A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  At last! Some good news.

  She texts Mec, “I am very much happy.” She is out of credit on her phone. Send me some balance, she tells him. I have something to tell you. She calls him promptly when the credit comes through. Why didn’t you let me call you if you have no money on your phone? he chides. But she wants to be the one calling. In the future, years later, she wants to remember that she had called him and told him her life was going to change.

  He asks her if everything is all right, and if she is still having problems with Mufti Qavi.

  She tells him that has been cleared up. Promise me something, she says.

  What promise?

  Promise me you’ll come to Karachi with me.

  Mec says he can’t travel at the moment. He has too many events lined up.

  Are they more important than me? She pretends to sulk. When she finally gets him to say what she wants to hear, she tells him she has received a phone call from the woman who organizes the entertainment and fashion industry’s biggest annual awards show. This year they want Qandeel to open the show, she says to Mec with a squeal. With Ali Zafar! One of Pakistan’s best-known singers! The organizer’s daughter had shown her Qandeel’s photographs and videos. People—women—in showbiz have been talking about her. Some are envious, some are in awe, and others are disgusted. But there is a great deal of respect after the incident with Mufti Qavi. For so many years people in the industry have been judged by the religious conservatives and scolded on live TV shows or been subjected to fatwas about everything from how they dress to their personal lives and the films they star in. Now, finally, one of their own—yes, they could accept her as one of them—has thumbed her nose at them all. She has guts, they grudgingly accept.

  Mec has to come with her to Karachi. She won’t go without him. Forget everything else that has happened. Now she will start again, and she will do things differently. No more secrets—everything she has hidden for years, the life she has pretended to live, all of that is finished. She has known it all along: if you have strong willpower, nothing can keep you down. Life taught her lessons at an early age. It has not been easy to become a woman who supports herself and her family. She will tell everyone exactly how she did it.

  Maybe she can even start some organization, some agency to help girls who have the same dreams as her. She will make sure that they do not have to go through what she did. Do you know what she is? What she is becoming? A girl power. A one-woman army. An inspiration to those ladies who are treated badly and dominated by society. Everything is going to change now. There will be new tricks, or perhaps none at all. After all, she is no longer just Qandeel Baloch. She is also Fouzia Azeem. Will Fouzia Azeem make videos and take selfies and tell Imran Khan she loves him? What will Fouzia Azeem, the woman who escaped an abusive marriage, the woman who supported her family, the woman who has a child, have to say?

  There will be more work, more countries to visit, but can she leave the country if there are two court cases pending against her? Perhaps she should ask Safdar Shah to look into that. Get a passport for yourself, she instructs Mec. We’re going to have many travels together. She is going to make it as a singer. She will do concerts. Concerts in Dubai! She wants to be back in Karachi as soon as possible. She wants to book her flight first thing in the morning. Will Mec make sure she is up early tomorrow? She has been told to get back to Karachi as soon as possible to choose her wardrobe for the awards ceremony.

  He promises to call in the morning to wake her.

  Promise you’ll come with me, she insists. I’ll send you a ticket as soon as I’m back in Karachi.

  He promises.

  The next day, 16 July, a Saturday morning, Mec keeps his word and calls Qandeel. There is no answer.

  Silly girl. She must have stayed up late again, and will now sleep until the afternoon.

  He had sent her a message the night before. “I am so happy. May you remain happy. I’m always praying for you. My heart is so happy.”

  I think I’m afraid to be happy, because whenever I do get too happy, something bad always happens…

  It is 10.30 a.m. She has not called him back and is not answering her phone.

  He messages her: “Good morning. Have a nice day.”

  THE MEDIA AND THE MURDER

  Malik Azam started working for the Daily Pakistan newspaper’s small Multan bureau in 2010, and his first story for the paper is still one of his favourites. He got a tip about a piece of land owned by the government that was being encroached upon by a minister. When the story ran, an opposition political party jumped on it, and soon the news was being discussed on talk shows and written about in other newspapers. The province’s chief minister took note, and Azam says he soon received a phone call. “They asked me where I’d found the information,” he recalls. “I led them to it, and then, just like that—” he snaps his fingers “—the encroachment was finished. Today there’s a hospital on that land.”

  It was everything he loved about journalism. “The stories you see these days,” he says, shaking his head. “Everyone is chasing the government’s soft stories. Even the biggest media groups are just doing PR. I want investigative journalism. The salary doesn’t matter. The resources don’t matter. It’s all about your will. How strong is your will? How far can you reach?” The best stories reassure him that “at least I have done something.”

  “The best stories uncover truths, no matter how cleverly hidden,” he feels. You may have have read Malik Azam’s “best story,” even if you don’t know his name or read the Daily Pakistan. It was the story of a girl from a small village in Punjab who changed her name and hid her identity and became one of the most scandalous women in Pakistan.

  There are only a handful of men in the Daily Pakistan’s Multan office on the day I visit to meet Azam. He speaks softly and starts our conversation with “Bismillah” (In the name of Allah). His hair is greying at the sideburns, and he has a bushy handlebar moustache. His forehead is lined, and when he ponders the answer to a particularly tricky question, he often furrows his brow, the lines deepen and his eyes look sadder than they usually do. Every day he spends more than an hour commuting to and from work. He is running late on the day we meet, but even so, when he arrives he looks freshly shaved, is wearing a perfectly ironed shalwar kameez and apologizes profusely. He is not in the habit of being late. He insists on offering me lunch to make up for it, but then, slightly shyly, wonders out loud what a woman from Karachi would want to eat in Multan. Perhaps pizza, like his daughter enjoys?

  The Daily Pakistan newsroom is a bare-bones space, a bit rundown and dark. There are no windows, and stacks of old newspapers are heaped in corners and under tables. A young boy scuttles between the desks with a steel tray crammed with hot cups of tea. Someone plays a recording of Quranic verses on their computer and turns the volume up until the room is filled with the recitation. “Which of your Lord’s favours will you deny?” the verse asks. The men will shortly lay reed mats on the small balcony outside the office, next to the stairwell, and gather for prayers.

  When the bureau chief arrives, the crisp swish of his starched white shalwar kameez announcing him, the reporters push their chairs back with their legs, some shuffle their feet back into their sandals or slippers, and then, not quite standing and not quite sitting, they remain in a half-crouch over their desks, each sinking back down the minute the chief passes him.

  Azam’s beat at the newspaper “keeps shifting.” He does whatever stories are assigned to him or whatever he happens to come across. One day he met two friends who said they had a particularly interesting piece of information for him.

  “Yaar,” said one, pointing to the other. “Ask him about Fouzi.”

  “Fouzi? Who is Fouzi?” Azam asked.

  His friend laughed. “Let’s go for a meal in the evening. I’ll tell you everything. It’s quite an interesting chapter.” However, when they sat do
wn to dinner that night, the man hemmed and hawed and delayed. He made a big deal about ordering the food and further small talk, teasing the reporter.

  Azam finally demanded, “Are you going to tell me or not?”

  The friend leaned back, satisfied. “Fouzi,” he said, “is Qandeel Baloch.”

  That’s it? That was the big news? Azam had heard the woman’s name but didn’t know much about her.

  “She was my classmate,” his friend continued. They had lived close to each other in the village she was from—yes, the village. She was no city girl. They had studied in school together until the ninth grade.

  “So everyone in the village knows who this woman is?” Azam asked.

  They did indeed, his friend said. There were others like him, people who had gone to school with Qandeel or who knew her family. And, in fact, Azam’s friend’s wife had been at a school in Multan with Qandeel as well.

  Azam went to the Daily Pakistan entertainment reporter and told him about Fouzi. The reporter scoffed. So what? he said. Big deal. Most of these women have fake names and identities.

  For six months, no matter how often Qandeel featured in the news, Azam sat on the story. There was no point filing it, he insists. As he puts it, the story would not “pinch” in Multan—there wouldn’t be much interest. No one in Multan would have cared what some girl from a nearby village was doing in Islamabad, Lahore or Karachi. He concedes that perhaps people might have been interested when Qandeel started making videos for Imran Khan, but he just didn’t bother with the story at that point.

  It’s an explanation that many reporters in Multan are quick to sympathize with.

  “Even I knew where she was from,” claims J, a reporter for a TV channel. “A guy who lived in Shah Sadar Din called me up and told me, This Qandeel Baloch is a girl from our area. I didn’t run with the story. I took it easy. But two days later Azam ran it in the Daily Pakistan and then suddenly every paper and channel had it.”

  J isn’t the only one who says he knew Qandeel’s true identity. Many reporters in Multan mutter that friends or sources from villages outside Multan or in Dera Ghazi Khan gave them the information, but Azam was the first one to print it. J then got in on the act by revealing that Qandeel had stayed in a women’s shelter when she fled Shah Sadar Din.

  Azam and his bureau chief, Shaukat Iqbal, rubbish rivals’ claims. “If they had broken the news, they wouldn’t be saying any of this,” sneers Iqbal. “They didn’t get the scoop and they definitely would have faced the consequences for that. Ask them just how many angry messages they got. How many colleagues asked them why they didn’t get the news?”

  When Azam saw the videos of the meeting between Qandeel and Mufti Qavi, he went to the paper’s chief reporter. “The bachi [girl] is from our area,” he told him, pointing to the TV where a clip of Qandeel taking a selfie with the cleric was running. “And by the way, she’s not even Baloch.”

  “How do you know?” the reporter asked.

  They went to see the bureau chief together.

  “File it,” Iqbal ordered.

  The story ran on 23 June, tucked away in a small box on the back page of the newspaper’s Multan edition. “From Shah Sadar Din’s Fouzia Azeem to Qandeel Baloch, a bitter journey to the heights of fame,” the headline read. “Her father’s name is Muhammad Azeem, from a Ma’arah family…” She had been unlucky in love in 2003 or 2004, and that had been her turning point, Azam wrote. He revealed that Qandeel had worked as a bus hostess and after entering the world of modelling had transformed herself from Fouzia to Qandeel Baloch. While he won’t reveal how he found out she had worked at Faisal Movers, Azam admits that he was never able to find proof that she had been a hostess—there was no employee record or even a single co-worker who remembered her from that time.

  By this point Azam had seen her passport—he won’t say how—and learned that Qandeel had travelled to South Africa in 2007. “Her selfies with Mufti Abdul Qavi of Multan have become the hot cake [sic] in the media,” the story noted. An old photograph of Qandeel, her chin resting on her hands, ran with the piece. The next day the Daily Pakistan’s back page featured an image of Qandeel’s passport, including her real name, her date of birth and identity card number. “She went back to her father’s home three times after she left, but never helped her parents leave the godforsaken village where she first opened her eyes in March 1990 in a mud house,” the story noted. “The family cannot tolerate to see her face again.” On both days the stories ran under a box containing an interview with “Multan’s famous religious scholar, Mufti Qavi.” “We met on Qandeel’s wishes, she was scared some magic had been done on her,” Mufti Qavi said in the interview. “Qandeel Baloch has apologized to me five times, and I have forgiven her.”

  The stories, which included a high-resolution scan of Qandeel’s passport, were immediately run on the paper’s English-language website, and quickly went viral. “Controversy queen Qandeel Baloch has been headlining the news for the past couple of days for her scandalous statements on live television and secretive hotel room meetings with religious scholars,” the report stated. “Although she now lives a somewhat glamorous life, new details revealed about her past show that she may have once lived an ordinary life of hardship and unrequited love.” Clippings of Azam’s Urdu story were shared on Facebook and Twitter.

  “When Mufti Qavi came into the picture, it became a hot issue,” Azam explains. “If I had run the story about her real name back in January, the impact would not have been as much.” It was a tantalizing mixture—a religious scholar who loved the limelight, and a woman who had filmed herself alone with him in his hotel room. Mufti Qavi was well known among the media in Multan, and more importantly his family had been running a madrassa in the city for decades. His sisters held classes teaching women from some of Multan’s most respected families how to read and interpret the Quran. The information Azam had on Qandeel would finally “pinch.”

  The Daily Pakistan story was picked up by other Urdu newspapers and the English-language dailies. It ran on television. Once everyone knew the name of the village Qandeel was from—it was not hard for local correspondents to call up sources in Dera Ghazi Khan or Shah Sadar Din, a little over two hours from Multan—the media wanted to know all it could about the daughter of Muhammad Azeem.

  * * *

  —

  Ever since the age of ten, Adil Nizami had known exactly what he wanted to do. That year, in July 2001, his eyes had been glued to the TV screen as news broke that the minister of state for foreign affairs had been shot dead in a town in the district of Multan while campaigning in a local election. He was riveted by the coverage.

  While at university, Adil dabbled in print journalism, but applied for a job at a small television channel as soon as he graduated. His second job had been with a flashy new network that soon went under for fraud and embezzlement. He finally arrived at 24 News, a current affairs channel, in 2015. At the time 24 had only been around for a year, but it had big ambitions and had recently snapped up one of the country’s best-known political talkshow hosts. Adil went for an interview and waited with nine others. He knew his CV wasn’t too impressive, but he had something none of the other candidates seemed to have: an interest in current affairs bordering on obsession. “People ask me, ‘Have you seen Devdas? Have you seen Taare Zameen Par?’ No, I haven’t. I watch the news. That’s all I want to watch. My friends call me crazy. But this isn’t a passing interest.”

  “Let’s say I am a cleric who wants to be a member of the senate,” his interviewer said after briefly glancing at Adil’s sparse CV. “How would I go about that?”

  Adil rattled off the procedure.

  “OK,” said the interviewer, surprised. “Not bad. How many four-star generals are there in the army?”

  “Sir, there are two four-star generals in the army at a time: one is the joint chief of staff and one is the chief of army st
aff.”

  “Tell me this,” the interviewer said, leaning across the table. “Who is the Sri Lankan president?”

  “Well,” Adil replied, “five days ago there was a transition of power. So do you want the last guy’s name or the current president’s?”

  He was offered the job immediately.

  On his second day at work a building collapsed in Multan, crushing everyone inside. One man died at the scene while Adil was reporting. He couldn’t sleep that night. The next day he arrived at work with puffy eyes. He was quiet, withdrawn. “Sir, this is what we’re going to be doing every day,” his cameraman said. “If this is how you’re going to be, you can’t be a reporter. You might as well stay at home.” A few months later, Adil found himself in front of a blazing house, reporting live as rescue workers struggled to control the fire. A woman and her five children were laid out on the street, still as dolls. He was relieved that he didn’t feel a thing. He quickly learned how to tell stories about things that people hoped would never happen to them.

  On the morning of July 16, he received a phone call from a source at 10:12 a.m. He remembers the time because he was running a late for work that day, literally racing up the stairs to the newsroom when his mobile rang. The man on the other line cut through the niceties. “I’m at the police station in Shah Sadar Din,” he said. “It’s Qandeel. She’s been murdered.”

  Adil flicked through the channels on the television screens in the newsroom: the usual advertisements, the daily bulletins, morning shows. He walked over to his assignment editor. “Heard anything about Qandeel this morning?” he asked. There was nothing. Adil called the source back. “You’re wrong, my friend. Must be a mix-up.”

  Twenty minutes later his phone rang again. It was the same source. “It’s confirmed,” he said. “Trust me, it’s her. The police are heading out.” At that moment all other beats ceased to matter. According to the rules of the newsroom, Adil should have told the crime reporter about the tip. But even though Adil had been with 24 News for barely over a year at this time, the channel had covered Qandeel enough times for him to know that she was one of Pakistan’s most controversial celebrities. He was determined to be the one to break this news. Telling no one but his editor about the phone call, he jumped into the station’s van with his cameraman and shouted at the driver to take the fastest route to the Muzaffarabad police station, a twenty-five-minute drive away from Multan’s city centre, from where his source had called.