In eastern religions the 40th day has a special significance in the human soul's journey to its eternal abode. Millions in Pakistan mourn the passing away of Benazir Bhutto in tearful ceremonies commemorating this milestone of the mystery of life and death.
During the past six weeks most of her countrymen have shown little capacity for any collective emotion other than the torment of her loss. It seems to have become a catharsis that has somehow lost an ending, a closure, a completion.
"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death", said the psalmist, "I will fear no evil for thou art with me."
Many people testify that Bhutto had a premonition of death and that as she planned to end her exile, the intimations of mortality grew stronger and she responded without agitation or rancour.
They found her increasingly mellower, tolerant and forgiving. Unknown to the milling crowds that hung on the undiminished power of her rhetoric she was obviously engaged in a secret dialogue with "Death" that she knew lays his icy hands on kings and makes sceptre, crown, scythe and spade equal in dust.
When I saw the facsimile version of her public testament which is an epistle to her party, I found the sheer tranquillity of her prose unnerving. I worked with her both the times she was the prime minister.
She could in all situations take her pen out and write an aide memoir after an important meeting or a note of instructions for us without scratching out a single word. An uncanny fluency knit her thought and expression together.
For me she did it in an outdoor meeting in the interior of Sind when the mercury stood at 50 C as well as during a flight to Amman that bobbed high and low in unexpected air turbulence.
But how did she maintain this repose when she sat down in Dubai on October 16 to contemplate her own death and write her long will? We do not know what the part dealing with her private affairs looks like but the message to the party does not have a single nervous erasure, a single faltering moment.
There is no personal posturing and no great claims about what she was able to achieve. Instead she wrote a tribute to those who stood by her through two military dictatorships. Without any doubt the fluency of the document came from what the mind had quietly concentrated on perhaps for weeks.
Benazir Bhutto's father said that Himalayas would weep for him. She filtered out of her text even a fleeting evanescence of her own iconic existence. It is a testament only about the party and the people.
The political party she inherited from her father had never been free of internal dialectical tensions. Mediating these ideological differences was often made difficult by issues between those who believed that it had a mission and those who got on to and off from the bandwagon as crass opportunism dictated.
The party's strength and weakness alike lay in its great dependence on her. She was obviously concerned about the perils of what she calls "this interim period"- the period following a death foretold - and asked her followers to let her husband, Asif Ali Zardari lead "until you and he decided what is best".
This is what has understandably attracted the spotlight. But the heart of this testament lies in Benazir Bhutto returning to an existentialist recapitulation of the party's pristine mission.
She had made compromises of necessity and expediency and many of us had argued with her about their cost. Her tolerance of such disagreements was a rare phenomenon in Pakistan's culture of power.
On one occasion I delayed implementing one of her orders for eight weeks because an immediate implementation could have hurt Pakistan's standing in the non-aligned world. She made it a point to convey her understanding and appreciation of our independent judgement in the foreign office.
Father's mission
It seems that it was the loss of that ambiance of democracy and the supremacy of the people's interest in Pakistan that came to inform her will. She described her father's mission as a federal, democratic and egalitarian Pakistan.
She said she feared for the future of Pakistan and urged her party to continue the fight against extremism, dictatorship, poverty and ignorance. The party's manifesto, she reiterated, calls for serving the downtrodden, discriminated and oppressed people of Pakistan".
Could it be that as she was about to leave for the treacherous waters of Pakistani politics, her innermost thoughts returned to the blurred beginnings of her party? The party had failed to realise those foundational objectives and she wanted it to go back to them.
Benazir Bhutto did not have to die for it. In a day or so the people of Pakistan, as indeed, the entire world would read in her last book why she took the fatal risk of homecoming. Her quest for power will be seen to have a wider context than the wretched of the earth in her own land.
The book will argue that she never ceased to be the "Daughter of the East" and that in more recent years the east meant the troubled world of Islam. Her approach to the predicament of the Muslim world will not find universal acceptance but it would be recognised that she considered the cause of finding a way out of it worth dying for.
Death stalked her from the moment she set her foot on the sacred soil of her motherland but she did not flinch even for a moment.
The will she wrote has a staggering simplicity and, is therefore, a formidable task for her party. Those who continue to walk barefoot to her grave, day in and day out, will hold the party to this awesome mission.
Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former ambassador and foreign secretary of Pakistan.
