by Sanam Maher
“How did she make enough money to buy all those things?” I ask.
“Allah provides,” Azeem interjected.
When the media revealed her real name and pictures of her passport and identity card appeared on TV and online, Qandeel called from Karachi. “I want to come home,” she told her mother. Then she vacillated, changed her mind. She would send them money for Eid. She didn’t want to leave Karachi.
A week later, she said she would come. “She said, ‘I am so tired, I am so worried,’ ” Shah prompts.
“I am tired, I am worried,” Anwar bibi repeats.
“I am tired of this life…”
“I am tired of this life. I want some peace.”
When she finally did come to the house in Multan, Qandeel was perpetually on the phone. Azeem heard her talking to someone one day. “What have I done for you to hound me like this?” she snapped. “Why are you after me? What have I ever done to Pakistan? Why do you keep calling me?”
“These media people hounded her,” Anwar bibi says. “They just wouldn”t stop. Hounded her beyond all limits.”
It didn’t stop even after she died. Reporters and camera crews followed her parents to Shah Sadar Din for the funeral. Azeem didn’t attend but insists that there were hundreds of thousands of people there on the day. However, photographs and video footage of the funeral show just a few people: relatives, villagers, curious bystanders. Qandeel’s body was covered and laid on a charpoy. A cleric stood before her, raised his palms to his ears and led the congregation, four rows deep behind him, in prayer. Shah stood right behind the cleric. “I handled all the arrangements,” says Shah. “Azeem wasn’t even there for the funeral. I was. He told everyone, ‘Shah sahib will be there. I don’t have the strength to come.’ ”
After the prayers Shah approached one of the reporters who had come to the village for the funeral. “You should interview me,” Shah told him. “I know just what is going on here.” His interview ran as breaking news that day. And since then Shah has stayed in touch with that reporter and others, providing them with nuggets of information and updates as the case progresses. He glues news clippings of his interviews or stories featuring his quotes or photographs into a thick oblong notebook, the kind that schoolchildren use.
“The media got her killed,” Shah says with a sigh. “She just wanted to be famous. She wanted to make a name for herself. She wanted people to know that Qandeel exists. I once asked her, and we used to speak practically every day you know, if she knew why people spoke badly of her. They are jealous of you, I told Qandeel. They are jealous of your fame.”
Five days after the world found out that her name was Fouzia Azeem, Qandeel received a letter from Fayyaz Leghari, a lawyer in Gadai, a town twenty kilometres from Shah Sadar Din. He wanted her to stop claiming to be a Baloch. In southern Punjab the tribal and feudal system has strong roots. Men and women use the name of their clan as their family name and defer to their tribal chieftain or the head of their clan on all matters. Political power is often held over decades by the heads of clans, and a tribal chief may be responsible for everything from building a new school or hospital in his village to resolving disputes within his tribe. Shah Sadar Din is home to members of many tribes, including the Ma’arah, which has its roots in the neighbouring province of Balochistan. Qandeel’s family belong to the Ma’arah tribe and believe they are Baloch. However, Leghari did not accept that. “You have no relation [sic] with any Baloch family or tribe,” Leghari wrote in his letter. He claimed that Qandeel’s behaviour was bringing shame to everyone who was Baloch and he threatened to sue her for up to fifty million rupees if she did not stop using the name.
Safdar Shah spoke with Qandeel shortly after this, and he recorded the call. Their conversation, a little over thirty minutes long, found its way onto YouTube, and Shah often cites it as proof that he knew Qandeel and would chat with her. When I ask why he would leak a private conversation, he insists that “a friend” put it on YouTube. He has a theory about why Qandeel was threatened with legal action for using “Baloch,” and it’s a theory he spoke to Qandeel about in that leaked phone call. He repeats it often. He notes that actresses and models who come from well-known or rich families in Pakistan have found success in the film or fashion industry. “But if Muhammad Azeem’s daughter appears on television, then she’s not Baloch. Why? Because he’s a poor man? Because he’s from a small village? If the daughter of the former governor of Punjab becomes a model, she gets offers to work in films. Her brother doesn’t kill her. Her father doesn’t kill her. But if Muhammad Azeem’s daughter becomes a model…” He trails off.
I don’t get to find out if Azeem and Anwar bibi really believe this. The most they will talk about for now is their memory of the morning that they found Qandeel’s body. The last thing Azeem remembers from the night before was how sleepy he felt when he lay down on his charpoy on the roof of the house, where he and his wife slept during the summer. “I woke up in the morning and my head was spinning,” he says. Their son would later confess that he had spiked their glasses of milk with a sedative the night before.
“I was the first to wake up,” Anwar bibi says. “I felt like my body was numb. I couldn’t see very clearly. I held my hand against the wall for support and tried to go downstairs. I remember sitting on the stairs every few steps because I could not stand. The sun was out by this time and it was quite hot. I was sweating a lot and I thought that I might be feeling unwell because I had been lying in the sun for too long. I washed my face. I didn’t feel like I could cook breakfast, so when the servant who worked at our house arrived, I gave her some money and told her to buy some food from the market. I called out to Qandeel. I said her breakfast was ready. I called her three or four times, but there was no answer. I opened the door to her room and saw her lying there on the charpoy.”
With Shah deftly steering the conversation, Anwar bibi and Azeem’s explanation for why Waseem killed Qandeel comes out as a muddled version of the story that has been told, retold and then untold over the last few months. A month before we meet, Anwar bibi and Azeem were interviewed on a talk show about their daughter.2 They said that Qandeel was scared of her brothers and feared their reaction to the kind of work that she was doing. Azeem told a reporter that his daughter had confided in him about this, saying, “Baba, sometimes I feel my younger brother wants to kill me.”3
Azeem explains that his daughter tried to placate Waseem. She said she had arranged for him to marry the daughter of a woman who used to come to her parents’ house to give her massages and to oil her hair. But Waseem wasn’t interested in getting married; he wanted his sister to stop the work she was doing. Anwar bibi says her daughter asked for a year, just one year, to cash in on her sudden fame. Qandeel promised her brother she would then leave show business.
When Waseem came to his parents’ home in Multan in July 2016 while Qandeel was visiting from Karachi, Anwar bibi tried to send him back to Shah Sadar Din because Qandeel pleaded with her to do so. She gave him 20,000 rupees. He left, but returned three days later. Azeem then told his son that he wanted him to represent the family at their neighbour’s funeral because he could not walk without assistance. Waseem agreed, and it was decided that he would stay the night in Multan.
Azeem and Anwar bibi had no idea about Waseem’s plan for that night—that he had arranged for his cousin Haq Nawaz to come to the house later to help him kill Qandeel. They claim that Waseem and Haq Nawaz stole 200,000 rupees and some jewellery from Qandeel after they killed her4 and pocketed 40,000 rupees belonging to Azeem before leaving the house in Multan that night. Anwar bibi and Azeem say that the moment they saw their daughter’s lifeless body, they knew without a doubt that Waseem had killed her, and when the time came to file an official report, that is exactly what Azeem told the police. Later, Azeem would tell a reporter from the BBC that he had felt unwell and out of sorts from the effects of the sedative Waseem had given
him and could barely remember what he had told the police. He claimed the police called him back to the station several times to amend his initial statement. Sometimes they would suggest what he should write down.
Today, they speak proudly of their daughter to me. They insist on calling her “Qandeel,” the name she chose for herself, and not “Fouzia,” the name they gave her. She is a shehnshah (a queen), the one whose name will always be remembered, the one who became famous, a brave-hearted girl who was a tomboy and loved to swim, ride bikes, run six miles at a time, and do karate. She was intelligent, far more than their other children, bringing home prizes for her work in school and becoming class monitor. She danced at the slightest hint of a tune. She was not naughty but knew how to stand up for herself. She beat up a man who teased her sister but was not cut out for hard work like harvesting, milking cows, cleaning, and cooking like the other women in the village. When she came to Multan for ten days at a time, she liked to sleep for much of the day. She liked to be fashionable. She loved children and spoiled them. She cried for her son when she lost custody of him.
“And now that she is gone, you must think of that child,” Shah interrupts.
“Don’t say things like that,” Anwar bibi replies.
“I don’t want that child,” Azeem says, scowling.
“You need to get that child somehow,” Shah tells them. “He is her nishaani [memory].”
A few weeks after she died, Qandeel’s landlord in Karachi sent her parents a notice to collect her things and pay a few months of outstanding rent. The letter had the address of her apartment, and her parents finally found out where she had been living in Karachi. Azeem and Anwar bibi travelled there with Safdar Shah. ‘This sofa you’re sitting on?’ Shah says, pointing. “Qandeel’s. That table. Qandeel’s. Want to see the rest?” Her clothes, wispy silk shirts, jeans and soft chiffon tunics, fill a steel cupboard in one room. In another—the room where Anwar bibi says she walked in that morning in July to find her daughter unresponsive, a cloth thrown over her face—a bright red and yellow suitcase lies on the floor, more clothes bursting out of it. A worn-out cotton robe from a hotel, a pink lace top, a royal-blue shirt, a leather jacket, tights, a black and blue scarf threaded with silver. The floral-patterned stole that she wrapped around her bare shoulders in one of her last television interviews.
“We brought back forty-five pairs of shoes with us!” Shah crows. “There was a great big cupboard outside one of the three rooms in her flat,” he says. “It was so big, we couldn’t move it. It was filled with her things. We asked the landlord if we could just leave it there. He refused. He said he would throw it out. So we tied ropes around it and tried to lower it downstairs. The rope slipped from our hands. That cupboard of hers fell. It smashed into bits and pieces.”
Anwar bibi comes into her daughter’s room and sits on one of the sofas brought back from Karachi. Sometimes Qandeel would take selfies as she lay back on those sofas, bored and alone in her apartment. Anwar bibi watches Shah rifle through the suitcase. “We brought back a truck full of stuff,” he says, tugging at the tangled clothes. “Sofas, a fridge. Her bed.” The same bed on which she made most of her videos. Where she writhed and sang love songs and feigned a headache and promised a striptease and wept as she asked, “Why do you guys hate me so much?” That bed is now in Shah Sadar Din.
Anwar bibi buries her face in her palms.
Shah looks at her. “She gets a little crazy sometimes,” he says.
It is the first time in our conversation that Anwar bibi has cried. “I feel so strange in here,” she says. “My heart feels so sad. I feel suffocated. I feel helpless. We are helpless. When I see her things, I feel this way. People say to me now that she was good. They praise her now. If they had praised her then, she would not have left this world. She would not have angered her brothers. But what crime did my daughter commit? She was innocent. They killed an innocent. I feel sad for her and I feel worried for my son.”
This is the most that she will say during our conversation. Shah looks around the room. “Do you know what we can do with all these things?” he asks. “These clothes, these shoes—they’re of no use to these people. Where we live, no one wears these kinds of things. Do you think people would buy this stuff?”
In a corner, the top of a small fridge is covered with a smattering of junk: Mr White Smokers Toothpaste, with the end cut off to squeeze every last bit of paste from the tube, a small bottle of mustard oil, a scrubbing brush for nails, Comfort Morning Fresh fabric softener, a yoghurt and cucumber face wash for oily skin, a card for a twenty-four-hour taxi service in Karachi, a toothbrush, and what looks like a bar of pure gold. Shah’s eye falls on this and he picks it up to examine it. He shakes it. It is a powder compact, its red and black embossed YSL logo slightly chipped. It is almost empty, with just a ground-down shimmering square of flesh-coloured dust.
Shah grins. “Here you go,” he says, thrusting the compact into my hand. “Something for you to remember her by. Take it. It’ll be Qandeel ki nishaani (a memory of Qandeel).”
“PEOPLE SAY THIS IS NO JOB FOR A WOMAN”
She is seventeen and he is her mother’s cousin. She writes him letters, confessing her love for him. The words turn the mottled brown of old blood—her blood—as the years go by. On their wedding day she is led into a room filled with family and friends and seated beside him. A woman fastens something to his wrist. He dips his head forward as a garland of pink and cream flowers is hung around his neck. He feels the heft of a gold watch, the cool metallic press of a ring slipped onto his finger. His arm presses against hers and someone arranges the gauzy puff of her dupatta around her. They never hold hands. She stares at a spot on the floor. Someone takes a photograph.
More than a decade later, when the reporters find him, he will show them this photograph and tell them about the letters. They will look at the picture of the happy couple and think that for a girl marrying a man she loved so much, she sure does look miserable. But then again, what kind of shameless woman grins on her wedding day? Would she have smiled if she had known that this photograph would later be seen by thousands of people?
There is no love marriage. My parents forcibly married me to him.
That’s it.
It isn’t long after the wedding that she comes home weeping, and tells her parents about the cigarettes stubbed out on her skin, of the electric shocks that tremble in her body, the threats of throwing acid in her face. “He hates me because I am beautiful and he is not,” she says. “I am young and he is not. He hates me.” He would not let her visit them or meet her brothers. “Something is wrong with this man. He wants to kill me.”
Every time, her mother takes her back to her husband’s home. “We are Baloch,” Anwar bibi scolds her daughter as they make their way back to Kot Addu, an hour away from Shah Sadar Din, “and Baloch do not believe in running away like this. His home is your home now.” Anwar bibi knows what the people in the village would tell her child: “He can beat you. He can break your body with sticks. He can set you on fire. Whatever he does, you have to stay there. That’s it.”
Anwar bibi would finally see the burn marks when she bathed her daughter’s body and wrapped her in a shroud on the day of her funeral. Even then she told the blonde woman who came to interview her the same thing she had told her dead child all those years ago.
Months pass. The girl feels no joy when the baby comes.
They think she will settle down now that she is a mother.
I was married against my will. Any child born in that marriage is not mine, it’s his.
You have a son, her husband snaps at her. What more do you want? But even six months later, even after she has grown to love the little boy, the answers to her husband’s question continue to beat within her.
I want to go back to school, she thinks when her husband strikes her. I want to leave this place, she repeats when she knows that she w
ill go to the nearest city, Dera Ghazi Khan, and not back to her parents’ home. I want to get a job, she reminds herself as she waits in the dark to hear her husband’s snores the night she runs away. I want to stand on my own two feet, she pleads as she clutches her child and waits at the gates of the women’s shelter in May 2009.
Main iss liye paida nahin hui thi ke kissi mard ki jooti bun ke rahoon. [I wasn’t born to be worth less than some man’s shoe.]
“Name?” asks the woman sitting behind a glass-topped desk inside the Darul Aman, the government shelter home for women.
She gives her real name. The name her brother had chosen for her when she was born: “Fouzia Azeem.”
“And his?”
She looks down at the baby nestled against her. She will never forget the misery she felt the day she learned she was having that man’s child. And then the love that held her so tightly within its grasp that she endured months with a man she called an animal, just for this little boy.
“Mishal.” It means “the light.”
A few days later, she is transferred to a shelter in the city of Multan. “My parents keep coming here for me,” she had told the officials at the shelter in Dera Ghazi Khan. “They just want me to go back to my husband. I’m in danger here.” From the car window, she sees men and women squatting on the footpath outside a mosque in front of the Multan shelter. Some of the women cradle children in their dupattas. They sit there for days, refusing to leave without the woman they have come to claim. “She will run off with someone else if she stays here,” the men argue with the shelter’s guards when they tell them to go away. “We do not accept this,” the women chime in. While they wait, they watch the female guards saunter to a kiosk at the corner to buy crisps, candy, and fizzy drinks for the women behind the gates. There are rumours the guards keep a close eye on the women inside so they can sniff out the most desperate. “We have a pretty, new one with us this week,” the guards then whisper to landlords and politicians in the city. The women are not allowed to leave the shelter, but on some nights, with a thick enough wad of notes in the right hands, the gates are unlocked. At least, that’s what everyone says about this place.