The bearded young man bounded out of the Karachi stock exchange, his eyes wide. It was a week since Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, turning Karachi into a war zone, and Jahangir Arshad was in no mood to hang around.

“We’re up 5 per cent,” the 31-year-old trader told The Times. “I can’t talk now. Everybody’s buying.” He hared across the packed courtyard, as traders and brokers talked shop in the winter sunshine. The street was jammed with cars, buses, trucks and motorcycles. In the distance, the cranes of the container port nodded. Karachi was back to normal.

A week ago such scenes seemed unimaginable as Ms Bhutto’s death unleashed violence across her province of Sindh – and especially Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital and largest city. More than 44 people were killed around the country. Mobs burnt shops, banks, cars, trains. Soldiers patrolled the streets, ordered to shoot on sight.

Pundits predicted civil war or the disintegration of Pakistan. Even the most optimistic expected days of rioting.

Q&A: the murder of Benazir Bhutto

Times South Asia Correspondent asks who had most to gain from killing the Pakistan People's Party leader

Multimedia

• Video: Bhutto assassinated

• Bhutto: the background, legacy and life

• Pictures: death of Benazir Bhutto

BACKGROUND

• Pakistan in chaos as Benazir Bhutto assassinated

• Who killed Benazir Bhutto? Main suspects

• Obituary: Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007

• Can democracy survive Bhutto killing?

Yet the country, like the stock market, has rebounded from what seemed a fatal blow, showing its exhaustive experience of political violence – and its invisible cultural and commercial bonds. The stock market, which lost 10 per cent after Ms Bhutto’s death, closed up 4.82 per cent yesterday.

“We’re not this isolated banana republic that’s about to let off a nuclear bomb,” said Adnan Afridi, 37, the managing director of the stock exchange. “Historically, we’ve seen this country has the ability to bounce back from these challenges, because for most people, politics has become decoupled from day-to-day life. Who’d have thought an event like this could happen and that life could go on?”

He admits that it is his job to “sell Pakistan”. But he also admits that he often regretted his decision to return to Karachi ten years ago after a decade in the US where he studied at Harvard and worked as a corporate lawyer. His first regrets came in 1998, when Pakistan and India carried out tit-for-tat nuclear tests. The last were on Thursday, as he bunkered down at home with his wife and two daughters. They did not go out for four days.

“People might think this is no way to live, but we’re used to this here.”

Karachi has been riven by sectarian tension ever since Partition triggered a huge influx of immigrants from India. In the 1980s and 1990s, 20,000 people were killed after another wave of people and weapons from Afghanistan.

This year alone 40 people were killed in Karachi in May in clashes between pro-government and opposition activists. Another 140 people were killed in October in a suicide bomb attack on Ms Bhutto’s motorcade when she returned from exile.

The death of Ms Bhutto – an ethnic Sindhi – threatened to unleash more sectarian bloodshed and a simmering separatist movement as many Sindhis blamed the Punjabis who dominate the Government and the army.

Those feelings appear to have eased since Bilawal Zardari, Ms Bhutto’s son, was appointed chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). “Like all chairmen of the PPP, I stand for the federation,” Mr Zardari pointedly began his acceptance speech.

What really seems to bind Pakistan together is the economy, which has been growing at 7 per cent anually in the past five years, fostering a middle class put at 20-30 million people.

The Government estimates that more than £1 billion of damage was done in the recent riots. The railways remain paralysed with 63 railway stations and 29 locomotives destroyed. Paramilitary police still patrol cities. Some economists forecast a downturn in the foreign investment behind the recent economic boom.

But for the moment, at least, most of the country’s 165 million people seem to have returned to the business of trying to make money.

Nazeer Khan, who works in a tiny electronics shop, says that his wife has urged him to move to the US to join his father and his brother: “I’ve thought about going. But despite everything, business is good here. It’s just the politicians who make problems.”

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