A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  Mec likes Bushi to dress the way Qandeel did. He has even bought her the sunglasses she had. Sometimes he creates little skits for her videos, just like the ones Qandeel became known for. In one Mec sits next to Bushi and eats voraciously from a plate of food.

  “Sirrrrrrr,” she trills. “Sir, how did you like my food?”

  The camera pans to Mec giving a thumbs up.

  “That’s it?” She pouts.

  Mec flashes a peace sign.

  She giggles, one hand with its long red lacquered nails covering her mouth. “Hmm! So delicious!”

  In another Bushi sings the latest Coke jingle. Someone hands her a glass of water. She purses her lips and pushes the glass away. She wants a Coke, not plain old water.

  The videos have hundreds of likes. “So innocent.” “Nice movement of beautiful model.” “When I see Bushi’s videos, I remember Qandeel.”

  Mec’s girls are less kind. “Prostitute.” “You know she’s been married two times?” They say she’s managed to make enough money to buy her own home. “You know how much money she spent doing it up?”

  If Bushi knows that the girls talk about her this way, she doesn’t seem to care. She has been in the industry for three years and is now finally getting some attention. A video of her cooking skills racked up 2,500 likes on Facebook alone, Mec claims. “You know how many offers we got just based on that video?”

  The comparison to Qandeel thrills Bushi. “I love it,” she says. “Love,” she repeats in a breathy voice. “She was so successful, but then…” She clicks her tongue and shakes her head mournfully. Bushi tends to behave like she is always being filmed.

  But as much as she dresses and behaves like Qandeel, Bushi cannot come close to what Qandeel meant to Mec. None of these girls can. “Qandeel used to sleep at my side whenever she was here in Islamabad,” Mec says. “I wouldn’t even turn in my sleep. Totally still. I didn’t want her to be disturbed. I didn’t want her to wake. And I never wanted her to think any wrong things while we lay together. No funny business.”

  Qandeel shared an apartment in Islamabad with her sister Shehnaz, who had moved to the capital from Shah Sadar Din and found work at a beauty parlour. The apartment complex is small, with the sand-coloured buildings huddled close together. There is a small garden in the centre, the grass patchy and yellowing. The paint has crumbled off the walls in swathes. Empty plots ring the complex, and in the winter a chilling wind whistles through the stairwells. There is a high school and a Montessori nursery further down the road and a small market just a few minutes’ walk away, with shops selling auto parts. Mec says he was the only one who could convince Qandeel to leave this apartment, to meet people. “She wouldn’t even go to the market,” he remembers.

  Qandeel was content staying in her room for days. She liked to be alone, Mec explains. Years later, she visited the city for work and stayed at a hotel. Mec stayed with her but needed to go home to pick something up. Lock the door from the outside, Qandeel told him. I’m not going anywhere.

  He had just reached his house when he received a frantic call from her. Someone was trying to get in. “They’re knocking on the door!” he remembers her screaming. “Someone is trying to come in. Come back immediately!” She refused to hang up until he promised he would call the hotel’s front desk. It was just the cleaners.

  In her room she would write in her diary, watch videos or read things online and message Mec. She would ask him questions about the people she read about or saw on the news or in the videos. “Why are people talking about that person?” she would ask. “She didn’t have a single friend, no friend, nobody,” Mec insists. “She trusted me the most.”

  Mec likes to hold his phone out to anyone who asks him about Qandeel and scroll past hundreds, if not thousands, of messages from her. He affectionately called her Sonu. He strokes the screen. There are photographs of clothes and shoes laid out on a bed. “Which dress shall I wear?” the message reads.

  His finger swipes down.

  There is chatter about a possible date, an ex.

  Swipe.

  Snatches of songs, recorded late at night when she could not sleep.

  Swipe.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day!” Small red hearts, a photograph of a rose.

  “She spent three Valentines with me,” he says. “She gave me a perfume.”

  Swipe.

  They talked about her family and her marriage, he confirms. He knew about it all. It didn’t mean much though. “I have two girls who have just joined me after fighting with their families,” Mec says. “I know that once they are on TV, once the relatives can call up everyone they know and say, ‘Our girl has come on television, you should definitely watch her show,’ then everything will be fine. That’s how it is. And once the paisa [money] starts coming in, everyone is happy. Then they can’t wait to meet the girl again.”

  That’s how it was with Qandeel, he says. They agreed not to tell anyone else about her husband and son. “We didn’t hide anything,” he bristles, “we just didn’t talk about it. I know what these girls go through. I know what their lives are like. Now if a girl is going to sit in front of you and talk about her sick mother or her father who has cancer, or if she tells you, ‘I go home and shoot up,’ you’ll say, keep her away from me.”

  With him, the girls get a chance to get out of their homes, to see what life could be like, he says. “People only see what’s on the screen, right? What is it that they say about Qandeel? ‘Bold thi, brave thi.’ That’s what they saw. She scared easily. You show me one girl here who was born with a golden spoon in her mouth. They are all struggling. It may be all glamour here, it may look good on screen, but these girls go home and eat the same daal roti as the rest of us.”

  * * *

  —

  I meet Khushi again, two months after she organized that fashion show, on 17 January 2017. Once again it’s a day of new beginnings for her. “I’m done with modelling,” she says. “I got out after that show.” She has had to start again once more. She has a new job now at an up-market gym and is trying to become a personal trainer. It’ll take her two or three months, but she’s started chatting with women who visit the gym in the hope that they’ll hire her once she’s certified. Her friend, another model, makes 40,000 rupees a month teaching these women yoga. Khushi has heard of one trainer who made 300,000 rupees in a month.

  When Khushi started modelling, she only told her mother and one brother. Her father believed the money she sent them every month came from a job at some company like the real-estate business she used to work for when she first came to Islamabad. Her mother agreed to stay quiet, but made her promise three things. “Don’t stay the night with some man, don’t do drugs or drink. You can die, you can starve, not have anything to send back home, but do not sleep with a man for money,” Gulshan told her daughter. “The day you do that for money, I’m dead to you. If you send me money that a man has given you to stay the night with him, that money is haram for me.” It had been hard for Khushi to keep these promises and still make enough money to send home every month.

  The show that day had gone well, but Khushi had barely managed to scrape together enough money to make it happen. When she called one of her sponsors for the 50,000 rupees he had promised her, he told her she could have it but at a price. “Come get your cash,” he said. “But that little friend of yours, what’s her name? Sunny? You leave her here.”

  Khushi knew this would happen at some point. But she also knew that once she started selling her models, she would be no different to other women who had tried and failed to make a career of organizing shows in Islamabad. “They got greedy,” Khushi says. “They would take two or three girls with them when they would meet any sponsor. Bold si dressing karo [dress sexy], they used to tell the girls. Wear tights. Leave with your money, without the girl, that’s how it is done.” These organizers would sell their girls, put on
third-rate shows and pocket the rest of the money. “Their reputations are in the dirt now and no one will give them a single rupee.” Anyway, Sunny found the amount offered laughable.

  Khushi has not heard from Mec for more than a month now. “Mec isn’t giving his models more than 3,000 rupees per show,” she tells me. “Maybe you can pay your phone bill with 3,000, but there’s not much else you can do.” The last time they spoke, Mec told Khushi he had a show lined up for her to walk in. Each model would be paid 12,000 rupees by the organizers. Of that, Mec would give each girl 4,000. It was generous by his standards.

  “I refused to do the show,” ’ Khushi says. “Maybe that’s why he isn’t talking to me.” Her model friends told her she was a fool. Sunny no longer talks to her. You’re ungrateful, Khushi was told. Most managers don’t give their models a penny. “The show gets you publicity,” they say, pocketing the entire amount the organizers hand over for the girls. ‘What more do you want?’ Others dole out 1,000 or 1,500 rupees to each girl. At least Mec doesn’t do that, his girls say.

  Of course, there are other ways to make money. It starts at the shows. A model might catch the eye of someone sitting in the front row. The girl can be found on Facebook, or the show’s organizer can be pressed for her phone number. Sometimes there is a selection process. A show organizer can get in touch with a manager like Mec to request photos of models to take part in a show and be available “later.” The girls can make 7,000 rupees each for the show and 20,000 for the party afterwards at one of the farmhouses on the outskirts of the capital. “Pay parties,” Khushi explains. “If some low-level guy wants you at his party, he can get away with 10,000 or 7,000 rupees per hour. But if you get a high-level ka bunda—a landowner, a businessman—you can get double that.”

  The requirements are easy enough: sit with the man’s friends, laugh at some jokes, a little dancing. “Whether you like it or not, you have to smile, you have to dance, you have to drink,” Khushi says. “One politician worked out a deal with a friend of mine: four hours of partying or attending a wedding, with everything—drugs, drinks—but sex included. That’s charged separately depending on what he feels like after the event.” If the girl meets someone during the event who makes an offer, she’s free to meet him afterwards and the politician does not object.

  At the parties the girls are introduced as “my friend” or “Islamabad’s top model.” The girls network, they flirt. Each person at the party is an opportunity. The host might be called the day after and asked about the pretty girl in the white dress and gold sparkly heels.

  A girl might get lucky at the party and make a khaas friend: that special someone who pays up to 150,000 rupees a month and installs her in an apartment or house. Some girls have several khaas friends and one of these friends might invite the girl to Dubai. “They go there for shoots,” Khushi explains. “The ones in which you only wear a bra and panties.” She grins. “The only time I was called to do one, I said, ‘Give me a crore [10 million rupees] and I’ll be on the first flight.’ They never called back.”

  If Khushi were to break her mother’s third and most important rule, she could do “night spends.” Some girls beg their managers to pick them for these opportunities. “A friend of mine charges 20,000 rupees per hour,” Khushi says. “Gold chains, branded dresses and shoes—you can afford all this with night spends, and even more if you keep yourself well groomed and maintained.” Khushi’s friend is very happy with her rate, but other girls compare theirs to make sure they aren’t asking for too little. Some girls boast about their fees. These girls can pull in big sums, but they end up spending most of it in order to attract new customers. “We have to look perfect,” Khushi explains. “Your hands, feet, hair, make-up, gym membership—all of it adds up.” There is an emphasis on brands, with some girls shunning those who cannot afford designer clothes and shoes. They clearly haven’t made it, they think.

  If Khushi chooses to keep the promises she made her mother, she cannot live in Islamabad as a model. On paper, models here are paid per outfit for even the biggest of shows, and a new model can make 8,000–10,000 rupees per outfit, whereas someone like Khushi, with nearly two years of experience under her belt, can demand 15,000–20,000. A girl starring in a television commercial can get up to 10,000 rupees, and a “brand shoot” for a catalogue or magazine can get a model 25,000 at best. But without a manager, even one who would give her a fraction of these amounts, Khushi isn’t booking any shows or shoots.

  And the offers that are on the table are less than promising. “There’s a really good opportunity here in Lahore,” Khushi, a friend of hers said on the phone just a few days ago. He knew she was looking for work. “Why don’t you come here?”

  “For whom?” Khushi asked. “And how much per dress?”

  “This isn’t a per-dress kind of job,” the man said. “It’s more like per hour.”

  Khushi was confused.

  “Can’t you understand what I’m saying?” he said, annoyed. “Per hour. Two or three clients. Get on the first bus to Lahore and I can get you 90,000 rupees for a few hours, and lakhs [hundreds of thousands] for night spend.”

  “Three men? Together?” It was the first question she could think of.

  “What’s the big deal? I have girls who book five clients for a night. Together.”

  Khushi couldn’t believe he was saying this to her.

  “Here’s the thing, Ali bhai,” she replied. “I have six clients. My six brothers. Two are in Karachi, but don’t worry, I’ll get them to come to Islamabad. You just put your mother and your sister on the first bus here.”

  “Have some shame, Khushi,” Ali snapped and hung up.

  Until two months ago, Khushi had been making 80,000 rupees a month through modelling and small roles in television dramas. She would spend 30,000 of that to buy clothes, food, and medicine for her parents and load it into a car headed to Dhirkot. She had never told her father how she paid for everything, and he had never asked. But three months ago her eldest uncle received some photographs and videos on WhatsApp. The images of Khushi and clips of her runway walks had been pulled from Mec’s Facebook page. “Your daughter dances in clubs,” her uncle shouted at her father. “She works with people who supply girls. They do shows in the day and parties at night.”

  Khushi’s father sent her a single message: “You need to stop all this. Either you keep me in your life or you keep this job of yours. Finish up everything and come home.” She replied, “I’ll come home. But who will pay for your expenses every month?”

  She says she is fine with no longer being a model. She dreams of setting up her own small women-only gym. She’s been receiving marriage proposals. If she were still in the business, she knows that no man would even consider her. “Every man likes to go to parties with a model on his arm, every man likes to flirt with these models, every man likes to chat for hours with these models, take selfies and make it their DP [display picture] on Facebook,” Khushi says. “But no man wants to marry a model. That model could pray five times a day, but if she says to this man, ‘I am going out to get some shopping done,’ or, ‘I need to meet someone,’ he will think, Who is paying for her shopping? Who is she going to meet? If her phone is busy when he calls her at midnight, he will think, She’s ignoring me, she’s degrading me, she’s talking to her lover. The girl could be talking to her mother, her father, her sister. But if her phone is busy, that’s what the man will think. No man will marry that girl.”

  Since I last met Mec, Bushi has all but disappeared from his Facebook page. There is no mention of QB2 any more. I ask Khushi what happened to her. “Who knows? Some models’ boyfriends will force them to leave the field. And some girls realise that there’s only one of three endings to their story: either they marry some rich man jo retire honay waala hai [who is about to retire]. Duniya se retire [Retire from this world]. He dies, but leaves you enough to live off. Or they will marry someone who a
lready has children and a wife. The man will make you his second wife, but will never give you the rights or love that he gives his first wife. The girls might marry these men out of desperation, because they’re tired of trying to make ends meet. And others will never get married and they’ll continue to model and eventually they’ll be told, ‘You’re too old to model.’ ” Khushi shrugs. “I don’t know which ending Bushi got.”

  “HOW I’M LOOKING?”

  It is October 2013. During that month, thousands of hopeful singers flock to auditions for a chance to be on the first ever Pakistan Idol, the local edition of the globally popular competition, American Idol. Three judges have travelled to cities across the country to meet these young men and women. One man has brought dates for them, another flowers, and another sweets from Multan. “My family is a family of paan [betel leaves slaked with a scarlet paste of lime, areca nut and tobacco and folded into triangles] sellers,” one contestant tells the judges. “My father was a paan wallah, I am a paan wallah, and God willing my son will also make paan.” Best paan in the country, he tells them as he fans out the tightly packed emerald-green envelopes on a platter. “Khaike paan Banaras wallah!” he sings the popular Bollywood song at the audition before the three red-toothed judges. A labourer skips work for his audition. He cries when they turn him down. He is paid by the day and has earned nothing that day.