A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  A Woman Like Her

  First published in 2018 in India as The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch by Aleph Book Company Copyright © Sanam Maher 2018

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: February 2020

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Melville House UK

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN 9781612198408

  Ebook ISBN 9781612198415

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949143

  Book design by Marina Drukman, adapted for ebook

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  v5.4

  a

  For my father, Mumtaz, and my mother, Rehana

  “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone. You’re so terrible, with your double standards. You like to watch me, and then you like to say, ‘Why don’t you just die?’ Will you be happy when I die? When I die, there will never be another Qandeel Baloch. For a hundred years, you will not get another Qandeel. You’re going to miss me.”

  —QANDEEL BALOCH

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  THE BALOCH FAMILY

  “PEOPLE SAY THIS IS NO JOB FOR A WOMAN”

  THE MODELS OF ISLAMABAD

  “HOW I’M LOOKING?”

  THE BLUE-EYED CHAIWALA

  “GUYS, WHO WANT TO WATCH MY NEXT NASTY CLIP?”

  THE HELPLINE

  “I’M GOING TO DO SOMETHING THAT GETS EVERYONE WORRIED”

  THE MUFTI

  “I’M TELLING YOU THAT MY LIFE IS IN DANGER”

  THE MEDIA AND THE MURDER

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In February 2016, Issam Ahmed, a journalist from the international news agency Agence France-Presse, interviewed a twenty-five-year-old Pakistani woman for a story on how the country’s youth interacted with social media. Qandeel Baloch, the country’s first social media celebrity, had more than 700,000 followers on Facebook, 40,000 followers on Twitter, and a popular YouTube channel. “Young people can communicate online in relative freedom,” Ahmed reported. He described Baloch as a “Kim Kardashian-type figure.”

  Ahmed was curious about whether Qandeel’s social media posts had any greater intent beyond gaining likes and followers. He thought her photographs and videos were funny, refreshing and cool, yet every time she posted something, she would receive a flood of abusive comments. So why did she keep going? It was gutsy, he thought. What did she want people to take away from what she was doing? When he first spoke with Qandeel, she was suspicious of these questions. It was the first time she had been interviewed for the foreign press, but more importantly, it was the first time that she was hearing that her social media activity had meaning.

  Qandeel had caught Ahmed’s attention after a video she posted on Facebook mocking a presidential “warning” not to celebrate Valentine’s Day—deemed a “Western” holiday—was viewed more than 800,000 times in less than two weeks. In the video, made on a cellphone as she lies in bed, Baloch wears a low-cut red dress, and her full lips are painted scarlet. The sheets match her outfit, and her dress rides up her legs to reveal her thighs. “They can stop to people go out,” she says in broken English, “but they can’t stop to people love.” She says the same thing once more, this time in Urdu, with an exaggerated American accent, as though she is not used to speaking the language. “No matter what they do, they can’t stop people from loving.” She whispers the message again: “logon ko pyaar karnay se nahin rok saktay.” These politicians are “ghatiya” (shameless) and “idiots,” she says with disgust. “At least Imran Khan doesn’t do this. That’s why I always support Imran Khan,” she notes. She adds a personal message for the former cricketer turned prime minister: “Imran, happy Valentine’s Day. I know you’re alone and you don’t have a Valentine. I don’t either. I’m also alone. And I don’t want you to be my Valentine. I just want you to be mine…Forever.”

  The video shows us everything that Pakistanis loved—and loved to hate—about Qandeel: she played the coquette, dished out biting critiques of some of Pakistan’s most holy cows, and gave her heart away to politicians, actors, singers, and cricketers. We snickered at her accent and the way she spoke, and marveled at her gumption. She was the stuff of a hundred memes and the butt of our jokes.

  Qandeel’s daily posts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were a mixed bag—she had a headache, she was bored, she had a song stuck in her head, she would try on a new dress—and seen by thousands. Her posts went up at night, when Qandeel said she couldn’t sleep, and they were forgotten by her viewers by the time morning came.

  Until they became more risqué—by Pakistan’s standards, at least.

  In March 2016, Qandeel uploaded a video that couldn’t be swept aside so easily. She promised a striptease for her viewers if Pakistan’s cricket team won an upcoming match against India. For many of her fans, Qandeel had gone too far. “Before you post these sort of videos think about your religion and your family…this is too much,” one viewer commented. Others were not so polite. “Please shoot her wherever you find her,” wrote one user. “You slut, if you love getting naked why don’t you go sit in a brothel?” asked a female Facebook user. “Have some shame. I don’t know what kind of family you come from, are they so dishonourable?”

  Four months later, she was dead. Her brother Waseem confessed to strangling her in their family home, in what would be described as an “honour killing”—a murder to restore the respect and honour he believed Qandeel’s behaviour online robbed him of. “You know what she was doing on Facebook,” Waseem said when he was arrested and asked why he murdered her. She was twenty-six years old.

  In the days after her death, many Pakistanis expressed happiness that Qandeel had been “punished” for behaving the way that she did. When he was asked about Qandeel’s murder, the leader of one of the largest religio-political groups in Pakistan, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, stated, “We are Muslims and Pakistan has been made in the name of Islam…shamelessness and exhibitionism are a scourge in our society, spread through women like her.” I saw acquaintances in my own social media feeds having arguments about whether what had happened was right or wrong, whether Qandeel “deserved” what had been done to her. On social media, many women who condemned the murder or confessed that they had been fans of Qandeel faced a torrent of abuse—some temporarily shut down their Facebook or Twitter accounts after receiving threats. Offline, many of the men and women I knew condemned Qandeel’s death but then, in the next breath, followed their statements with “…but if you think about it…”

  In the year before Qandeel was murdered, 933 women and men were killed for “honour” in Pakistan, according to the country’s Federal Ministry of Law. Those are only the number of cases that were reported by friends and families—many honour crimes are not reported or covered up as a family can collude to protect one of their own. The victims are often believed to have broken a code that their community or family lives by, and their “crimes” can include anything from chatting with a member of the opposite sex on a cell phone or marrying someone of their own f
ree will rather than having a marriage arranged by their parents.

  The average Pakistani would find it challenging to recognize the faces or remember the names of any of these men and women. Their stories and our dismay at yet another killing fade with the newsprint from our fingers as we read about them.

  But Qandeel was different. Her murder was splashed across the front page of every newspaper. She had appeared in our social media feeds every day, her videos nestled among photographs, status updates, or tweets by our friends and family. Whether we loved, loathed, or ignored her, it was difficult to turn away from the image of her shrouded remains, her hands and feet covered in henna by her mother—a ritual from Shah Sadar Din, the village she was born and then buried in, that declares that this woman left the world with honour. Her family did not close ranks around their son and brother, the murderer. Even in death, Qandeel was exceptional, it seemed.

  When I began working on this book in July 2016, I asked myself how one woman could crystalize such disparate views on how a Pakistani woman can and should behave and what happens when she breaks the rules. I felt that in Qandeel’s story—her journey from a village in Punjab to the metropolitan city of Karachi and nationwide fame—lay the answer. A media frenzy had followed her death, locally and internationally. While she had been alive, Qandeel had largely been ignored by the foreign press. In death, she captivated it. She was written about by every major media outlet, including the New York Times and Vogue. Her obituaries praised her as a woman who “gave voice to a generation of Pakistani women,” and “an incredibly fearless Pakistani women’s rights campaigner who had zero fucks left to give.” It was the opportune moment to discuss Pakistani society, culture, and an apathetic government that didn’t seem to care about the violence committed against women. The men and women in Qandeel’s life were quickly given roles to fit the news cycle’s narrative: a Pakistani woman who had tried to live life on her own terms and was brutally murdered by her own brother; a father who wept on camera as he praised her as better than his sons; a mother who talked fondly about her whispered confidences with her daughter, the way they would share every detail of their lives with each other. A short documentary introduced us to the benevolent friend of the family who was acting as their lawyer and representative. After months of reading and watching everything put out about Qandeel, I thought I knew what my book was going to be about. I thought I knew the whole story.

  But after my first week of interviews with her family and friends, I was bewildered. By the time I met them in November 2016, Qandeel’s parents were weary of the media attention, and their resolve to punish their son was weakening. The lawyer was not so benevolent. After months of interviews and camera crews and photographers and sound bites, most of the people who had known Qandeel were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear about her. Their memories of her were coloured by grief, or by their desire to appear a certain way. In Shah Sadar Din, the village that Qandeel was from, many people were irritated by the media attention. It was “bringing them a bad name.” As interest in Qandeel’s story grew outside Pakistan, it became more common to encounter people who claimed to have been very close to Qandeel and would swear that they had extensive proof of their friendship with her, although phones were always damaged, stolen, or lost, and the messages they contained from Qandeel irretrievably, conveniently gone. I had conflicting accounts of her life and personality, and I now also had my own perceptions, as a consumer of her photos, videos, tweets, songs, and interviews. I felt frustrated by my inability to verify what I was told about Qandeel, but at the same time was fixated by the idea of truly knowing her, of finding some thread that would lead me to unravel her story.

  It took me some time to realise that even if Qandeel had been sitting right in front of me, it would not have made a great difference to my understanding of her. Many of the articles and documentaries about her that have been published and aired since her death have promised to tell us the “real story” of Qandeel Baloch, and I have been asked many times in the course of researching this book about the inside story of her life and death.

  Today, Qandeel cannot speak for herself, and even when she could, she said very little about her life. I realised that it isn’t my job to provide the reader with every dirty little detail of Qandeel’s life, but to ask why they would want them at all. I began to ask other questions. What kind of place created a woman like Qandeel? Why did her story receive such great attention? Why are we still so fascinated by her, and when we watched her videos or saw her latest photograph, what was her image reflecting back to us?

  Qandeel’s every appearance, video, interview, tweet, or Facebook post was in character. She created a story about herself—part truth, and part lies and exaggerations. The story allowed her to be whoever we wanted her to be, and the small fibs are as much a part of the real story of Qandeel—if not more important—as the filtered memories of her friends and family. Qandeel’s words, translated by me but otherwise unchanged, appear as italicized sentences throughout the book. I feel it is necessary to allow her to have a voice as we tell the story of her life and death.

  I knew that this book wouldn’t only be about Qandeel, but also about the kind of place that enabled her to become who she did—a place that ultimately found that it could not tolerate her. The book uses parts of Qandeel’s life in order to open up into a story about Pakistan and young Pakistanis at this particular moment, when, with the touch of a button, we are connected to the world like never before. While we might tread in a global space of ideas and possibilities online, we’re still very much grounded in a society and culture that may not allow for those possibilities. In Qandeel’s story and some of the others in the book, I have sought to reveal what happens when those two worlds collide.

  This text is adapted from a previous edition and includes editorial changes for the American edition. Some names have been changed to protect privacy.

  Sanam Maher

  Karachi, August 2019

  PROLOGUE

  She is eight or nine years old when it happens.

  She is inside a room with baked-mud walls, a mud floor. There is little of beauty in this room. Everything is functional, everything is shared, the overwhelming colour is of the beige walls. But there is a television, and she moves and writhes her body like a woman on this television. She doesn’t have the woman’s curves, but she sways her girlish hips in time with her anyway.

  She longs to be outside. But she has been punished and must stay indoors. “What is wrong with you?” her mother had asked as she plucked her from the scrum of boys she had tried to play with. It is hot in the room. She wishes she could be swimming in the canal outside her home, and thinks of the cool slip of water against her skin, how each stroke of her arms and the furious pumping of her feet stirs a rush of mud. She could barely ever see in that brown gloom. The grit stung her eyes and coated her hair and left her skin with a wash of fine silt. Above, the sky would be cloudless, the sun a gold coin. It is a different world under the water. Just imagine, she thinks, if I could glide to the furthest reaches of the canal, past the fields, swoosh into the greater surge of the river and swim right out of this village. For now, however, the whole world comes to her, streaming into her home through a big bowl-shaped satellite dish in the courtyard.

  She puckers her unpainted mouth. She doesn’t know what the woman on the television yearns for, but she wants whatever it is. She knows the words to all these songs and she loves to sing, mouthing each word, her face twisted with the longing, the pleading. Ten years from now, the songs she will love, the ones she’ll sing into her phone and then play back and share with the whole world (or whoever is out there, listening to her sing at night when she is alone in her home and can’t sleep) will sound the same.

  There’s someone in the doorway. Her older brother is leaning against the frame of the door, watching her dance. She wants him to be proud. To marvel at the way she imitates the woman on th
e screen. He’ll tell her parents and they’ll stroke her hair and tell her she’s more beautiful than any of the women on television. They’ll plead with her to do a little dance for them. No, not just them, but for anyone who comes to the house. They’ll turn on the music and give visitors a glimpse of just how she sashays and sways and knows all the words to every song. Just one, they’ll cajole, just sing one verse for us. Our little nightingale. Let us hear that sweet voice. Do you know how far you’ll go with a voice like that?

  She puts everything she’s got into that dance for her brother. He’s the one who named her when she was born. She loves to watch him as he stands in the courtyard of their home, scowling, scissoring the air with his swift karate kicks. She tries to do it just like him. When he’s not there, she sneaks into his room and tries on his shirts and pants and looks at herself in the mirror, the cuffed hems of the trousers falling fatly around her ankles. He strides towards her and she beams. She looks up at him in anticipation, thinks of how he’ll retell this moment to their parents…and that’s when he knocks the breath right out of her.

  Her cheek smarts, she stumbles to the side, bright motes before her eyes. He raises his warm open palm once more, but she sees it coming this time, feels the gasp of air as his hand rushes towards her and she scrambles away. He is shouting and their mother runs into the room. Will she think of this moment, years later, when she dances in—no, not in, but for—a huddle of men at a wedding, when her fingers brush the rupee notes that these men shower on her? The papers will caress her feet. She will tread on them. The bridegroom, drunk with happiness or actually drunk, will sway. Someone will fire an AK-47 in the air, and the rat-a-tat will startle her just a little. She will be sweating in her tight black jeans and T-shirt. A scarf, fringed with small shiny discs, will feel too snug tied around her waist. Or is that someone’s arm? (Later, she would swear that she hated that sort of thing. She would never do that. She didn’t even know those kinds of dances.)