A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  Is that what her brother had pictured, what he had feared, when he saw her dancing in that room?

  Will her mother remember that day when she walks back into the same room more than a decade later with small knots of journalists, their cameras slung around their necks, dark blooms of sweat on their shirts in the July heat? The journalists will hear about the time the girl’s brother slapped her when he saw her dancing.

  By then, hundreds of thousands of people will have seen her dance. They will have seen her pull the white bathrobe she stole from a five-star hotel down over her shoulders. It’ll slip to her hips, a single knot holding it together at her waist. In that lime-green slip of a bikini, she’ll caress her breasts and trace the curve of her stomach. “This was just the trailer,” she will tell these people. “Do you want to see more?”

  THE BALOCH FAMILY

  It takes a little over two hours to drive from Multan, a city in southern Punjab, to the village of Shah Sadar Din. After many checkpoints, where officers shake down the young men on motorbikes, some riding two or three at a time, their thin arms curled around each other’s waists, you’ll see a silty brown river snaking past men lounging on charpoys by its banks. On the way, if you admire the fields of sugarcane, each stalk taller than a man, your driver, a local who has played under the green sway of these plants as a child, will scoff. The ganna is short this year because there has been little water. He has seen these plants soar to fifteen feet. On the side of the road men and women stand by smoking steel vats, stirring a muddy treacle, folding crushed almonds and dried fruit into the soupy folds of the molasses. They sell packets of this liquid sugar along the highway.

  You’ll drive past a thicket of short, squat mango trees, sufaidas (eucalyptus) that are chopped for firewood, and date trees that in five or six months will yield bundles of silky-skinned fruit the size of a baby. The grass here is the brightest malachite. It is impossible to know where the sky ends and the azure, cloud-filled pools of water in the fields begin.

  A thermal power station with lazy puffs of smoke curling from its cooling towers powers the entire region. Great swoops of cable arc from one pylon to the next, each tower a child’s line drawing of a robot standing astride our puny world. Within an hour of leaving Multan, you will reach the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Housing Complex and its accompanying hospital, donated to the people here by the Turkish government after their homes were washed away during the floods of 2010. In the distance smoke plumes from brick kilns, where men, women, and children spend their entire lives on their knees under the sun, cooling, patting, stacking, and packing red bricks that are sent across the country. They will never leave this burning land, always thousands of rupees short of freeing themselves from their debts to the kilns’ owners.

  Beyond the kilns, white canopies hover inches above the ground, protecting a swathe of GM crops. You’ll pass warehouses, built better than most homes here, filled with the government’s wheat reserves. And then you’ll see the blaze of the mustard fields. If you have spent your life in a city, you will struggle to remember seeing a yellow so bright, a yellow like the neon gleam of a McDonald’s sign in the night, like a New York taxi washed clean by the rain. After this, you arrive in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan and it will feel as though that mustard field is the last thing of beauty you will see for some time.

  You will abruptly realise that no women feature in any of the advertisements on the billboards. It is the first time you have seen only men in ads for washing powder. You’ll see women on the streets, but never their faces. Many of them wear what looks like a black ski mask with slits for their eyes under their hijab. The others wear a burqa that makes you feel naked under your dupatta. The burqa’s fabric falls from a skullcap fitted to the woman’s head. A thin funnel rises from this cap. The burqa has no slits for the eyes. The funnel allows air into the burqa so the women do not suffocate. If you have ever been caught in a dust storm, you’ll understand how these women see the world. When you stare at them, your contact in Dera Ghazi Khan, a journalist, tells you about a place not too far from here where the tribal belt of Balochistan province starts, where he says the women are not given any shoes. When you don’t understand, he explains impatiently, “If you’re not wearing shoes and you walk outside, where will your eyes remain? You’ll never look up—never look at any man—if you’re scared of where your naked foot might fall when you leave your home.”

  Less than an hour away from Dera Ghazi Khan, you speed past fish farms and a smashed tractor—five people dead, and no ambulance for miles—then pass a board that welcomes you to the village of Shah Sadar Din. Qandeel Baloch was born here.

  In July 2016, the villagers watched as reporters from all over—not just from Pakistan, but from abroad, from the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times—turned up in Shah Sadar Din to cover the story of Qandeel Baloch. It was a great time to be a local reporter. If you weren’t covering the story, you were working as a fixer, an interpreter, a driver…the possibilities were endless. The local journalists took the visiting reporters to Shah Sadar Din over and over again. Everyone wanted to see where Qandeel came from. The villagers couldn’t understand it. “My friend, you have come here for nothing,” a man said to one of the reporters. “Strange people, coming here just like that.” What did he mean? the reporter asked. “We have a tradition here that every second or fourth day some girl is killed and thrown in the river. You media guys are creating hype for nothing.” A girl could be stuffed into a gunny sack or the kind of bag used to carry wheat or sugarcane and the bag could be filled with stones. The bag would sink to the bottom of the river. The girl would stay there, buried under the stones.

  * * *

  —

  When I meet Qandeel’s parents, three months have passed since the day she died. Any meeting with them must now be organized through a man named Safdar Shah, who introduces himself over the phone as their lawyer. A few days earlier, Qandeel’s parents had told a reporter they have been forced to beg for food in Shah Sadar Din, where they returned after they were evicted from their house in Multan.1 While their daughter was alive, they divided their time between Shah Sadar Din and Multan, and Qandeel paid the 10,000 rupees’ rent for this house every month. Without her, they could not afford the rent. But Shah says the meeting will take place at the house in Multan, where Qandeel was murdered, and not in Shah Sadar Din. “It’s no problem at all,” he says airily. “Just don’t come to the village. People here aren’t happy about all the reporters who have been coming to meet the parents.”

  It takes around twenty-five minutes to travel from Multan’s city center to Qandeel’s home. We pass through the cantonment area and drive past the army club with its fat white onion domes and buildings whose walls bear neat lines of portraits of young men. The photographs change from grainy black and white—soldiers who died long enough ago to have roads named after them and paragraphs devoted to them in textbooks—to rosy-cheeked technicolour. These are pictures of shaheeds (martyrs)—men who have died in the line of duty for their country. Everything is perfectly ordered, from the manicured grass outside the city’s only McDonald’s to the separate line for donkeys and cyclists at the checkpoints to get in and out of the cantonment. Just past the last checkpoint, we pass the sprawling skeleton of a building under construction, the new garrison library, which boasts enough space for 200,000 books, and then banks and a line of schools with names like Blossom Valley and Bloomfield.

  Further on, as the road narrows and deteriorates, there are fewer women. Men crowd the vegetable carts and fruit stands and linger at shops selling household supplies, shoes and clothes. There are signs indicating a textile mill. Dung cakes slapped on the low red-brick walls of houses grow warm in the November sunlight. As we near the Karachi Hotel neighbourhood, the buildings thin out. The area is home to many who have come to the city from villages across Punjab seeking work. Small houses, narrow, one or two storeys high, constructed by landowners who rent
them out for five to ten thousand rupees a month, are squeezed together on patches of land.

  Someone is building a house just a few steps from the one that Qandeel rented for her parents. The scrub has been cleared, and the foundations reveal a simple, cramped layout: a kitchen, two rooms and what will probably be a bathroom. It is quiet, with the houses at some distance from the road. There are no squalling cars, no shrieking children playing in the street, no shops around the corner, no gurgle of water in open gutters. It does not have the familiar smells: there is no scent of sewage, no waft of food simmering on a stove, no piles of chicken fat, vegetable skins or cores of fruit festering in heaps on the side of the street. It seems to be deserted.

  Safdar Shah’s white car stands at the end of the lane, just before the sharp right turn to Qandeel’s house. Only one of the four houses here is occupied. A woman emerges from it and narrows her eyes at us. “Media?” she asks. I nod, yes. “Do you have a card? Any phone number?” She takes my business card, and it disappears down the front of her shirt, probably tucked away with loose change and bits of paper with prayers scribbled on them. “Never know when you guys might come handy, right?” she says as she walks off.

  Shah waits at the door to Qandeel’s house. He wears a starched black shalwar kameez that puffs around him and rustles when he moves. His shoes have been scrubbed to a dull glow down to their pointed tips. He probably slicked down his hair this morning, but it has buffeted into wispy clouds. His light skin is flushed pink in the heat and his moustache is a jet black straight from a bottle. He looks like the kind of man who, if you ask him his age, will coyly reply, “How old do you think I am?”

  “I know more about her than they could ever tell you,” he says right away, as though picking up the thread of our earlier conversation on the phone. “Did I tell you I am a Syed? [A Syed is a Muslim who claims to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad’s family.] We don’t lie, you see.”

  Inside, Qandeel’s father, eighty-year-old Muhammad Azeem, perches on a black imitation-leather sofa, his legs, stick-thin within the loose folds of a dhoti, pulled close to his chest. He absently strokes the puckered nub of flesh where one leg abruptly ends. He lost his foot six months ago when a car ran over it. “The daughter came here to have his leg fixed,” Shah explains. “She came to Multan on the second day of Eid and she planned to get his treatment done and then fly back to Karachi. She said she was going to leave for India after that.”

  Qandeel’s mother, Anwar bibi, looks like she is in her fifties. She is small, the hard rise of her collarbones under her kameez hinting at a thin frame. She sits on the edge of one of the two charpoys in the room. Her feet dangle inches above the floor.

  Shah drives Azeem and Anwar bibi here from Shah Sadar Din when he needs them to meet a reporter or appear on a talk show. He brushes off a query about Anwar bibi’s claim that she and her husband have been forced out of this house. The landlord doesn’t mind if they stay here for some time for free, he explains, and anyway they now have around 100,000–150,000 rupees in donations from human rights groups and sympathizers.

  I try to gauge Shah’s relationship with Qandeel’s parents but it’s not clear how he helps them or what he does as their lawyer since they are represented by the district prosecutor in their daughter’s murder case. “I go everywhere with them,” he explains as he sits on the charpoy next to Anwar bibi. “I mean, they refuse to go anywhere without me. They tell me, ‘If you go, we’ll go with you.’ Even if it’s for their son’s bail hearing. You see, we have known each other’s families for generations. We have been together for eight generations. Our fathers were friends and their women come and go from our house. We Syeds don’t usually go to other people’s houses [I assume he means people who aren’t as well off as his family] but we went to theirs. The one time Azeem had to go somewhere without me, he started weeping in the car. I asked him, ‘Uncle, why are you crying?’ Do you know what he said?”

  Azeem is quiet. He does not tell us what he said.

  Shah continues, “He told me, ‘Safdar, promise me you won’t leave me!’ So I swore, ‘As long as I am alive, I’ll never leave your side.’ ” He points to Azeem. “You see, they have cell phones; people can call them, but nobody ever understands what they say.”

  While Anwar bibi seems to understand and speak some Urdu, Azeem responds only in Siraiki. He tends to mumble, his words gummy and sloshing and often unintelligible when he cries, which is frequently and in small bursts.

  Shah says he is the family’s pir (spiritual leader). In rural areas across Pakistan, particularly in the provinces of Sindh and Punjab, pirs offer everything from religious intercession to dispute resolution among their followers, known as mureed. In southern Punjab, where Azeem’s family lives, many political parties turn to pirs—usually landed, wealthier residents of small towns and villages—in order to secure the votes of their followers. “I help them because we are all from the same village. Our lands border each other, and they are my mureed,” Shah says. “Azeem Khan is my mureed. His children are my mureed, and their children and so on.”

  Both Azeem and Anwar bibi only stare at the television as Shah makes these statements. They watched their daughter on that screen in a handful of television dramas and morning show appearances. She would call them to let them know what channel and what time she would be on. “In those moments, while we were waiting to see Qandeel, life would feel great,” Azeem says. As a child, she had told them she wanted to be a star. And now that she was singing, dancing and acting, they were happy for her.

  Shah sighs. “She didn’t talk to them for years. Didn’t talk to the father for three years.”

  “I supported her,” Azeem pipes up. “I used to send her money.”

  Shah continues as if he hasn’t heard him, “Didn’t talk to the mother for six years.”

  “She would call us sometimes,” Anwar bibi says quietly.

  “Oh she just ended all relations with them,” Shah says. “She thought they wouldn’t like what she was doing. She said she would never look back.”

  Qandeel’s six brothers knew about the television shows she was on, and they didn’t like it. “Tell her we never want to see her again,” one of them told Anwar bibi. Qandeel had two sisters, and when she returned to Shah Sadar Din for her younger sister Shehnaz’s wedding around 2010 her parents tearfully welcomed her home but said she couldn’t stay. “Leave, or your brothers will pick a fight with us,” Anwar bibi told her daughter.

  Qandeel’s neighbour in Shah Sadar Din remembers a night, perhaps during that visit, when Qandeel appeared at his house out of breath. Her brother Arif had a pistol and was threatening to kill her. “I had no idea what had happened,” he recalls. “Qandeel had come there with a driver and she took off. After she left the village, her parents had told us all she was working at some mill.” She did not want to come back to Shah Sadar Din after that. She found this house in Multan and told her parents that she would meet them there once a year.

  “Our sons, their wives and children didn’t bother with us after that, and we didn’t bother with them,” Anwar bibi says. “Our daughter took care of us and no one else paid us any attention. We didn’t know much about what she did, and we didn’t really understand it. She travelled to Malaysia, Sharjah, Dubai, and South Africa, but we had no clue why. What she’s doing, what she’s not doing—we didn’t bother asking. It was her life.”

  By June 2016 they were alarmed. Their daughter’s face and voice seemed to be on TV almost every week. These were not appearances that she called to tell them about. “We saw these photos on the news,” Anwar bibi says. “They said Qandeel did an interview with a cleric. There were photographs of her sitting on his lap. Wearing his cap. Every day those pictures were shown on every channel. Over and over again.” While Anwar bibi and Azeem were in Multan for a visit, they found out that some people were taking photos of their home in Shah Sadar Din.

 
“These kameenay [bastard] mullahs,” sputters Azeem.

  “Those bearded men,” Shah suggests.

  “Those bloody bearded ones!” Azeem continues. “They asked people, ‘Who is Qandeel? Where is she from? What do you know about her?’ ”

  Qandeel was worried. “Don’t think badly of me,” she told her father. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m just fighting with someone.”

  Anwar bibi scolded her daughter. She didn’t want her to do any interviews or talk about the cleric. “These people are bigger than you,” she remembers saying. “Don’t meet these people who are above your stature,” she cautioned. Remember where you come from. Whose daughter you are.

  A few days later, in the last week of June 2016, everyone found out who she was, where she came from and her father’s name. She had been married and had a son. Stills of her passport and national identity card, with her real name, “Fouzia,” were shown on the news. When news broke that Qandeel Baloch was really Fouzia Azeem of Shah Sadar Din, Waseem refused to leave his home. People were coming to the mobile phone shop he owned in the village with their phones. “Can you download your sister’s latest videos on this for me?” they’d ask, sniggering. When Waseem’s friends came to his house to enquire about him, why he hadn’t been out drinking with them, why he wasn’t coming to the hookah pani (shisha) spot any more, he told his mother to say he wasn’t in.

  Up until this point Waseem had kept in contact with his sister. “Whatever he asked her for, she gave him,” Shah claims. “If he said he wanted a mobile phone that cost 80,000 rupees, she bought it for him. If he asked for one lakh [100,000] rupees, she sent it to him. She did everything for him and her sisters. When Shehnaz got married, she sent a truck loaded with things for the new bride, including an air conditioner.”