An Inconvenient Woman

The life and death of Qandeel Baloch

“How I’m looking?” That’s the question Qandeel Baloch asked in her first viral video, writhing sexily as she pouted for the camera. Pakistan duly clicked on the link and didn’t quite like what it saw. Scratch that. They hated it. But even as the outrage flowed and the abuse got more graphic, “How I’m looking” became a catchphrase in that country, and Qandeel became a bonafide social media star – albeit one that everyone loved to hate (or so they claimed, at any rate).

Sanam Maher, a Karachi-based journalist, tells the improbable tale of this unexpected breakout star in The Sensational Life & Death of Qandeel Baloch. The book begins with the death of Qandeel, and the media frenzy that followed. And then traces her journey from her impoverished life in a small village near Multan, to a doomed first marriage at 17 (which resulted in the birth of a son, whom she abandoned), a disastrous appearance on Pakistan Idol, to the hard-scrabble existence she led as she tried to establish herself in the ‘glamour’ business, and finally, to her short-lived triumph when she became an international star.

It was not an easy haul, by any standards. Pakistan, a conservative, hide-bound society that swears by Islamic mores of propriety and modesty, had never seen anyone quite like Qandeel Baloch. There had never been a woman who had no compunctions about doing a ‘strip-tease’ for the Pakistani cricket team to encourage the players to win in a match against India (she promised to go the whole hog for Shahid Afridi if he managed to beat India). Nobody had ever posed in a skimpy outfit and sent out a video message proposing marriage to Imran Khan. Or, for that matter, released pictures of herself with a respected Islamic cleric which seemed to suggest that the two of them had got up to no good in a hotel room.

So, as is usual in such circumstances, Qandeel was dismissed as a ‘whore’, a loose woman who was bringing shame on her family, her country, her religion. She was forced off Facebook (briefly) after a concerted campaign to paint her as a blot on Pakistan. She was threatened with rape and murder. And she was inundated with abuse every single day of her life.

The only problem was that Qandeel declined to play along with this narrative. She refused to be shamed. She refused to apologize for the way she looked, the way she dressed, the things she said, or the videos she released. She was a woman who owned her own story; a woman who was comfortable in her own skin; a woman courageous enough to live the life she had created for herself.

In many other countries, she may well have gotten away with it. Sexy videos, revealing outfits, and outrageous statements are the staple of ‘social media stars’ all over the world. As Qandeel admitted in an appearance on a Pakistani TV show, she was ‘inspired’ by such Indian women as Poonam Pandey, Rakhi Sawant and Sunny Leone. And she was routinely described as the ‘Kim Kardashian of Pakistan’ in both local and international media.

But while all Poonam Pandey and Rakhi Sawant had to contend with was being the butt of cruel jokes in India, Qandeel had to deal with actual hatred and contempt, not just from Pakistani society and media, but also her own brothers, one of whom ended up killing her for the family ‘honour’. While Sunny Leone could follow up a porn career in America by forging a new mainstream avatar in Bollywood, Qandeel was doomed to being dismissed as a ‘beghairat aurat’, a woman with no honour, forever beyond the pale of polite society.

It is tempting to speculate what Qandeel Baloch’s fate would have been if she was born in India rather than Pakistan. Would she still be alive today, putting up risible videos on Youtube, clocking up millions of likes, even as people laughed at her rather than with her? Would she have achieved mainstream stardom if she had fulfilled her ambition of starring in Bigg Boss? Would she have become the new Sunny Leone in our lives and on our screens?

But this is not a story about India. It is a story about Pakistan, and Maher tells it with journalistic rigor and creative flair, pulling together several strands with deceptive ease.

And like all good writers, Maher doesn’t restrict herself to telling the tale of the transformation of a young girl who was born Fouzia Azeem but turned herself into Qandeel Baloch. Instead, she uses the prism of Qandeel’s transmogrification to tell the story of a slice of Pakistan itself, through the medium of different characters.

There’s Khushi Khan, a model coordinator in Islamabad whose family lost everything in the 2005 earthquake, and who had scrambled to make a living ever since, dealing bravely with all the misogyny and sexism she encounters along the way. There’s Nighat Dad, the founder of Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) based in Lahore, which helps women deal with cyber harassment. And then, there’s the handsome ‘chaiwallah’, Arshad Khan, whose picture, taken at his humble tea stall, goes viral and changes his life.

But shining through all these stories is the shimmering figure of Qandeel Baloch, the quicksilver star who burnt all too briefly before being snuffed out for being far too bright.

  

It’s not cricket

But Shahid Afridi’s anti-India tirade is pretty much par for the course

For the life of me, I can’t understand why people in India are so outraged by Shahid Afridi’s statements made on a Pakistani TV channel. In case you’ve been living under a rock over the past week, this is what Afridi said: Indians did not have as pure and large hearts as Pakistanis and Muslims did; and that no long-term relationship with India was possible because of this.

Now, as far as I am concerned, this is pretty much par for the course. However much we may try to kid ourselves, throwing around phrases like ‘We are the same people”, or even “Pakistanis are like our brothers and sisters” the truth is somewhat different. If you monitor their media, listen to people on the street, or even log on to Facebook groups and Twitter, it rapidly becomes evident that most Pakistanis don’t like us very much.

And frankly, that’s hardly surprising. Ever since the Partition, each successive generation of Pakistanis have been brought up to regard India as The Enemy. The textbooks they study tell them how awful Indians are; the media sends out the same message; the political leadership constantly harps on an anti-India theme; and the army whips up a frenzy about India’s dire designs on the Pakistani state.

So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we are regarded with implacable hostility at best and visceral hatred at worst by our ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ across the border. And yet, every time a story like this pops up, the reaction seems to be shock and horror.

How could Afridi say such awful things? Doesn’t he know that we are the ‘same people’? (And that, in any case, there are more `pure-hearted’ Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan!)

At some level, I understand where these reactions are coming from. As a Punjabi whose family roots lie in Pakistan, I was also brought up on a steady diet of pre-Partition stories of love and brotherhood. My father’s friends from Pakistan visited, there were many evenings of bonhomie as they remembered the good old days, even as we kids hung on to every word invoking a past we could never re-visit.

It was easy to believe – as we sat down to large meals and an even larger dose of nostalgia – that we were indeed the same people, with the same roots, the same tastes, the same culture, but just divided by a border created by political forces beyond our control.

It was in that mood that I made my first trip to Pakistan – as part of the press party accompanying the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, as he made his historic bus yatra across the Wagah border. I was all set to get in touch with my Jhelum roots, re-discover the land of my ancestors, and get a taste of that famous bonhomie that had always marked India-Pakistan relations.

Boy, was I in for a shock!

The first false note was struck when a bunch of us were introduced to a group of volunteers who were assigned to look after us at the media centre. Our Pakistani friends repeated each new name with trepidation, as if they were trying out an entirely different language and weren’t quite sure of the pronunciation. Finally, it was my turn. “Ah, Seema,” said one of them with palpable relief. “Yeh naam toh hum jaante hain. Yeh baaki sab Hindu naam humnein kabhi sune nahi.”

That’s when I first realised that the West Punjab of my parents and grandparents had well and truly passed on. Now, there was a new West Punjab, with a new generation of Pakistanis, who had grown up with no Hindu neighbours. In fact, most of them had probably never met a Hindu in their life. To them, we were foreigners in their land; not long-lost brothers and sisters with whom they could establish an instant camaraderie.

If anything, the prevalent mood was one of hostility and suspicion. It reminded me of a story the late Mani Dixit used to tell about his time in Pakistan, when he visited a Pakistani diplomat at his home. He was introduced to the couple’s young son as a visitor from India. The child said an obedient ‘hello’ and then started running around a startled Dixit shouting ‘Hindustani kutta, Hindustani kutta!’ The embarrassed parents hurried him out of the room and apologised profusely to Dixit.

A friend’s aunt, who is married to a Pakistani, and often visits the country, had much the same experience. Sitting at the breakfast table one morning, she saw that her young nephew was playing with his toy airplanes. She walked across to join him, but stopped short when she heard him mutter, “Main India pe bomb maroonga...”

In any case, this stuff about a shared culture only goes that far. After all, it’s only Punjabis – and to some extent, Sindhis – who have a cultural affinity with Pakistan. For the rest of India, there is no special bond in the shape of a common language or even a common cuisine.

I remember an office lunch at Bengal Sweets, when there was a group of Pakistani ladies sitting at the next table. There was flurry of excitement when our paper masala dosa was served. What on earth was this, the ladies wanted to know. They had never seen a dosa in their life.

I often think of that moment when I hear the candles-at-the-Wagah-border brigade ramble on how we are the same people. You know what, actually we’re not.