto
And you know, there were a lot
[08:33]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
of secrets because survival depended on secrets. So you couldn't tell people where you
[08:39]
Fatima Bhutto
were, you couldn't tell them where you weren't.
[08:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And sometimes you had to leave your home because it was dangerous. And then of course, you would return to your home as though nothing had
[08:50]
Fatima Bhutto
happened, or, I mean, all the grown ups would return as though nothing had happened. But I would be a little bit
[08:55]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
stunned and confused and unsure. So there were little clues that things were not normal. There were things that felt very extraordinary. But I, I just understood it as, as how it Was.
[09:12]
Fatima Bhutto
I didn't. I didn't really see how we could change that.
[09:16]
Interviewer
And your mother was not in the picture, right? She and your father divorced when you were three?
[09:22]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
They divorced when I was three.
[09:24]
Fatima Bhutto
And
[09:26]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I didn't really have very much
[09:28]
Fatima Bhutto
interaction with her when I was older.
[09:34]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I'm sure that affected me in multiple, multiple ways. But at the time, again, my father
[09:40]
Fatima Bhutto
was really the sum of everything for me.
[09:43]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And as long as I had him
[09:44]
Fatima Bhutto
nearby, I felt safe.
[09:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I was still in Damascus and Syria. When my father was a bachelor, I
[09:51]
Fatima Bhutto
had kind of a bachelor life too. We would go swimming on the weekends, you know, he would play squash and I would read a book or swim at the pool.
[10:02]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
We'd go out and have meals.
[10:05]
Fatima Bhutto
My father thought he was a very good cook, but I'm not really sure he was. So there was a lot of dinners out.
[10:12]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You know, I didn't really have a bedtime per se.
[10:16]
Fatima Bhutto
You know, I could stay up late, I could travel.
[10:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Where my father went, I had to
[10:20]
Fatima Bhutto
go because there was no one else to look after me. When the grown ups were talking, I was sitting there eating peanuts and, you know, listening to them talk. And I thought my father's friends were my friends because I had to spend as much time with them as he did.
[10:38]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So it was quite a bachelor life. But then he remarried and then they
[10:44]
Fatima Bhutto
had a baby, my brother Zulfikar. And that certainly felt a little bit more normal. You know, there was now a bit more of bedtimes, there was a baby, you had the routines that babies have.
[10:57]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I went to school and that felt very normal.
[11:01]
Fatima Bhutto
You know, I had friends that I loved and I lived in a beautiful city, you know, one of the world's most ancient cities.
[11:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And everything felt very normal until we
[11:14]
Fatima Bhutto
had to return to back as. And my father stood for elections and he won.
[11:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And that was it.
[11:21]
Fatima Bhutto
This very romantic but tragic exile was suddenly over.
[11:27]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And this possibility that we had always
[11:30]
Fatima Bhutto
spoken about but never really thought would come true, that we would return home
[11:35]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
suddenly was upon us.
[11:36]
Fatima Bhutto
And not only were we returning home, we were returning home in a month.
[11:41]
Interviewer
And how old were you when that return happened?
[11:44]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I was about 11. Eleven and a half, Something like that, yeah.
[11:48]
Interviewer
So you're also leaving the friends that you've made behind. I mean, 11, it's just. Nobody wants to be 11 again.
[11:57]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
No, I'm in the sixth grade, you
[11:59]
Fatima Bhutto
know, it's like the beginning of a very exciting period at school. And we're in middle school, we have lockers now, you know, it's Just really kind of cool new period.
[12:11]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I've got to leave, and I've got to leave. And I didn't think I was in exile.
[12:17]
Fatima Bhutto
You know, my father was in exile. It was not his country, it was not the language he grew up speaking. It was not his childhood home, but it was mine.
[12:26]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So the end of his exile was,
[12:27]
Fatima Bhutto
in a way, the beginning of my own.
[12:29]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he had spent 16 years waiting,
[12:32]
Fatima Bhutto
counting days and months and hours and
[12:35]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
missing everything about home. And that period, for me, really began
[12:39]
Fatima Bhutto
when we left Damascus and I returned to this place that up until that point, I had only visited. And I loved it, but I loved it because my father loved it.
[12:48]
Interviewer
And what was that landscape like? You know, you're 11 years old, 12 years old, you're now in Karachi, your father is elected, and there's this whole other world. And also, I would imagine the rhythm of just everyday life must have shifted tremendously.
[13:06]
Fatima Bhutto
Oh, it was not just a different world. It was like a totally different life, because Damascus at that point, I mean, in the 1980s, even the early 1990s, was nothing like the Syria people imagine today. It was a very sleepy town.
[13:24]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
It was a tiny place.
[13:25]
Fatima Bhutto
It was incredibly safe. Karachi was a mad city. It was a city of millions upon millions upon millions of people. It's a crush of people. It's super chaotic. There's motorcycles, rickshaws, cars. There's no footpaths, there's no pavements. So you've got people, children, families whizzing in between traffic.
[13:50]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it was not just a megacity, but it was a very dangerous city.
[13:55]
Fatima Bhutto
It was a city where there was a law and order problem, which is, you know, it's a nice way of saying you lived in a really violent place and there were shootings, there were at that time, there weren't bombings, those came later.
[14:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But also, it was not anonymous city
[14:12]
Fatima Bhutto
for me, because whereas in Syria, I had just been, you know, a sixth grader, someone from a strange part of the world, someone from far away in Pakistan. My family was very well known, and
[14:27]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
that meant that people were curious about me.
[14:31]
Fatima Bhutto
And I'd not had that before. I'd not understood what it felt like.
[14:39]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
We'll be right back.
[14:48]
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[15:18]
Jacob Goldstein (Odoo Advertiser)
This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Business software is expensive. And when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing. Slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's O D O o dot com.
[16:02]
Bethenny Frankel
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[16:48]
Inner Balance Advertiser
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[17:24]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
When Fatimah is 14, her whole world is upended. Her beloved father, her sun and moon is assassinated. This is not a haphazard or unorganized killing. His assassination is well planned, very deliberate.
[17:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
We'd started to notice in the days
[17:45]
Fatima Bhutto
before, armored vehicles were beginning to be placed around our house. So coming back from school one day, I saw one. And, you know, an armored vehicle is pretty hard to miss, especially when they're men with Kalashnikovs, you know, standing out of it.
[18:00]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then the next day there were
[18:01]
Fatima Bhutto
two, and then the next day there were three, and we were basically surrounded.
[18:06]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And at that time, like I said,
[18:09]
Fatima Bhutto
Karachi was a very dangerous place. And I went to the American school, and it happened once in a while that our school was shot at. You'd be going to class and you'd hear gunfire and, you know, you knew what to do. We knew what to do, we were taught what to do.
[18:24]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So it was scary, but it didn't
[18:28]
Fatima Bhutto
quite feel out of the ordinary.
[18:32]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
My father, because he was a politician
[18:33]
Fatima Bhutto
and he was very outspoken, he thought they might try to arrest him.
[18:37]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And that's what he'd told us to plan for. But the day that he was killed,
[18:42]
Fatima Bhutto
he was going to a public meeting
[18:45]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
outside of the city, and I wanted
[18:50]
Fatima Bhutto
very much to go with him. And usually my father was quite keen to drag me along on his political outings because we could chat in the car and we always had fun when we were together.
[19:02]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But that day he said I couldn't come.
[19:04]
Fatima Bhutto
He said it was too dangerous, and he would see me when he got back in the evening.
[19:09]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And what we didn't know is that
[19:12]
Fatima Bhutto
as it got darker, the Karachi police were placed on our street. There were anywhere from 70 to 100 policemen stationed, some in sniper positions in the trees, in these very old banyan trees, you know, which are very large, imposing sort of trees that look a bit like weeping willows. You know, they've got very long leaves. The police were put even as high up as into those trees.
[19:40]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And we live on a street where
[19:42]
Fatima Bhutto
there are a lot of consulates.
[19:45]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And all the guards at these foreign
[19:47]
Fatima Bhutto
consulates were told to leave their posts by the police, and the street lights were turned off and traffic was stopped from entering the road. So when my father's car approached the road to come home, the police stopped him. And someone was charged with identifying that he was who he was. And when they identified him, then they gave an order to fire. And my father and all the men with him were shot not once, many times. And they were all killed by point blank gunshots.
[20:22]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And we were in the house at the time.
[20:24]
Fatima Bhutto
So My brother was 6 years old and I was 14. And so we heard everything.
[20:30]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And this was in the days before cell phones, so we had no way
[20:33]
Fatima Bhutto
of reaching my father to know where he was.
[20:37]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But when we tried to leave the
[20:40]
Fatima Bhutto
house to find out what had happened,
[20:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
the police stopped us and said that
[20:44]
Fatima Bhutto
there had been a robbery nearby.
[20:46]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And again, because this was such a dangerous city, they could say something like
[20:50]
Fatima Bhutto
that, and it was within the realm of possibility. It was strange that a robbery would have produced so much gunfire because it
[20:58]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
was several minutes long.
[20:59]
Fatima Bhutto
It felt like a lot of weapons were being fired. It wasn't, you know, a single shot or things like that, but that's what they said.
[21:06]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But what they were doing is they
[21:08]
Fatima Bhutto
were cleaning the streets and they were moving all of the men, including my father, to different locations around the city, none of which were emergency hospitals. They were all just taken to different clinics around Karachi.
[21:24]
Interviewer
And when were you told what had happened?
[21:28]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Well, we were waiting and waiting and
[21:31]
Fatima Bhutto
waiting, and my father hadn't come back yet, and it seemed strange that he would be so late. And my aunt. This is the less ordinary part of the story. My aunt at the time was the prime minister of the country. And after an hour or so of waiting, I said I was getting nervous, and I said, I'm going to call my aunt and find out what's happening. And my aunt and my father were quite estranged, though they had been very
[22:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
close as young people.
[22:03]
Fatima Bhutto
He was a critic of her government. And it was a government that was marked by a lot of exactly the kind of violence that both of them would be killed by a lot of police excess and many other things.
[22:18]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So I called the prime minister's house,
[22:21]
Fatima Bhutto
and the secretary, the ADC of the prime minister's house, was very apologetic to me and very concerned. I had no idea why, obviously.
[22:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And instead of putting me through to my aunt, he put me through to
[22:35]
Fatima Bhutto
her husband, who was. Who was not really a favorite in the family, let's put it that way.
[22:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
He was.
[22:43]
Fatima Bhutto
He'd been accused of a lot of corruption. He was known in those days as Mr. 10% because of all the graft that he took off of deals going through the government. He put me on the phone with my aunt's husband, and I was a bit confused as to why I was put on the phone with him.
[23:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And when I asked to speak to my aunt, he said, no, you can't.
[23:05]
Fatima Bhutto
She's hysterical.
[23:09]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I still didn't understand because I
[23:11]
Fatima Bhutto
really didn't connect that shooting and all the noise to my father. I just. I didn't want it to be my father. But also, I had hoped really against hope it wasn't.
[23:23]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So I asked my Aunt's husband. Why? My aunt was hysterical and tried to
[23:29]
Fatima Bhutto
impress upon him that it was very important I spoke to her.
[23:32]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And that's when he said, oh, don't you know, your father's been shocked?
[23:38]
Fatima Bhutto
And that's how I found out.
[23:41]
Interviewer
And where was your stepmother during that?
[23:45]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
She was there. And it was at that time when
[23:49]
Fatima Bhutto
I heard those words, I just dropped the phone and everything went a bit black. And she picked up the phone and I don't really know what happened then. The next thing I remember was just that she was screaming and getting the car ready to go somewhere. And again she tried to leave me behind and I refused and I insisted on going. And that's when we went to a clinic. That was the kind of clinic you went when you had to see the dentist or you had to get a vaccine. It was not a place that had emergency doctors that didn't have an er. And that's where my father had been taken purposely so that he couldn't be helped. And that's where we went. I was totally heartbroken. And beyond that, I was a bit broken by my father's killing.
[24:45]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I had no choice but to
[24:49]
Fatima Bhutto
get on with it. I had to go to school. I. I had to do the things
[24:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
you have to do. And also I had to live in the same house.
[24:59]
Fatima Bhutto
I mean, anytime I went to school, if I went to buy a pack of gum, I had to travel on the street that my father was killed on, anytime I came home. Any homecoming also meant passing that road.
[25:13]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Being on that road, I had no
[25:16]
Fatima Bhutto
sense of how wounded I was and how much work it had taken to keep me getting through those ordinary moments as stably as possible. I'm sure everyone worries about what happens to their parents, but in my life, it seemed not a possibility. It seemed a highly likely possibility.
[25:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I'd always had anxiety.
[25:44]
Fatima Bhutto
I'd always had, you know, pain in my stomach as a child when I felt afraid. And.
[25:52]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And as I got older, that. That became more obvious.
[25:57]
Fatima Bhutto
It became much stronger, much raw.
[26:00]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And when I was older and I guess enough away from what had happened and finally felt, you know, I'm now
[26:11]
Fatima Bhutto
building a sort of new life, was exactly the moment that I started to get incredibly devastating panic attacks where they were so strong I didn't think I could breathe or I couldn't stand up. I was unable to communicate.
[26:26]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I mean, now, you know, we
[26:27]
Fatima Bhutto
know all kinds of things about how the body keeps the score. And at that time, there was no vocabulary for it. I didn't. I didn't understand.
[26:36]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I thought I had dealt with a
[26:37]
Fatima Bhutto
lot of my trauma because I went to therapy. You know, everyone knew what had happened to me, so it was difficult not to talk about it.
[26:46]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I was lucky to have a lot of support from. From friends, from people in my school. I've seen a lot of sadness and.
[26:55]
Fatima Bhutto
And a lot of danger, but I've also seen, you know, the incredible kindness of people, of strangers. So I didn't understand what was happening.
[27:05]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it carried on for really, a rather long time, I have to say. It was always somewhere there in the background. And it made me.
[27:12]
Fatima Bhutto
Even as I dealt with it. And I did more therapy, I did
[27:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
yoga, I took medicine. It always stayed with me. So I never felt far away from grief.
[27:23]
Fatima Bhutto
I never felt very far away from my anxiety. I never felt far away from fear.
[27:29]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I did the best I could, I suppose. I went to college.
[27:34]
Fatima Bhutto
I then went to England. I did a master's.
[27:37]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And though I wanted to be a
[27:39]
Fatima Bhutto
writer, I enjoyed it very much.
[27:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I did also choose to write about things that.
[27:45]
Fatima Bhutto
That hurt me, that bothered me, that worried me, that made me fearful. And eventually I wrote about my father's life and his assassination in. In what was my first book.
[27:57]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And so put myself through the experience
[27:59]
Fatima Bhutto
of the trauma all over again by finding people from my father's path, finding policemen that had been present on the scene that night, finding doctors.
[28:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I did that really because I
[28:14]
Fatima Bhutto
didn't think I was going to get justice anywhere. I didn't think I was going to get it in the courts. I didn't think I was going to get it in my country.
[28:22]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And so I had to find a
[28:23]
Fatima Bhutto
different way of reckoning what had happened. And it seemed like a record of it, a reckoning of it, and a testimony, a document of what had happened was going to be the closest I could get. So I spent six years working on that book.
[28:39]
Interviewer
And not surprisingly and unsurprisingly, and also, I mean, what were you gonna do? Write a romance novel? I mean, yeah, our themes are just. It's a fancy literary word for what obsesses us. And it would seem to me that it would have been absolutely impossible for you to do anything other than that. And yet, of course, with everything that we know about trauma now and the way that it does live, you know, in our bones, that it would re. Traumatize you. You know, I think in some way, too, people have the misunderstanding that there would be catharsis around something like delving so deeply into this story that was just this defining, terrible story. Tragedy of your young life. And it does something else. It embeds it. So you had written that during this period of time you're on tour and you lose your voice.
[29:49]
Fatima Bhutto
Yeah, I finished the book. It comes out and I go on this tour with it. Of course, I knew nothing about how books work. And I just assumed you write the book and then someone else does, you know, the rest of it, but it doesn't work that way. And so you kind of have to go out and shepherd this thing around. And it was incredibly important to me, the story. So whenever I was asked, will you come here and talk about your book? I said, yes, of course. And I went.
[30:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And just as I'm doing now, I
[30:19]
Fatima Bhutto
had to relive really the worst moment of my life over and over again.
[30:23]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And not always with, I mean, not
[30:26]
Fatima Bhutto
often, I should say with sensitive interlocutors. You know, at that time, Pakistan was very much in the news. The war on terror was still, you know, in its throes.
[30:38]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I was interviewed by journalists and war correspondents who treated me, you know,
[30:45]
Fatima Bhutto
in a way like I was answerable for Pakistan in a lot of ways. And they would forget really that I'm. I'm someone talking about her father. I'm someone talking about someone that they love. I'm not an official, I'm not a government official. I don't hold any office. I'm not really answerable.
[31:03]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I had to be calm.
[31:04]
Fatima Bhutto
You know, I couldn't cry on stage, I couldn't. I couldn't get angry, I couldn't get upset. I had to be calm.
[31:11]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I would do it.
[31:13]
Fatima Bhutto
I don't know how, but I would do it night after night after night, sometimes several times a day.
[31:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then I would just crumple, you
[31:21]
Fatima Bhutto
know, I would get off stage and. And if I couldn't find my hotel key, I would just fall down crying. I would spend days where I couldn't sleep, where I couldn't eat.
[31:35]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then finally I lost my voice. And I went to doctors, I went to see specialists, and there was nothing wrong.
[31:43]
Fatima Bhutto
I had nothing wrong with my throat or my vocal cords or anything like that. It was just my body saying and it had had enough.
[31:52]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
During this time, something else is crumpling, something unexpected. Fatima's relationship with her dog, Lama.
[32:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I got Lama at a time when,
[32:06]
Fatima Bhutto
again, you know, there was a lot of uncertainty and danger in Pakistan.
[32:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And she was this wonderful long haired dachshund who was so gentle and so steadfast.
[32:17]
Fatima Bhutto
I mean, that's the best way to
[32:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
describe her and I. I adored Llama. And then this book came out.
[32:24]
Fatima Bhutto
It had. I hadn't even begun writing it at the time that I got Llama, but
[32:28]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I then, you know, begin the process of writing the book.
[32:32]
Fatima Bhutto
I then have to go out and
[32:33]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
tour with the book. At that time, I felt, none of this is going to work if I'm.
[32:40]
Fatima Bhutto
If I'm sitting here in. In Pakistan, you know, I've got to get away from. From everything, from this life or the grief, the. You know, my old life. I'm trying.
[32:51]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I wanted to build something new. And at that time, I was still
[32:54]
Fatima Bhutto
touring with that book about my father.
[32:56]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And so I started to distance myself
[32:59]
Fatima Bhutto
from home, from, you know, my life at home, my life as I knew
[33:05]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
it, and even my dog and even Lama, because it became harder and harder
[33:09]
Fatima Bhutto
to say, goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye. And carry on this nomadic existence that I'd thrown myself into when there was
[33:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
always this little creature who was waiting
[33:19]
Fatima Bhutto
for me and who felt lonely without me.
[33:23]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And in trying to make that distance
[33:25]
Fatima Bhutto
and in trying to cement that distance, I was careless, I was cruel. I just wanted to cut ties and be gone.
[33:36]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And when I was traveling during one of these periods, Lama died.
[33:42]
Fatima Bhutto
She had.
[33:43]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
She'd been fine.
[33:44]
Fatima Bhutto
She just got ill, and before I could get back, she was gone.
[33:49]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I felt horrible. I felt I had been so careless and so unthinking and to do that to an animal, you know, who's so loving. And all animals are, you know, they. They just love us. They love us at our most negligence,
[34:07]
Fatima Bhutto
at our most distant, at our most
[34:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
selfish and thoughtless because they can.
[34:13]
Fatima Bhutto
Because they do.
[34:14]
Interviewer
Well, they love. They love unconditionally, which is something that we long for as humans and is rare.
[34:23]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yes. Yes. And to be honest, you know, we
[34:26]
Fatima Bhutto
don't do it with each other very often. We're very stingy when it comes to doing that with each other.
[34:33]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But Llama, I really. I felt horrible about.
[34:42]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
[34:52]
Jacob Goldstein (Odoo Advertiser)
This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Business software is expensive. And when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing. Slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that, because all Odoo software is connected on a single, affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to Sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com that's O-O-O.com Most dog food brands
[35:38]
Podcast Announcer
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[36:06]
Inner Balance Advertiser
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[36:36]
Cindy Crawford
That's innerbalance.com hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of meaningful beauty. When Dr. Sabah and I decided to do a skincare line together, he said to me, we are going to give women meaningful beauty. And I said, that's exactly right. We want to give women meaningful beauty, which means each and every product is meaningful. It has a reason to exist. It's efficacious. You're going to get results and then you just go out and live your life. Meaningful beauty Confidence is beautiful. Learn more@meaningful beauty.com.
[37:17]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Before Lama's death, Fatima meets someone. A man who will, for better or worse, become a fixture in her life for the next decade.
[37:27]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I had put myself in this situation
[37:29]
Fatima Bhutto
where I was really retraumatizing myself on a, on a daily basis and I,
[37:36]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I had already spent most of my life quite grief struck, but I did
[37:42]
Fatima Bhutto
sort of believe what people said. I did think maybe there's some kind of catharsis in, in writing a book like the one I had written.
[37:49]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I thought maybe there might be some
[37:50]
Fatima Bhutto
justice and actually there wasn't. And that was a really rude awakening for me. It was a really unpleasant surprise to
[37:58]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
find that actually, no, I didn't feel better.
[38:01]
Fatima Bhutto
I didn't feel, you know, healed in one way or another.
[38:05]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I felt, I felt even more afraid.
[38:08]
Fatima Bhutto
I felt even more undone because so
[38:12]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
much time had passed and I was still very much in pain. And at that time, I met a man who was older than me, and he seemed, at the time, possessed of
[38:29]
Fatima Bhutto
this unearthly intelligence and confidence.
[38:35]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And when I met him, he told
[38:37]
Fatima Bhutto
me that he could see I was wounded, that I was in pain. He said it was written all over my face and I was telegraphing it and everything I did.
[38:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he said it was strange because he could see right away that I
[38:51]
Fatima Bhutto
didn't have to be in pain, that
[38:52]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I could press a switch almost by understanding things in a different way.
[38:57]
Fatima Bhutto
And I could end all my sorrow.
[39:00]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I could end all my suffering and grief.
[39:03]
Fatima Bhutto
I could be done with it. I could be cured of all my sadness.
[39:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it was easy. And all I had to do was. Was to believe him and to listen to what he said.
[39:15]
Fatima Bhutto
And he would help me. He would help me erase it.
[39:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it was really too seductive a
[39:22]
Fatima Bhutto
promise not to jump at. And.
[39:26]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I was entranced by this possibility. I was entranced. And he sort of did it. I mean, he. He had a totally unusual, confident,
[39:37]
Fatima Bhutto
very
[39:38]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
primal way of being in the world. And he didn't think what had happened
[39:42]
Fatima Bhutto
to me was all that unusual. He didn't think it meant I had to ruin my life.
[39:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
He thought it could be a matter of just changing my perspective. And he did help me, I have to say, he did help me, to
[39:56]
Fatima Bhutto
give him credit where he does deserve
[39:58]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
it, change my thinking. And that was one of the secrets
[40:03]
Fatima Bhutto
he told me that, you know, we do our thinking. It's not done to us. It's not like a thought just magically appears in your mind.
[40:11]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You've put it there, and just the
[40:13]
Fatima Bhutto
way you put it there, you can take it out. What I didn't realize at the time
[40:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
was that he was grooming me as well.
[40:21]
Fatima Bhutto
In many ways, he was grooming me to forget a certain kind of treatment that he would dish out to me.
[40:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And though he was very charismatic in
[40:34]
Fatima Bhutto
this way, though I wouldn't call him charming because he was confident, because he had this sureness about himself.
[40:44]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I was quite entranced by him.
[40:46]
Interviewer
Well, and some of it came true.
[40:47]
Fatima Bhutto
Right.
[40:48]
Interviewer
Like your voice returned.
[40:49]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yeah.
[40:50]
Interviewer
I mean, that. That was so striking to me. Is that literally your voice, which had troubled you and had disappeared on you, and could there possibly be a more powerful metaphor? And then he is at least tangentially responsible for, you know, for your voice returning to you, and yet simultaneously, he's also embarked on a process that's going to rob you of a voice in another way.
[41:19]
Fatima Bhutto
Oh, completely. In fact, I've never actually thought of it that way, but that is what happened. He.
[41:27]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
He does this kind of magic, you know, and he did this not just
[41:32]
Fatima Bhutto
with my voice, but with other things. I used to be incredibly, incredibly panicked about time. You know, if I had a flight, I had to be at the airport three hours before the flight.
[41:43]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
If I was going to meet you
[41:45]
Fatima Bhutto
for a coffee and we agreed to
[41:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
meet at 10, I would be there
[41:48]
Fatima Bhutto
at 9:30, just, you know, ages, Ages before.
[41:53]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Because if I was even five minutes
[41:55]
Fatima Bhutto
close to being on time, I would be just wrecked.
[42:00]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And this man turned around and said
[42:01]
Fatima Bhutto
to me, oh, you've got to stop doing that. And, you know, I'd heard that before,
[42:05]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
obviously, but he said, no, no, you've got to stop doing that. The reason you care so much about
[42:10]
Fatima Bhutto
the time is because you. You couldn't save your father because your father was dying while you were locked inside the house and you couldn't reach him in time to speak to him. And that's why you panic about the time.
[42:21]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And. And he was right. I mean, he was right.
[42:24]
Fatima Bhutto
I would.
[42:24]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I would drive myself into not, you know, to be on time. And if I was late, I felt
[42:30]
Fatima Bhutto
like my system was exploding. So he really did help me in a lot of ways.
[42:37]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But at the same time, he was building a new.
[42:43]
Fatima Bhutto
A new set of boundaries and anxieties. And as confident and sure as he was, he was also very controlling and he was very coercive.
[42:57]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And because I thought at this point
[43:00]
Fatima Bhutto
that he had helped me so much
[43:02]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
and that his help required.
[43:04]
Fatima Bhutto
On a belief, on a lack of
[43:07]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
resistance from my part, I was too
[43:10]
Fatima Bhutto
afraid to upset that I thought I needed him really to be all right.
[43:16]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he also, because he knew very well what my wounds were, he knew how to activate them and he knew
[43:23]
Fatima Bhutto
what to say to remind me of them. And we began a relationship that went on for a very long time. And that was really quite toxic.
[43:35]
Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, it also seems like it was quite secret. He did not want to meet your friends. He did not want. Want you to meet his friends. He wanted to keep things. He asks you at one point, do you want a normal relationship or do you want a special relationship?
[43:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yes. He was quite unusual as well, because at that time in my life, you know, I did feel very wounded. But though I was young, I felt like I had been through a lot
[44:09]
Fatima Bhutto
for the age that I was. I was in my late 20s.
[44:12]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he sort of thought, not really,
[44:15]
Fatima Bhutto
or at least that's what he said, you know, and.
[44:18]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he didn't Seem to want to be a part of, you know, he had his own rules. He was very independent. I was very independent. I traveled all the time.
[44:26]
Fatima Bhutto
I remember counting once and realizing that within a six month period, I'd not spent more than seven days in the same place.
[44:33]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he traveled and, you know, he just. I don't even remember how he explained
[44:39]
Fatima Bhutto
it to me, to be honest.
[44:41]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But it was a slow unraveling, you know, and in the beginning it was not the right time.
[44:49]
Fatima Bhutto
And then later it was the wrong time.
[44:53]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then it was, you know, people are jealous and, you know, we have to protect what's special. And then it was all manner of things.
[45:05]
Interviewer
It was also, you come from a public family. I don't want to be public.
[45:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yeah, it was also, you know, I had done this book. I was talking about people that were still very much in power in Pakistan.
[45:19]
Fatima Bhutto
They remain in power. The people involved in my father's killing never went to jail for it. They were never punished for it or held accountable. They were promoted and promoted and promoted.
[45:30]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And there was a certain amount of
[45:32]
Fatima Bhutto
attention on me and you know, in a way there still is.
[45:34]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he didn't really want any part of that.
[45:37]
Fatima Bhutto
And because I was quite independent myself and, you know, I have my own
[45:44]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
life and I had friends in different places and things to do in the beginning, it sort of suited me. I thought, okay, this is quite spontaneous.
[45:53]
Fatima Bhutto
This is, you know, unusual.
[45:55]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I thought, like many before me, I thought, he'll change, I'll change him,
[46:01]
Fatima Bhutto
you know, and it's a rotten kind of thinking that a lot of us tend to fall into.
[46:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And of course he didn't change.
[46:11]
Fatima Bhutto
I was the one who was very changed by the whole experience, and not in a good way.
[46:16]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
He was incredibly manipulative. He gaslit me constantly. He had an almost sinister patience that he employed.
[46:26]
Fatima Bhutto
He weaponized to teach me lessons, to keep me in place.
[46:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And again, I had fallen prey to
[46:33]
Fatima Bhutto
this line of thinking that I think is so damaging.
[46:36]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I didn't really understand what an abusive relationship was, but I was pretty sure
[46:40]
Fatima Bhutto
that it was physical. I was pretty sure that it happened
[46:43]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
if you were weak.
[46:44]
Fatima Bhutto
And I was absolutely sure that I was a strong, confident, independent woman and such a thing could. Could not happen to me. And I didn't understand that abuse is not in violence necessarily, but abuse is in the total disrespect of your boundaries.
[47:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
It's in the breaking down of any
[47:04]
Fatima Bhutto
place in which you might erect a space in which someone can't intrude on.
[47:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I also thought that if someone
[47:12]
Fatima Bhutto
is going to become coercive and controlling with you, they do it loudly and dramatically.
[47:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I didn't understand that. Actually, it's a quiet process and it really is a menacing process because it begins very softly, very slowly. He had already made me feel that I needed him. I needed his understanding and his help and his insight in order to be okay. And when I did question him, there
[47:41]
Fatima Bhutto
was a reaction, there was a consequence.
[47:44]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So I had to start making choices,
[47:46]
Fatima Bhutto
like, is this worth me saying something about or is he going to get mad? And then if he gets mad, it's going to be a process that lasts three days. Do I want to go through that? No. Okay, I won't say anything.
[47:57]
Interviewer
And there was also this. I think something that this variety of narcissists does so brilliantly is. Creates an exquisite sensitivity to their every flicker of a mood.
[48:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yes. And, you know, I mean, one of the things that really I had to
[48:15]
Fatima Bhutto
understand and recognize, and I hope anyone listening to this will take from me,
[48:20]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
is that a lot of the reason
[48:22]
Fatima Bhutto
I didn't fight back against him is
[48:24]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
because I thought he was special.
[48:25]
Fatima Bhutto
I thought he had something special, that I needed that to feel okay, to feel safe, to feel well.
[48:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But actually, this type of person, emotionally
[48:34]
Fatima Bhutto
abusive person, is not. They're not special. They're generic.
[48:37]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
They are so basic.
[48:39]
Fatima Bhutto
They follow exactly the same pattern wherever in the world you find them, however old they are, whether they're your partner or your boss or your parent or your sibling, they are absolutely identical. And they isolate you, whether that's by keeping something secret or making you share a secret.
[48:58]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
They isolate you. They punish you for reacting.
[49:02]
Fatima Bhutto
They reward you in small enough ways, you know, that you need more of the reward.
[49:09]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And on and on and on.
[49:11]
Fatima Bhutto
I just. I didn't realize it was being done
[49:14]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
to me at the time, but it very much was. And the gaslighting is especially pernicious because if someone lies to you, they've got to do a load of work to
[49:26]
Fatima Bhutto
keep that lie up. You know, they've.
[49:28]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
They've got to constantly have this file
[49:30]
Fatima Bhutto
running in the background of their lie
[49:33]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
and keep you from.
[49:34]
Fatima Bhutto
From accessing it.
[49:36]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
They've got to keep you away from the truth.
[49:37]
Fatima Bhutto
It's really quite onerous on, on, you know, on them. But when someone is gaslighting you, the onus is on you because you're being told you're imagining things, you're being told you're crazy. You're being totally put off balance of,
[49:52]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
of equilibrium, and it's really damaging.
[49:57]
Fatima Bhutto
It's really painful because you no longer
[50:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
have any sense of confidence about your
[50:03]
Fatima Bhutto
own life and your own ideas and your own place in the world.
[50:10]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Fatima has many friends, close friends and a best friend, Allegra. But her relationship with the man is a secret. Four years into her relationship with the man, Fatima adopts a Jack Russell terrier puppy she names Coco. She initially adopts Coco, intending her to be a gift for her younger brother. But two things change that plan. First, Fatima falls madly in love with Coco. And second, conveniently, Coco also falls madly in love with Fatima and doesn't want anything to do with Fatima's brother. And so Koko becomes, in a way, the only witness to her secret relationship. As Fatima writes, she's the only one who knows the full truth about the situation. Because that's how Fatima thinks of this ensnarement. A situation.
[51:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I mean, quite intentionally, I think.
[51:04]
Fatima Bhutto
You know, the relationship was constructed the way it was by the man precisely so that I, I, I would be rendered helpless.
[51:13]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I don't say anything to my friends
[51:15]
Fatima Bhutto
because I understand secrets also as being necessary. You know, I remember those moments of being a child and being told, you can't tell people on the phone where you are. You can't tell people where you're going. You've got to, you've got to keep your own
[51:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
little bubble private and protected. And I, and I am in many
[51:36]
Fatima Bhutto
ways, though it certainly doesn't sound like it, a private and guarded person.
[51:41]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So for a while, I understand his requests, but at the same time, I have to admit that I'm quite sure
[51:51]
Fatima Bhutto
I knew what my friends would have said to me.
[51:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I don't want to hear it
[51:56]
Fatima Bhutto
because of course, and here's where you realize how generic all these things are. They don't know him like I do, and they don't understand him like I do.
[52:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So I don't. I want to at points, but I don't. And I do really think I believe,
[52:14]
Fatima Bhutto
number one, all of his excuses for himself, which he has pretty handy.
[52:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But I, I also think he'll change. I also think I can change him. I can, I can make this person who is often cruel and often cold and often mean. I just think, well, maybe he's been hurt in life too. And, you know, I have to help him. So I don't. And it's really just my dog who
[52:43]
Fatima Bhutto
sees what goes on and who, at
[52:46]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
the same time as I'm in this
[52:48]
Fatima Bhutto
relationship that's very manipulative and very unpleasant.
[52:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
My dog teaches me really about care,
[52:57]
Fatima Bhutto
about what tenderness means.
[52:59]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
What it. What it means to love. I mean, to. To be cruel is a choice. You have to go out of your way.
[53:05]
Fatima Bhutto
To be cruel, you know, to love is natural.
[53:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
It's an instinct.
[53:09]
Fatima Bhutto
It's an instinct to be kind, you
[53:11]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
know, and she reminds me of that
[53:13]
Fatima Bhutto
constantly at this point in my life, when I don't really have any reminders of it at all anywhere else.
[53:20]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I think also part of the reason
[53:21]
Fatima Bhutto
I didn't talk about this to friends is because I was ashamed, is because I knew what was going on, whether I had the right word for it or not. I understood that I was being treated badly, and I was ashamed because I didn't know how to justify why I was putting up with it.
[53:41]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the man was very, very protective
[53:45]
Fatima Bhutto
of his own boundaries and his own
[53:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
privacy and space
[53:50]
Fatima Bhutto
while absolutely disregarding everyone else's.
[53:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And one of the things he would
[53:55]
Fatima Bhutto
like to do is he would want to.
[53:57]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You know, he would wait hours and
[54:00]
Fatima Bhutto
hours and hours before agreeing to go out for dinner. You know, so the normal time to go out for dinner would be six or seven.
[54:06]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he would dilly dally for as long as possible.
[54:08]
Fatima Bhutto
So you were just absolutely at the end of your tether by the time, you know, you reached.
[54:13]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And one of the ways he would do this, which was also, you know, it's a small thing, but I think
[54:20]
Fatima Bhutto
it betrays a certain calculation and disregard for other people, is he would.
[54:24]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
He would meander into stores that he had absolutely no interest in and spend
[54:30]
Fatima Bhutto
hours in them while the person he's with was hungry or had to go to the bathroom or, you know, had an appointment to get to.
[54:40]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And one day we were going to
[54:43]
Fatima Bhutto
dinner, and he wanted to stop in an electronic store, which we happened to pass by. And we go inside, and there's no one in there.
[54:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he finds a singular.
[54:56]
Fatima Bhutto
Like a salesman who is alone in the shop.
[54:59]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he starts to ask him question
[55:01]
Fatima Bhutto
after question after question. You know, how is the machine made? What kind of decibel?
[55:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Who was the inventor of the speaker?
[55:10]
Fatima Bhutto
I mean, he's just going on and on and on.
[55:14]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And at some point, you know, he
[55:16]
Fatima Bhutto
mentions to the salesman that. Who's Egyptian, That I grew up in the Middle east, and, you know, I understand some Arabic.
[55:22]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the salesman talks to me a little bit. And at some point he says to
[55:27]
Fatima Bhutto
the man and I, in English, he says, you know, if you and your wife. He wants to recommend something.
[55:33]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the man looks almost offended at
[55:35]
Fatima Bhutto
this, at this inference and says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. She's her no, she's not my wife.
[55:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the salesman was confused.
[55:44]
Fatima Bhutto
You know, I think he wondered, why would it be like, did he say something wrong?
[55:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So he then says, oh, well, okay,
[55:50]
Fatima Bhutto
your partner, your girlfriend.
[55:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the man now doubles down and says, her?
[55:57]
Fatima Bhutto
No, no, I'm not. I'm not with her.
[56:00]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Do you like her?
[56:00]
Fatima Bhutto
Ask her out.
[56:02]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then walks off. And it was the kind of thing he did, the kind of thing that would stun me, stun the other person, and then pretend it was nothing. If I was to get upset, he
[56:13]
Fatima Bhutto
would say, oh, come on, I was joking. Or, oh, you're so sensitive, you have to make a big deal out of everything.
[56:20]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it was this salesman who. Who turns to me and in Arabic says, is he serious? And I was so shocked and
[56:32]
Fatima Bhutto
so
[56:32]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
thrown off guard that I said to him, I said, no, he's not.
[56:35]
Fatima Bhutto
He's just awful.
[56:37]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the salesman looks hurt. I mean, the salesman really kind of
[56:40]
Fatima Bhutto
ends the conversation with the man, and.
[56:43]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he says to me, I would
[56:45]
Fatima Bhutto
never talk to you that way. You know, I.
[56:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he. And he sort of walks off shaking his head.
[56:50]
Fatima Bhutto
And it's happened often that cab drivers would tell me, Someone on the bus would tell me, someone in the subway, someone walking by on the street would say, what are you doing with this guy?
[57:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it was a pretty good question.
[57:06]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Now it's 2020, and we all know what happened in 2020. Lockdown puts pressure on everything, especially what was already under pressure. Fatima is 38 years old. She plans to ride out the pandemic with her best friend Allegra, and with Coco. The man is elsewhere, elusive and secretive as always. But the age of 38 is a real inflection point for a woman who longs to have children. And Fatima longs to have children. The man has played with her endlessly in this regard, never saying no, never saying yes. She has frozen her eggs, an insurance policy of sorts. And the man is not supportive. She's alone in this longing. And then, in a strange parallel in the animal universe, Coco is about to have some puppies of her own.
[57:59]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I had always wanted a family because mine had been decimated. And I always felt that my father having me really changed his life. It turned it from something that could have been sorrowful and tragic to something
[58:19]
Fatima Bhutto
filled with tenderness and warmth and joy.
[58:22]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I very much wanted the same. And the man, of course, didn't want to have children.
[58:30]
Fatima Bhutto
But instead of just saying that, just kind of made excuses after excuses and
[58:35]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
at the same time pressured me
[58:39]
Fatima Bhutto
to have Coco have puppies. Because he wanted a puppy of Coco's and
[58:46]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
insisted and insisted. And. And again, I think it's.
[58:51]
Fatima Bhutto
It is something to do with boundaries, but.
[58:56]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But it turns out that Coco does get pregnant.
[58:59]
Fatima Bhutto
And just when we have it confirmed, lockdown happens. And I, with my best friend, go to Oxfordshire to stay with another friend of ours, mc, in the countryside.
[59:12]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I was angry.
[59:16]
Fatima Bhutto
I was angry because I think a
[59:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
lot of women my age had been told, you know, to focus on careers, to have. You know, to pursue our careers, to be told. We were told we could. We could have the family and the
[59:29]
Fatima Bhutto
life and all that.
[59:30]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Later. There was time for everything.
[59:32]
Fatima Bhutto
And now here we were in our late 30s, basically cut off from the world where was all this time we were supposed to have. So we all had careers and we'd all worked really hard at what we
[59:44]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
wanted to do in life at the
[59:45]
Fatima Bhutto
exclusion of things like children and settling down. And now we're stuck inside for God knows how long. So I was annoyed. I was annoyed.
[59:54]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I had frozen my eggs again. Gaslit, really, by the man who kept saying to me, when I would say
[60:01]
Fatima Bhutto
that I wanted to have children, he
[60:03]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
would turn around and say things like, well, how do you know you can. Maybe you're infertile, why don't you go check?
[60:10]
Fatima Bhutto
And I would go and check, and the doctors would say, yeah, you're fine. You can have kids.
[60:15]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then he would say, okay, well,
[60:16]
Fatima Bhutto
if you can have kids, just wait. Why are you bothering me?
[60:20]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Or, you know, if you're so anxious
[60:22]
Fatima Bhutto
about children, why don't you go freeze your eggs? And then, of course, I would freeze my eggs.
[60:26]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And then he would say, well, you can freeze them again. So this was going on in the background, and Coco has this pregnancy.
[60:36]
Fatima Bhutto
It doesn't look anything like a real pregnancy should, but I don't know anything about dogs and pregnancy or humans and pregnancy at that point.
[60:46]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it's locked down so no one will see us. And I did what we all did.
[60:51]
Fatima Bhutto
You know, I read the books. I. I spoke to friends who'd had litters, and I was as prepared as I could be. And the night that Coco goes into labor, something immediately goes very wrong. And she. She doesn't have a puppy. She basically has just one pup that is deformed. I mean, it's just skeleton. It's. It's not. It's really dead before, you know, it's even born. And we go back and forth from the vet to the house to the vet to the house, and I have to do a lot of it myself again, because of COVID But Coco comes
[61:35]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
out, and it was so hard to see her in that sort of a situation. But I was assured by everyone, vets,
[61:43]
Fatima Bhutto
friends, you know, acquaintances, that dogs don't feel the way we do, that they don't. They don't remember things the way we do.
[61:53]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But all I could see was a
[61:55]
Fatima Bhutto
dog who was grieving, who had everything in her body telling her she was a mother, but she had no baby.
[62:03]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I had to care for Coco
[62:05]
Fatima Bhutto
over that period after. After this happened.
[62:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I was incredibly moved by her reaction. She wouldn't leave me. She slept with me.
[62:17]
Fatima Bhutto
She wouldn't eat anything unless I ate it first.
[62:20]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
She wouldn't let anyone come into the
[62:21]
Fatima Bhutto
room where we were.
[62:23]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
She started to sleep on my hand. She started to sleep on my hand. And if someone came into the room,
[62:28]
Fatima Bhutto
she would protect my hand. She would sort of pull it away and sit on it, and she started to lick it, to clean it. And I realized she was hormonally a
[62:39]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
mother and she didn't have a pup,
[62:42]
Fatima Bhutto
so she was turning my hand into her pup. You know, dogs. Dogs as puppies, they can't. They can't do anything for the first two weeks. They can't see, they can't hear, they can't really walk very. You know, they sort of squirm.
[62:53]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And they can't even expel waste.
[62:55]
Fatima Bhutto
Their mother has to expel the waste, simulate the waste production for them. And that's what Coco was doing when she was licking my hand. And.
[63:04]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the vet on the phone said
[63:05]
Fatima Bhutto
to me, you've got to take your hand away because she'll never recover. She's just going to keep thinking she has a baby.
[63:12]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he said to me, whatever you
[63:13]
Fatima Bhutto
do, don't get her a toy.
[63:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Obviously, I got her a toy because I couldn't. I just couldn't bear taking away my
[63:21]
Fatima Bhutto
hand and then leaving her with nothing. So I got her this long snake that she carried around. It was like 17 times bigger than her.
[63:28]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And she carried it around and would
[63:30]
Fatima Bhutto
carry it upstairs and downstairs, you know,
[63:32]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
until she felt okay.
[63:33]
Fatima Bhutto
And then, you know, she put the snake down one day and just never picked it up again.
[63:38]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But it. It was a really extraordinary experience because
[63:42]
Fatima Bhutto
animals are not that different from us, I don't think. I really don't think.
[63:46]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And they feel exactly what we do because they're capable of such enormous tenderness and love.
[63:55]
Fatima Bhutto
Why wouldn't they feel pain in the same way that we do?
[63:59]
Interviewer
And so you end up really, with this just this crash course In, I mean, so many things. In maternal grief, in unconditional love, in caring for being the center of Coco's universe while this is happening. And then it's the summer and Coco's recovered, and you take her and you go to visit the man. It's the first time you're seeing him since the pandemic started and you decide you're gonna meet in Florence. And this really does feel like what happens there is the beginning of the end.
[64:43]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yeah.
[64:44]
Interviewer
Yeah.
[64:45]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
It's really the first time that I see his cruelty that I've experienced so
[64:52]
Fatima Bhutto
often turned towards someone else.
[64:56]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it's hideous to see.
[64:59]
Fatima Bhutto
It's hideous.
[65:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You know, in the same way that
[65:02]
Fatima Bhutto
I don't think controlling relationships begin with a loud, dramatic clap. I'm not sure they end with a
[65:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
loud, dramatic clap, but seeing him be
[65:12]
Fatima Bhutto
cruel to my dog, it really took the mask off for me. I wish I could say I left immediately, though. I mean, it was my instinct to. I obviously wanted to, but I wasn't able to.
[65:26]
Interviewer
Things are never that neat and tidy, right?
[65:29]
Fatima Bhutto
Yeah.
[65:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
No, no, never. But it is an eye opener for
[65:35]
Fatima Bhutto
me because I lose respect for him.
[65:40]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
His behavior in this moment is indeed anything but respectable. It's deplorable. He baits the dog, makes pincers with his fingers, snapping at her, toying with her very nature. And because she is a dog, she snaps back at him. At one point, he hits Coco. Characteristically, he doesn't own up to this bad behavior. He never did and never does and never will.
[66:09]
Fatima Bhutto
Someone used to imposing their way on others is not going to be accountable.
[66:13]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Or let's put it this way, what the man told me was true.
[66:18]
Fatima Bhutto
You. You can make your mind forget anything.
[66:21]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And in fact, he was exactly the
[66:23]
Fatima Bhutto
person who taught me how to do that.
[66:25]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And he made sure that I used that really often with him. One thing that I remember, I always
[66:33]
Fatima Bhutto
used to have a 50 pound note in my.
[66:36]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
In my wallet because I traveled so
[66:38]
Fatima Bhutto
much, because I was, you know, catching
[66:41]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
planes and trains and ending up in cities that I didn't know or where
[66:45]
Fatima Bhutto
I didn't speak the language.
[66:47]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I always had this 50 pound
[66:50]
Fatima Bhutto
note just in case, you know, my. I lose my wallet or I lose my credit card or my ATM card doesn't work. At least I've got enough money to get myself wherever, to the airport, to the train station, to the hotel. And it's also because I. I am an anxious person. And, you know, I've dealt with anxious anxiety of my life.
[67:11]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And the man, at every chance he could get.
[67:14]
Fatima Bhutto
Would take that note from me. Why?
[67:18]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You know, I want to have an ice cream.
[67:21]
Fatima Bhutto
Well, you buy it.
[67:23]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Oh, well, I don't have cash.
[67:24]
Fatima Bhutto
I don't want to put it on a card. Why not? Well, it's just an ice cream. Come on, what's the big deal? What's the big deal?
[67:31]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And actually, it was a big deal because that was a small talisman for me. It made me feel safe.
[67:36]
Fatima Bhutto
It made me feel like, you know,
[67:39]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
in an emergency, I'm okay. And it was a matter of principle
[67:44]
Fatima Bhutto
for him to take it away from
[67:45]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
me to make me uncomfortable. And I think that kind of person essentially takes from animals exactly what they
[67:55]
Fatima Bhutto
give so freely, which is love, you know, attention, care, compassion. But do they walk them? No. You know, do they go to the vet with them at three in the morning when they're throwing up? No.
[68:06]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And all this started to become incredibly clear to me. I just. I stopped doing that thing he. He convinced me to do when he
[68:15]
Fatima Bhutto
met me, which was to believe him.
[68:16]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I just no longer believed him after that. When you don't believe someone, there's quite
[68:23]
Fatima Bhutto
little you'll tolerate from them.
[68:25]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it started to make me sad.
[68:26]
Fatima Bhutto
See, all the other behavior unmasked, and he fell apart.
[68:31]
Interviewer
That's such a full circle, what you're describing, because in the beginning, it was all about believing him. There were very powerfully good things about believing him that were helpful to you. But in the end, sort of when the scales fell from your eyes, it completely unmasks someone like that.
[68:50]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
Yeah, it does.
[68:51]
Fatima Bhutto
And I think.
[68:52]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I really do think that part of the reason women find themselves, I mean,
[68:56]
Fatima Bhutto
not just women, everyone, but. But certainly a lot of women find
[69:00]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
themselves in these kind of situations is because the discourse we're given really is damaging to us. You know, it's that strong women don't
[69:09]
Fatima Bhutto
end up in these situations. But it's also. Don't make a scene.
[69:13]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You know, be polite.
[69:14]
Fatima Bhutto
Don't make a big deal out of something.
[69:17]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it's. It's really. It's the opposite. Someone makes you feel uncomfortable, you should
[69:22]
Fatima Bhutto
absolutely make a rioting scene. And, you know, if you're wrong, you can apologize later.
[69:29]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But you.
[69:30]
Fatima Bhutto
You should make the biggest scene possible. If you don't feel good or you feel uncomfortable or you feel someone is invading your. Your boundaries or your space.
[69:38]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And that's the thing we should tell each other.
[69:40]
Fatima Bhutto
And, And I.
[69:41]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
You know, at the end of the day, I. I never wanted to talk
[69:44]
Fatima Bhutto
about this kind of thing, but I.
[69:46]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
But I did, and I. And I wrote about it because I wish I had come across something like
[69:51]
Fatima Bhutto
this when I was in this relationship because it.
[69:55]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
It would have snapped me out of
[69:58]
Fatima Bhutto
the delusions I had so willingly accepted and created.
[70:03]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
If I had read a book about
[70:06]
Fatima Bhutto
this abusive sort of nature, it would
[70:10]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
have forced me to ask uncomfortable questions
[70:13]
Fatima Bhutto
of myself because it would not have been with the judgment of a friend or a stranger or a.
[70:20]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
It would have been a safe space
[70:21]
Fatima Bhutto
in which to quietly investigate something.
[70:25]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I just.
[70:26]
Fatima Bhutto
Yeah, I didn't come across anything like that.
[70:33]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Fatima finally cuts all ties with the man. Praise the Lord. And Koko eventually has a litter of five healthy puppies. Fatima can't keep them all as much as she'd like to. She keeps two and has a pack of her own. Now Fatima, Coco and Coco's pups, Carlo and Tokio. She's 41, and she's reached a point of thinking, maybe this is okay. Maybe I won't bring children into the world. Maybe this is my story. But then one night, she's out to dinner with Allegra and she meets an American man. And the rest, as they say, is history.
[71:16]
Fatima Bhutto
I end the relationship. Coco has another litter of puppies that goes. Everything goes absolutely wonderfully. I didn't want her to have puppies because I was so horrified by the bad pregnancy that I just thought, I want to avoid this at all costs. And, you know, Murphy's Law was that. The day I visited the vet to talk about having her spayed, she met a very handsome Jack Russell in the park, and they have these puppies, and I acted as though I'd had the puppies. You know, I was so excited by it, and I looked after them. I'm basically a vet at this point.
[71:50]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I end the relationship. And I have been so lucky.
[71:54]
Fatima Bhutto
I mean, I've really, truly been so lucky in my life with the friends that I have.
[72:01]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I've had so much love and support
[72:03]
Fatima Bhutto
that it's hard not to believe in God because I always had it when I needed it.
[72:08]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And so at some point I thought, well, maybe I'll just have another dog. You know, I'd only wanted to keep
[72:15]
Fatima Bhutto
one of Coco's puppies, but of course the man said he wanted one, which I now think he did, only not to take the dog just so I'd be saddled with three Jack Russells.
[72:25]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I mean, if you. If, you know, Jack Russell's, you know,
[72:28]
Fatima Bhutto
one Jack Russell is equivalent of, like three normal dogs, you know, so it's like having. Yeah, it's like having 400 dogs to have three Jack Russells. They are absolutely without any kind of chill or calm. They just go 24 hours a day.
[72:42]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
So I have these three barking, yapping, jumping Jack Russells.
[72:48]
Fatima Bhutto
And.
[72:49]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I really did think, I thought,
[72:50]
Fatima Bhutto
okay, well, I'll just adopt another dog and then another dog and then I'll just look after the dog.
[72:56]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And I was with my best friend Allegra having dinner, and I was precisely
[73:01]
Fatima Bhutto
showing her the next dog that I was planning on saving from some very sad story when the man who I would marry walked into the restaurant and sat behind us. I really didn't want to go out that night. And Allegra sort of dragged me and
[73:19]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
I'm so glad that she did.
[73:21]
Fatima Bhutto
And I make Graham thank her all the time because we wouldn't have met
[73:25]
Interviewer
if it weren't for her.
[73:27]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And we met, he was traveling, he
[73:32]
Fatima Bhutto
went back to the States and, you
[73:35]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
know, I really didn't want to be
[73:37]
Fatima Bhutto
in another long distance. You live far away, you don't live in the same place kind of relationship.
[73:43]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And neither did he.
[73:45]
Fatima Bhutto
And we got married and quite soon after, actually.
[73:51]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And we have two little boys and
[73:55]
Fatima Bhutto
we have the three dogs. And Graham lives in the perpetual fear that we will have a fourth dog. And I think he's right to live in that fear.
[74:07]
Fatima Bhutto (Narrating her story)
And it is a house filled with
[74:09]
Fatima Bhutto
noise and chaos and a lot, a lot of joy.
[74:27]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-888-SECRET-0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram annnyriter. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
[74:54]
Interviewer
check out my memoir, Inheritance.
[75:19]
Chase Sapphire Business Advertiser
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[75:56]
Jacob Goldstein (Odoo Advertiser)
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[76:41]
Podcast Announcer
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[77:12]
Kalpen (Podcast Host)
Hey everyone, it's Kalpen. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
[77:41]
Podcast Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast.
[77:44]
Fatima Bhutto
Guaranteed Human.