The Bhutto Legacy.(Benazir Bhutto)

A charismatic and controversial force in Pakistani politics, Benazir Bhutto staged an ill-fated comeback that ended in her assassination. What, asks Janine di Giovanni, does she leave behind?

Benazir Bhutto was sixteen years old in 1969, a tall and precocious teenager nicknamed Pinkie by her family and on her way to Harvard's Radcliffe College, when her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the future president and prime minister of the country, brought her to the ground in which she would be buried nearly four decades later.

As they stood near the graves of her forefathers, he told the young girl that one day, no matter how far she traveled, she would return to Pakistani soil.

"You are going far away to America," he said in a scene she described in her autobiography, Daughter of the East. "You will see many things that amaze you. But remember . . . your place is here. Your roots are here. The dust and mud and heat of Larkana are in your bones. And it is here that you will be buried."

In 1977, Zulfikar was overthrown in a coup; two years later, he was brutally hanged by the military regime of General Zia ul-Haq, an act that traumatized Benazir as she languished in a nearby prison cell with her mother. His body was brought back to the family tomb in Sindh province, as later were those of her two brothers, each of whom died prematurely. Benazir always knew she would return here, to her own village, to her own people, in death. It was only a matter of when.

After her assassination, in a combined suicide bombing and bullet attack on December 27, her body made the long voyage south from Islamabad by helicopter and ambulance to the Taj Mahal--like tomb, a large and elaborate white marble structure that rises out of the dust of her family's ancestral village, Garhi Khuda Baksh, near the town of Larkana. She was laid next to her father, across from the graves of her two brothers, and the red-brown earth scattered on the mound was covered with rose petals. Her party's flag of red, black, and green was placed on top.

Retracing Bhutto's final journey, I make my way in early January to Garhi Khuda Baksh, which is largely composed--in stark contrast to the opulence of the Bhutto family tomb--of mud-brick buildings. In Larkana many small businesses had been damaged in the violent riots that raged across Pakistan for three days at the news of Bhutto's murder. In the two weeks since, thousands of mourners have filed past her grave, tramping through the mud-lined streets where camels wander and water buffalo graze in guava groves and among the baid-mushk trees.