A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  She takes to covering her face as much as possible when she is out in public on her own.

  My name is Qandeel Baloch. I’m not the kind to get scared by you. Do whatever you want.

  One evening, shortly before Ahmed is supposed to go back to Islamabad, he tells Qandeel he wants a tour of Karachi. He came by train and he has never seen the city’s airport, but has heard that it is very big. He has only seen the chief minister’s house, the high court and governor’s house on television. Qandeel promises to show him all of it. “But if we take a cab, it’ll end up costing us a lot,” she says. She doesn’t have a car, but she says she will figure something out.

  When Ahmed comes to her apartment the next day, she has a motorbike ready and waiting. There are some small shops on the ground floor of her apartment building, and the men who own them like her. She can cajole them into running errands or doing odd jobs for her. She has managed to borrow a bike from one of the men.

  For the next four hours, she sits snugly against him, her arms around his waist, her legs astride the bike as they sail through the city. She loves being on the bike and tells Ahmed she knows how to ride it herself. They don’t get lost even once. The airport is indeed as big as everyone says it is. Qandeel points to the towering big-name hotels clustered together on one stretch of road, the small squares of light from a hundred rooms visible behind the blast-proof walls topped by barbed wire, and the concrete barricades designed to prevent bomb attacks. She shows him some of Karachi’s famous restaurants, an old club that used to have a sign saying women and dogs could not enter, the gothic hulk of a building that looks like a church with an ivy-green roof, and the house—now a museum—that the founder of the country called home.

  They disappear into the swarm of bikes on one of the longest, busiest roads in the city. Every light is green. There’s no stopping them.

  The wind surges against them like a great river and the streetlights stream past like a glowing ribbon. If the road had been a runway ending abruptly at a cliff edge, they could have soared into the air, two fugitives carried by the wind.

  As Ahmed leans gently to either side and dips the bike to the left or right as he passes cars or steers a wide lazy arc past a roundabout, he thinks of the woman leaning against his back and how she looks just like another boy on a bike in her jeans and shirt, her face covered by a helmet. No one would ever guess that it was her, that it was Qandeel Baloch. At that moment she is not the girl in the shisha café or the girl on TV or the girl who makes everyone laugh with her broken English and fake American accent. She is none of the girls in the videos she posts. She is a girl none of the thousands of viewers of those videos have seen; she is herself.

  * * *

  —

  When she can’t sleep, which is often, she watches movies or YouTube videos and scans Facebook and Twitter to see what people are talking about. One night she is bored and decides to talk to her Facebook followers in an audio-only live session. They hear the wail of sirens and the sound of honking cars as she sings songs on request and answers some of their questions. Her phone keeps buzzing. She pleads, please stop calling my personal number. She apologizes for the noise. “I live near the main road next to the sea, where the McDonald’s is,” she explains. She is alone at home in the dark, lit only by the gleam of her laptop. “I’ve opened the windows because there’s no electricity. So that’s why you can hear the traffic.”

  She starts asking Ahmed what is going on in the news and what people are talking about. What is trending right now? Cricket? Politics? Football? She wants to make videos about things that people are discussing because this way they will also discuss her.

  I act from the heart and I think from the heart. I’m not desperate for fame. Fame is chasing me, I’m not chasing it.

  One evening she is feeling low and calls a friend in Islamabad.

  She weeps on the phone. He tries to cheer her up. At this time the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan is making news as his second marriage has ended in divorce. Her friend jokes, “Chill out. Don’t be so sad. Maybe you should just marry Imran Khan.” In the morning he checks Facebook and sees that after they ended their conversation Qandeel posted a new video on her social media pages.

  In it she is lying on her bed. She pulls up the front of her low-cut top. There is a black tattoo, one of the temporary ones she loves to put on her arms and neck, above her breasts. Her full lips are a bright red. She dedicates a song to Imran Khan. “I like you so much, and I love you so much,” she says. “If Reham has left you, then there’s still so many who want you. I am one of them. I want to marry with you. Will you marry me? Please?”

  By morning she is flooded with calls from news channels. They have found a new angle in their relentless coverage of the divorce. Soon the video has been watched more than 830,000 times. A female television anchor calls her shameless.

  These girls who call me bitch and whore and other names are the same girls who talk about respecting women.

  She makes a few more videos. She gets more hits. On Twitter and Facebook she pleads with Imran Khan to accept her proposal, and people make fun of how she pronounces it—“par-posal.” “I just want you to be mine,” she tweets. “People tell me he will only keep you as his maid,” she says in one interview. “But I would agree to that too. Anything for Khan sahib.” She is back in the news. The Imran Khan angle works.

  I always choose the wrong man. I don’t have a special person. He comes in my thoughts and dreams. He’s very good. He’s just like Imran Khan. Other than Imran, I’ve never told someone, “I love you.”

  She knows that not everyone is happy with the videos. Mec scolds her for losing focus. Stay away from politics, he tells her. He wants her to stick to videos where she sings or dances or is funny, like when she asked, “How I’m looking?” He says she is being foolish and getting carried away by the attention.

  In Islamabad men ask Jalal, her old martial arts instructor and friend, for her phone number. At a dinner her name comes up. He doesn’t understand why everyone is talking about her. At home he looks up her Facebook page and sees the videos and photos. He feels ashamed. She is insulting herself. When he tries to talk to her about it, she gently brushes him off. “Sir, leave it be,” she says. “I’ve understood these people. I know better. I’m happy. I’m getting what I want.” She tells him she has finally figured out how to make money.

  Ahmed sometimes tells her not to talk about certain things. It is too risky. People can get angry about any small thing, he warns her. But they will all say later that she did not listen to anyone, not Mec or Jalal or Ahmed or anyone who knew her.

  Whatever you try and stop me from doing, I’ll do that even more. I’ve been like that since childhood.

  Two months later she sees on the news that the president has spoken out against the celebration of Valentine’s Day. It’s a Western concept, he says. On social media many are treating the statement with derision. The news is being covered internationally as well. She makes a new video. “They can stop to people go out,” she says, “but they can’t stop to people love.” She says the same thing once more, this time in Urdu, with the exaggerated American accent she uses, as though she is not used to speaking the language. Just like any other rich brat who went to an English-speaking school. She continues in Urdu, “No matter what they do, they can’t stop people from loving.” She whispers the message again before adding a personal valentine message to Imran Khan.

  She receives a phone call from a man who speaks with a British accent and says he is from an international news agency. He has seen the Valentine’s Day video. He wants to talk to her about it. This is the first time she has been approached by the foreign media.

  Initially she is suspicious. “What do you mean?” she keeps asking him when he tries to get her to explain something she has said or done. No one in the local media asks her what her work means. They only ask more and more f
requently why she doesn’t stop what she is doing despite the hateful messages. They ask why she wants sasti shauhrat—grubby, easy-to-get, cheap publicity.

  It’s no small thing to get sasti shauhrat. If it was so easy, then everyone would be famous.

  When the reporter with the British accent runs his story, it is picked up in many countries, and she sees that the reporter has called her Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian.2 She makes a note to use that line in the future.

  When she meets Mansoor again, he is worried. The Valentine’s Day video is a very public middle finger held up to many conservative Pakistanis and clerics. In previous years the spokesperson of one of the largest religio-political parties in the country had declared the day “against Islamic culture.” Such parties believe those who mark the day are from the “elite class” who ape Western culture. In 2002 co-education institutions in Karachi banned students from celebrating Valentine’s Day for fear of reprisals from conservative or religious student groups,3 and in many schools and colleges in the country the celebration of Haya Day (Modesty Day) is encouraged on the same date. In 2013 a handful of people gathered in Peshawar to burn Valentine’s Day cards in front of the media while women in black burqas held up signs protesting against the custom, and the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) urged TV and radio broadcasters to be sensitive to “viewers’ sentiments” on the day. “PEMRA has been receiving complaints from a large segment of society that Valentine’s Day celebrations are not in conformity with our religious and cultural ethos and has, therefore, condemned its unequivocal propagation through media,” a statement from the authority said. “Such events have been perceived as a source of depraving, corrupting and injuring the morality of Pakistani youth.”4 The year Qandeel makes her Valentine’s Day video, a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami youth wing in Peshawar notes, “People who celebrate [Valentine’s Day] are offending Islam. They are automatically discarded from our religion.”5 Mansoor suggests Qandeel think twice about what she is doing and saying on public platforms like Facebook. She smiles at him and asks sweetly, “Don’t you want your friend to become popular?”

  I am a moody type of girl. Kissi ki sunti nahin hoon [I’m not going to listen to any of you].

  * * *

  —

  On 14 March 2016, four days before Pakistan plays India in the ICC World T20 cricket match, she uploads a video to her Facebook page. “If Pakistan wins, I will do a strip dance for the whole nation,” she promises. “And that dance will be dedicated to our captain, Shahid Afridi. Just defeat India once, and whatever you tell me to do, I’ll do it.”

  A few nights later, she uploads a trailer for the promised dance. She stands on her bed, wearing nothing but a bright green and yellow bikini and a white bathrobe stolen from a hotel. The robe has been pulled down and tied loosely around her waist. In the video, she cups her breasts and caresses herself. She sways her hips like a belly dancer while an Enrique Iglesias song plays on her laptop. She draws the robe close to her like a matador’s cape and then flicks it back to reveal a smooth, uncovered leg. The “full film” will be released online if Pakistan wins the match, she promises.6

  When Mec sees the video, he tells her, “People here don’t let others live their lives the way they want, and you think you can do these kinds of antics? You’re only going to get into trouble.”

  She calls Ahmed and weeps after she reads some of the comments on her Facebook and Twitter posts. He chides her. “Don’t look at them,” he warns.

  She reads some of them to him anyway.

  “Please shoot her wherever you find her.”

  “You ugly bitch. People like you should go die…fucking cunt.”

  “You have no shame so why are you even wearing this bikini? Take it off, you can earn some more.”

  “You uneducated bitch…you’re giving Pakistan a bad name. Your pimp family won’t even shoot you. Your father must be just like you that’s probably why he doesn’t say anything to you.”

  “You give the Baloch people a bad name.”

  “Shame on your parents.”

  “You want to read these things even when you know they’re going to hurt you,” Ahmed scolds her. “Why do you do it?”

  I’m 99 percent sure that you guys hate me.

  She hides her face in her pillow and sobs then stops to look again at the camera.

  And I’m also 100 percent sure that even my shoe doesn’t give a damn.

  Qandeel’s trailer goes viral. It makes the headlines not just in Pakistan, but in India too. She is called “Pakistan’s hot new Internet sensation”7 and “Pakistan’s very own version of Poonam Pandey.”8 Pandey, an Indian model and actress, promised to strip for the Indian cricket team during the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2011. Qandeel would go on to repeat what Pandey said at the time, almost verbatim, when asked why she released the trailer—she did it to “buck up” the team. It was a patriotic gesture.

  To become popular, you have to do a lot. It’s necessary to do some bad things. You have to show yourself, take off your clothes.

  An online campaign to shut down her Facebook page is launched. On 18 March 2016, Farhan Virk, a blogger and self-proclaimed social media activist with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter alone, makes a request: “Report [her] Facebook page and share this message. We can’t see a retard like her shaming our nation. Keep sharing this message and reporting her page. We need to get it banned.” Virk is often accused of operating fake Twitter accounts to spread rumours or impersonate politicians and celebrities. He has a significant social media following, particularly among supporters of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, as he frequently launches campaigns against those critical of the party or its leader. His message about Qandeel is shared more than 3,000 times on Facebook by his followers.

  “We should have drowned in shame the minute we heard her say [she would strip],” Virk tells his social media followers. “In an Islamic state, what kind of thing is that to say?” He is a Pakistani, but Qandeel does not represent him, he complains, and people in India and other countries do not understand that. “Pakistan is not just the name of a country,” he says. “To create Pakistan, two million of our ancestors gave up their lives, just so that the Muslims of the subcontinent could live their lives in an Islamic society, according to an Islamic way of life. Now you tell me—when you see her, what would those ancestors feel? Is our honour so lost that we call this freedom of expression or freedom of speech and ignore it?”

  Today, the world might be available at the tips of any Pakistani’s fingers with the press of just one button, but they must remember one thing: they are still rooted here in the land of the pure. “If this woman had done this in India, America or Britain, then we would understand it. Because in India, America or Britain two million Muslims did not sacrifice their lives to the country,” Virk explains. He accuses her of dishonouring the Pakistani flag. The bikini she is wearing in that video is no ordinary bikini, he tells thousands of his followers. She is wearing the Pakistani flag. “Can your honour allow you to stomach that?” If you tolerate Qandeel today, then ten years from now every actress will be doing what she is. Virk’s voice quavers. “And then we will hang our heads in shame and the people of India will mock us.”

  Pakistan loses the match, but the campaign against Qandeel’s social media pages doesn’t end.

  There are so many problems in Pakistan, so why is everyone focusing on me? I’m just an innocent girl. Why am I being made a target of judgement?

  Two days pass. Virk urges his followers once more, “We need to stop her from spreading vulgarity in our Islamic state.” Those who do not want to join the campaign and report the page to Facebook probably “don’t have mothers and sisters in their homes, they have other Qandeels in their homes.” Those who report Qandeel’s page post screenshots of their complaints to Facebook. “I am getting messages from Pakistanis overseas that due to Q
andeel Baloch they are facing harassment,” Virk claims. “Let’s keep reporting her.”

  A letter is widely shared online: a cleric has issued a fatwa against Qandeel, declaring that it is forbidden to watch her videos or look at her pictures. The letter is later revealed to be fake.

  On 22 March 2016 Qandeel’s Facebook account is suspended.

  She loses an audience of more than 400,000.

  She is alone now. They had all warned her and she had not listened. Mec is furious. How long has it been since they last spoke? It feels like weeks.

  Ten seconds was all it took to unravel what she has been working on for years. A ten-second video.

  Soon after, she is invited to be on one of Pakistan’s most watched talk shows, Khara Such. This is not like the morning shows, where she shares airtime with several others; the producers for Khara Such want only her. “This is social media,” Qandeel shouts angrily in a promo for the interview that runs on television and online. “It’s not someone’s father’s property. Everyone has the right to express their opinion on it.”9 The show’s host, Mubasher Lucman, tweets this to more than three million social media followers. It is watched on Facebook more than 600,000 times, and the comments that follow are angry.