Aatish Taseer and Lady Gabriella Windsor on the cover of Hello magazine

London, Jan. 5: Salman Taseer’s brutal death today may free his author son, Aatish, from writing about the father with whom he has had, by his own admission, a difficult relationship.

Aatish, now 30, was the product of a brief relationship between Salman Taseer, a visitor from Pakistan, and the Delhi journalist, Tavleen Singh. The couple met in Delhi but when the relationship ended, Aatish was brought up in India and studied later in America.

In recent years, Aatish and his English rose girlfriend, Lady Gabriella Windsor, daughter of the Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, got into the gossip columns of British newspapers but reports they would marry proved to be without foundation.

It was never clear whether Princess Michael had a hand in ending in relationship. It is unlikely she could have stopped the marriage had her daughter really wanted it.

But in 2006, it was officially announced that the couple had split up, shortly after press speculation that the couple were about to get engaged.

Princess Michael categorically denied her daughter was engaged to Aatish. She told a German newspaper that Gabriella, who has since become a freelance journalist, “is so young and is not thinking about getting married. She is going first to Africa to write an article about guenons (monkeys) in the Kalahari. Why should she be sitting around in India with babies? I am very fond of her boyfriend. I would not be against a marriage even though I receive letters from many people who do not appreciate multicultural marriages.”

The spokesman for the princess was authorised to say on the record: “They are not getting married. That’s official. They are very young, they are just enjoying each other’s company.”

He was categorical: “I can confirm that Gabriella and Aatish are no longer together, but the love and respect they share for each other has not diminished.”

Had it not been for Gabriella’s royal connections, the relationship would not have merited much press attention. The couple had been together for three years, which in contemporary Britain often means it is time to find romantic excitement with a new love.

By this time, Aatish was making his name as a journalist and an author. His efforts to establish contact with his father proved problematic. It seems that while Aatish wanted to make sense of his own distinctive identity, the part Muslim, part Hindu son of an Indian mother and an absentee Pakistani father, Salman Taseer, the rising politician, did not take kindly to being written about in public. He probably did not appreciate having his past dug up by a son he did not know and perhaps did not want to know.

While in the west it is all too common for children to write about celebrity parents in an excessively critical way, Pakistani and Indian society appears not to be ready for such public scrutiny. When Aatish wrote about the father-son encounter in the form of a thinly disguised novel, his father was not pleased.

Salman Taseer, who was on his third marriage and had other children, had ambitions and reacted badly, it seems, to his son’s novel, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands. Reviewers have commented that it reflected the anguish of a son who felt betrayed by his father for abandoning his pregnant mother.

Some open minded fathers might have congratulated their sons on the literary merit and honesty of such books. From all account and particularly that of Aatish, Salman Taseer was apparently furious. The son felt rebuffed.

It is the tradition in the west to be painfully honest in the examination of a writer’s own life and the shortcomings of parents. In India and Pakistan it’s not. Aatish wrote in the London Evening Standard about his father’s opposition to his novel. “My first intimation of trouble was when my father, in part the subject of my memoir Stranger to History, re-entered Pakistani politics after a 15-year hiatus. As the book was being typeset, he was sworn in as a caretaker minister in General Musharraf's Cabinet and then, with an ideological flexibility particular to Pakistan, he was Asif Ali Zardari’s governor in Punjab.”

Aatish continued: “As the book was going to print, he threatened to sue my Canadian publisher for referring to his union with my mother as ‘a marriage’. They were never married. They had a liaison soon after my mother, a journalist at the time, interviewed my father about his book on his political mentor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; I was the result. ‘How funny, darling,’ a friend said. ‘Your father considers it libellous to have been married to your mother!’ ”

Lot of women journalists become involved with men they interview. Some in London dine out for years afterwards on the strength of the men who loved them and left them. But perhaps Aatish was being naïve if he thought his father’s political opponents would not throw the book at him.

“I must sadly confess, after my father’s political opponents in Pakistan used the book to rubbish his Islamic credentials, to being an accidental accessory to attempted political parricide,” Aatish recounted. “My father’s reaction was silence, far more menacing than his threats to the Canadians for their delayed attempt at making an honest woman out of my mother.”

Fatima Bhutto has written a gripping book about her father’s assassination. Painful though it will be, Aatish will now in theory also be able to write a moving book, both as an observer and a participant, about today’s shocking drama in Pakistan.