Khuda-hafiz, Benazir

There is a photograph of me taken in the summer of 1990, my first full summer in Pakistan. I'm 9, a blonde, skin-and-bones girl, standing erect with a big smile, my two big front teeth gleaming. I'm wearing my mother's red-framed sunglasses and a pink dupatta wrapped around my head. I'm dressed up as Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's prime minister at the time.

Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister of a Muslim country in 1988, a year before my family moved to Pakistan. She seemed a breath of fresh air in the political spheres of Pakistan, if only for being a woman, and quite charismatic at that. She was prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, and was going to lead her Pakistan People's Party in the elections of January 2008. She spent years in prison in solitary confinement and in exile. The footage of her stepping down from the airplane to her homecountry after a 9-year absence shows a more human side to her as she wipes tears from her face, overcome by emotion.

When the news announced her death yesterday, it wasn't so much a feeling of disbelief and shock that overpowered me but a sick feeling in my stomach of yet another disappointment, another violent act to continue the cancerous legacy of Pakistani politics. "The unrest", an overused expression in the English-speaking media that I have grown to strongly dislike, has continued to grow in that weary artificial nation since the day a group of Oxford-educated gentlemen - who had never set foot in their colonial relic - forced a border halfway down the Indian subcontinent and created The Land of the Pure.

Ah, Pakistan. You break your people's hearts. What will become of you?