A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  The first time Adil had seen her was at work was when one of the video editors had pulled him aside and showed him a video she had posted on her Facebook page. This was in March 2016, right before a cricket match between Pakistan and India, one of the world’s biggest sports rivalries. In the video Qandeel was lying on a mound of pillows, wearing a sleeveless Barbie-pink dress with black polka dots.1 The creamy tops of her breasts peeked out over the neckline. A black tattoo—a leaping deer? a dagger?—snaked across her right breast. She had a message for Shahid Afridi, the captain of the Pakistan cricket team. “Just win this match,” she said, staring straight at the camera. “And then see how Qandeel does a strip dance for you. Seriously. I’ll say your name as I strip.”

  Adil couldn’t peel his eyes off the screen. He had never heard a woman speak this way. How could she say those things?

  The next encounter was far tamer. Not long after the video was posted, someone at the office got her number and Adil was nominated to dial her up on speaker before a group of fellow reporters. He introduced himself and then put the call on speaker. The men hovered in a circle around the phone. She was friendly, Adil found out, especially with the media. Then he was nudged to pass her to someone else. “Qandeel, our assignment editor wants to talk to you,” Adil told her. The editor lost his nerve. He couldn’t say a word. Qandeel waited patiently on the line, hearing the reporters’ stifled giggles. The editor panicked and cut the call. To this day, he is still needled about that incident.

  Racing to Qandeel’s home on the day he found out she had been killed, Adil marveled at his luck. A giggle escaped his mouth. The van’s driver raised his eyebrows. Adil ignored him. Well, he wasn’t about to let slip the biggest story in Multan in years—maybe even the biggest story in Pakistan right now—by telling a loudmouth driver with at least six friends on speed dial working for other television channels. Sixty or seventy crime reporters in Multan, and none of them had got the call, Adil mused. This fat little bird flew right into his hands. Just like that. And no one else knew!

  The driver glanced over at Adil in the passenger seat. The baby-faced reporter’s nose was dotted with beads of sweat, and one leg had had the shakes ever since they’d left the office. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” Adil muttered under his breath as the van crept closer to the checkpoint on Shershah Road in the army cantonment in Multan. His fingers drummed a frantic beat on his laminated press card. Where does this kid need to rush off to so early in the morning on a Saturday? the driver wondered. He knew Adil’s beat was the political and religious parties. Had some bloody maulana (cleric) died or what? He stuck his head out of the van’s window and cursed everything: the beggars slowly weaving their way through the lines of cars when the lights changed from amber to green; the men perched on laden carts urging donkeys that were too tired or starved to do more than strain against their harness as they tried to inch their load forward; the motorbike riders who could wriggle on to the pavement and zoom ahead; the van’s broken air conditioning; the goddamn heat; this mystery assignment.

  The Muzaffarabad area on the outskirts of the city was mainly known for having one of the largest textile mills in the country, and they had long since driven past the fork in the road that led to it. The police station where Adil’s source had called him from was located on a deserted stretch of road with no street signs or markers. It was quiet there, with only a few scattered shops selling mobile phone credit, drinks or snacks. There were no pedestrians. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the policeman behind the desk inside the station. Adil pressed him. “I said I have no idea,” he snapped. “No police van has headed out from here.”

  On his way out, Adil felt someone pinch his elbow. A policeman jerked his head towards a corner. Adil followed him. “Get out of here, drive back towards the cantonment and then take the first lane on the left when you see a sign for a clinic,” the policeman whispered. “Go to Karachi Hotel. She lives there.” He paused. “Lived.”

  “Karachi Hotel?” repeated the driver.

  “That’s what he said.” Adil shrugged. Small restaurants and roadside cafés serving tea and snacks were commonly referred to as hotels. “Must be a restaurant.”

  Adil got a call from his editor. “There’s a Shinza Baloch who lives near the police station Adil,” he said. “Some singer or actor? Do you think it could be her?”

  Please, dear God, don’t tell me it’s some actress no one has heard of! Adil thought.

  They drove through a warren of unpaved narrow lanes that led off the main road. The van had trouble squeezing through. Adil walked to a small kiosk covered in advertisements for mobile phone companies.

  “I’m looking for a restaurant,” he told the shopkeeper. “Karachi Hotel?”

  “You’re in Karachi Hotel, bhai,” the man replied. “This neighbourhood. This is Karachi Hotel.” He looked at Adil’s press card dangling around his neck. “A police car just went that way,” he said, pointing to a lane.

  They drove into the lane. Nothing. Another one. Nothing again. Adil frantically called his sources in the police. One whispered directions to the house, another said that they already knew who had done it. They knew who had killed her. Adil didn’t know what was true. He just needed to get to the house fast. The news would spread quickly, and it would not be long before other reporters got wind of it. Then he saw the ambulance. Adil scurried towards it while the cameraman rigged up his equipment. He could hear crying. The ambulance was parked outside a clinic for children. The lane seemed to be a dead end, closed off by a brick wall.

  “What happened, son?” Adil asked a little boy standing near the ambulance.

  “Uncle-ji dropped dead in Karachi,” the child replied. “They brought the body back this morning. He came in an aeroplane, you know.”

  Uncle-ji?

  “Who are you looking for?” asked a woman standing at the gate to a house next to the clinic.

  “Do you know where Qandeel Baloch lives?” Adil asked.

  “Who?”

  “Qandeel.”

  “No one here by that name. I’ve lived here for eight years. There’s us, the widow of a police officer and a lame old man. He has a wife and son. No daughter.”

  There was a flash of black and khaki in the corner of Adil’s eye. He turned. The lane wasn’t a dead end after all. There, to the right, were three small houses nestled in a corner. A pale yellow one-storey house abutted a rose-pink wall. A policeman darted behind the house’s cream-coloured front door. The woman glanced at it. “That’s the lame man’s home. The police just showed up ten minutes ago. God only knows why.”

  Jackpot! Adil thought.

  Adil walked over, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered between the bars of a window next to the front door of the house. He couldn’t see a thing. A gate next to the door swung open with the gentlest of nudges. An elderly man and woman sat in a room to his right. Straight ahead, the door to another room opened. Four or five men, some police, stood in a circle around a charpoy, their heads bowed, their necks craned forward. What were they looking at? A pink and white sheet trailed on to the floor. Something peeked out at the end. Was that a foot?

  The mustachioed face of a policeman was the last thing Adil saw in that house. “Out!” the officer hissed. “Move back.” The gate was slammed behind Adil as he stumbled down a potholed concrete ramp. His phone rang. It was the channel. “We ready to go? I need you to do a live call immediately. We can do the visuals later,” his editor barked. Adil stayed on the line and waited. A few seconds before the anchor came on, he heard the producer say urgently, “OK, ready. Wait. Is it her? You’re sure it’s her?”

  At 11:25 a.m. that day Adil Nizami, a twenty-five-year-old rookie reporter from Multan, broke the biggest story of his career. “Famous model Qandeel Baloch has been killed,” he blurted out in a live call that interrupted 24 News’s regular morning bulletin.2


  As he stood in the lane outside Qandeel’s house, the words that had been on the tip of his tongue for more than an hour now rushed out. “Some are saying that she was shot dead. The police have just reached her house here in Multan. We should find out shortly how she was murdered. The incident took place a little while ago in the area of Muzaffarabad, where model Qandeel Baloch had been living for some time. Her brothers, the murderers, were angry with her because of her behaviour and all the scandals on TV. We also found out that she was planning to travel to India to take part in a reality TV show there. Her family was angry with her. And we have found out this morning that her brothers have either strangled her or shot her, but there’s conflicting information about how they killed her.”

  In the van the driver received a call. He listened for a moment. “Fuck. Are you sure? Adil said so? Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell you how to get here.” It’s going to be a long day, he thought, irritated.

  A long day in the middle of nowhere in this heat.

  After forty minutes, a line of twelve Digital Satellite News Gathering (DSNG) vans made its way down the lane leading to the house. Adil estimated that more than a hundred people—police, reporters, cameramen, locals—were now buzzing around like flies in a jar on the rough sandy road.

  When the ambulance arrived, it took the driver half an hour to cover the last few feet. No one wanted to give up their hard-won spot in front of the small house. It didn’t matter. Nothing could save her now, and the police did not seem to be in any rush to get the body out, even as the mercury rose on that sweltering July day. Adil’s bright pink knock-off Ralph Lauren shirt was covered in dark patches of sweat. It was nearing 2 p.m. The officers milling around outside the house looked bewildered. Some hadn’t even had the time to put their uniforms on before they rushed to the scene. Every time a high-ranking officer arrived, someone inside the house would open the gate just a few inches for them to squeeze through.

  The reporters had been breathlessly relaying each drop of information as they received it from inside the house. They were getting restless. Their producers mined Qandeel’s social media feeds for quotes and photographs to tide viewers over until they had anything tangible. Adil watched his colleague hoist his camera above the gate of the house, attempting to film what was transpiring inside. It could make for a precious few minutes of footage that the channel would slap its logo on, running it on a loop until Adil could give them something better. A policeman swatted at the camera. An officer had made a video of the body inside the room. The reporters scrambled for it.

  Adil didn’t want that. I want the real thing, he thought. If I’d only been here ten minutes before…If I’d headed out right when I got that first call, I could have been here before the police. I could have got a shot of her.

  He knew exactly what he would have done. Shoot footage of the body first. Blur the face of course, but then again that depended on what the bosses at the channel wanted. Maybe a good shot of her face, in case they wanted to run a still. “After that, I’d shift focus,” Adil told me. “She’s been murdered, she’s been identified, she’s Qandeel Baloch. OK! Done! Now the parents. How was she murdered? Who murdered her? The story they gave the police—that story could have been mine. I would have been the first to get it.”

  All eyes were on the ambulance, which had now been wedged up against the gate. “They’ll bring her out soon,” the reporters murmured among themselves. “Any minute now,” they told their producers reassuringly. “The body will come out any minute now.” Adil had the best spot, right next to the ambulance’s open doors. The other reporters had graciously offered him the space. “You were the first one here,” they said, squeezing his shoulders. Adil spotted a photographer he knew from another channel. He called him over. He could hear someone behind the gate shouting for a sheet. It was time. Adil had a plan.

  The gate of the house opened. Everyone surged forward. Adil helped the photographer up into the ambulance and told him to crouch at the far end. The ambulance men had forgotten to bring the standard white shroud for the body; they had used the pink bed sheet from Qandeel’s charpoy instead. The body was loaded into the back of the vehicle. Inside, the photographer plucked the sheet off so he could quickly take photos of the body. I need to see for myself, Adil thought as he quickly slid open one of the ambulance windows. His hand, holding his mobile phone, snaked inside. He stared at the puffy blue-lipped face for a split second. He began filming.3

  “Yaar, dead body ka khyaal karein [Have some respect for the dead],” City Police Officer (CPO) Azhar Akram, the highest-ranking official on the spot said as he grabbed Adil by the arm and pulled him away from the ambulance. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  But Adil had got his shot.

  The ambulance pulled away. The door to the house opened and two police officials came out with an old man. He could not stand on his own as he had only one leg. The policemen held the elderly man up as the reporters scrambled towards him and pushed their microphones under his chin. With his arm around the shoulders of one of the officers at his side, Qandeel’s father, Muhammad Azeem, confirmed the news of his daughter Qandeel Baloch’s death. He compared her to Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in 2007. His daughter had been as brave as Benazir, Azeem wanted the reporters to know. The loosely tied white cotton turban he was wearing unravelled as he told the media that his son Waseem had killed Qandeel.

  Azeem was immediately taken to the police station just a short walk from his home, where he filed a First Information Report (FIR). Azeem formally accused his youngest son of murdering his daughter. “My daughter, Qandeel Baloch, who works in showbiz, came to our house in Multan from Karachi on Eid…my son, Waseem, who is twenty-four or twenty-five years old, came to meet us on the 14th of July,” he stated for the record. He implicated another of his sons, Aslam, a junior officer in the army, in the crime, saying that he had encouraged Waseem to kill Qandeel. “[Waseem] wanted to stop Qandeel from working in showbiz.” “Qandeel Baloch was killed by Waseem in the name of honour,” Azeem wrote in the FIR. “This is an injustice. He did this for money. Waseem killed Qandeel Baloch at the urging of my other son, Aslam Shaheen, a subedar [captain] in the army.”

  Over the coming months, Adil would lose count of the number of times his jerky footage of Qandeel’s body in the ambulance would be seen by viewers around the world. Even when his phone crashed and he lost the original video, he could pull it up from thousands of sites where it continued to be shared.

  When I interviewed Adil four months later, I asked him what he had been thinking on that day as he filmed Qandeel’s body. He thought for a moment. “What was I doing?” he repeated the question to himself. “In that kind of moment—when you don’t have control of your senses, can’t control what you will do, what you must do and what you shouldn’t do—you don’t think about this question until later. Then you ask yourself, what could I have done differently?”

  * * *

  —

  Some twenty years ago, or perhaps longer than that, two questions were asked on a TV game show. “Which bank in all of Pakistan has the richest coffers?” “Where do the richest people in the land live?” The answer to both was Shah Sadar Din. At least, that’s how people in this village4 of a little over forty-five thousand tell the story.

  “People here might not have education, but they have money streaming in from abroad,” explains Javed Siddiqui, a reporter in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan. The people of the district, also named Dera Ghazi Khan, where Shah Sadar Din is located, brag that the area has the most expensive land in the country—yes, more than Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad. Since the 1970s, men from Shah Sadar Din have been travelling to Saudi Arabia for work, Siddiqui says. According to the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment, more than two hundred and thirty thousand residents of Dera Ghazi Khan district are recorded as having left the country in search of employment between 1981
and 2017.5 Some find jobs in construction while others set up small businesses. It is unusual to find even one home in the district that has not sent a father, son, brother or husband abroad. Qandeel’s brother Arif was one of many who set their sights on a life in Saudi Arabia.

  According to urban legend, families in the village made fortunes working outside Pakistan. “Labourers were sending home up to a lakh every month,” Siddiqui insists. “Some might send five, ten, twenty lakhs. Places here that deal with foreign remittances brag that they have dealt with transfers of twenty million rupees in a month.” He says that three servants who worked in his home have left for Saudi Arabia. One of them, a labourer, sends 3,000 Saudi riyals to his family every month. “Yes!” exclaims Siddiqui. “A labourer! He earns more than 80,000 rupees.”

  It’s December 2016. I’m sitting with Siddiqui and a few other local reporters in his small office in Dera Ghazi Khan city, an hour away from Shah Sadar Din. “How much do you think this office is worth?” Siddiqui asks, referring to the 800-square-foot space where he is sitting on a carpeted floor, sipping tea and juice with other journalists. “Thirty million rupees,” he brags.

  One of the men pipes up with a story he heard recently. A man from Shah Sadar Din went to a small tea shop—Where? Oh he can’t remember where, and that’s not the point anyway—and asked for a cup of chai. Ten minutes later he was still waiting. He asked again. An hour went by, and there was still no tea. “Just see what I do to you,” he shouted at the server. He bought the tea shop and the land it was built on the very next day and fired the man who hadn’t given him a cup of tea.