A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  Every day women pound at the gates, pleading to be let inside, and they are led to Fatima’s office. She has been in charge of the shelter for only a year, but she learned one thing very early on: “The women who end up here are the rebellious ones.” But this place has a way of weakening that spirit. Perhaps it is the din of wailing children—and sometimes their mothers—that makes women want to return to whatever it was they escaped. Maybe this place makes them realise they aren’t all that special. Once your eyes get used to how dark it is inside—windows are a risk—you will see that there are two kinds of women here: those who want to marry someone of their own choice and those who want a divorce. And no one can stay here forever.

  Some women crack in two days. Better the devil you know, they say. Some women believe their father’s or brother’s or husband’s earnest promises. After they leave, Fatima gets updates on them. They have locked her in the house. They have cut off her legs. They have killed her.

  The new girl does not seem to be in any hurry to leave. Her parents travel for hours from their village to see her. She doesn’t want to talk to them. She has no interest in any of the classes—religious lectures, handicrafts, stitching and embroidery—intended to keep the women busy. She fusses over her child and trails through the corridors crooning to herself. Sometimes she takes requests, and then the sweet strains of a love song slip under the cracks of the door to Fatima’s office, silencing for just a few seconds the whine of complaints from the women who crowd around her desk like siblings snitching on each other.

  At any given time Fatima is responsible for up to forty women at the shelter, and she would have forgotten all about the new girl, were it not for the day she gives her baby away. Fouzia says the boy is sick. She is terrified he will die.

  If anything happens to him, God forbid, they will do a case on me.

  I had no choice.

  “What kind of mother are you?” Fatima asks with disgust when Fouzia returns to the shelter after meeting her family, her arms empty. The boy is no longer hers. She doesn’t seem to register a word Fatima is saying.

  “Just try and meet him [the child],” her husband had said. “See what I do to you if you even try.”

  What have I done? Will my boy ever know his mother’s name?

  Fouzia doesn’t weep, she doesn’t talk back or walk off as Fatima berates her.

  I thought when my child is older, he’ll understand, he’ll see the environment there in the village and feel that his mother was right, that she did what was right.

  Maybe she has some fantasy for herself, Fatima thinks. She imagines herself living in a beautiful house, a rich woman with the world at her fingertips. Maybe she is one of the educated ones. They think they are very modern. I am an educated girl, these girls say when Fatima asks them why they ran away from their homes. I don’t belong there.

  “Why did you do this?” she asks Fouzia.

  Even years later, she has not forgotten the girl’s reply.

  “I need to make my own life,” she says. “Whatever I want to do, I cannot do it with a child hanging onto me. I’ll become helpless.”

  The child could live with his grandparents. Maybe his father will want him.

  Fatima tries to argue with her. “But your parents could help you…”

  Fouzia will have none of it. “No. They will not listen to me, and I will not listen to them. They should let me live my life.”

  They sit in silence for a moment.

  “You don’t know what I have planned,” Fouzia says as she rises from her chair. “Just let me do whatever I need to.”

  A few days later she is gone. The next time Fatima sees her face is on the news, and by then Fouzia is calling herself by another name, the name the world has come to know her by.

  * * *

  —

  You need a good memory to remember the faces of all the women who come in just one day to the Faisal Movers bus depot seeking work. Subhan isn’t likely to remember a face. He scarcely ever looks up from his phone when he sits across from the hostess applicants or their fathers, brothers or husbands. So when reporters and officials turn up in his office in July 2016 to ask him about a woman named Fouzia, he gives them the same answer over and over: “These girls stay with us sometimes for two weeks and sometimes for two months. How can I be expected to keep tabs on each one?”

  Every girl is the same. He repeats mechanically the requirements for the position as they strain to hear him above the crackle of the loudspeaker every time the announcer presses her lips too close to the mike—Is she kissing it or trying to eat it? Subhan grumbles—to rattle off a string of departure times. Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Sahiwal, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Quetta, Bahawalpur, Rajanpur. With a belch of black smoke and a smack on the rump from the ticket inspector, the buses roll out of the depot and across the country every half-hour, all day and all night.

  “Education?” Subhan asks the prospective hostesses. “Matric,” they reply. Some lie. Others have Master’s degrees. These ones weep when he says he has nothing administrative for them. It is hostessing or nothing. He knows they won’t refuse. “It’s better than having nothing,” some of them say, sniffling.

  “Age? You need to be above twenty.”

  Most of them lie again.

  “Do you want to be paid daily or monthly?” The answer tells him how desperate the girl is. Those who opt for daily pay have promised themselves this is just a quick stopover until something better comes along. They need the money to tide them over.

  Hostesses welcome passengers on board the bus, recite the safr ki dua (prayer for safe journeys) and serve water, cold drinks and cardboard containers of biryani or sandwiches halfway through the journey. They earn a few hundred rupees for each trip, and some women clock up several trips a day to earn a bit extra. In 2016 the company announced that if a hostess did thirty trips in a month, she would get a 2,000-rupee bonus. It doesn’t sound like much, but every rupee counts for these women. If any of the rival companies offer them even 100 rupees extra, they will leave.

  The hostesses travel across Pakistan—a measure of freedom they would not have had otherwise—but Subhan knows the job isn’t ideal. The girls who come here have no other choice. They don’t have fathers or they have brothers who do nothing.

  If a woman gets the job, Subhan dispatches her to a nondescript two-storey building outside the depot. The only male allowed inside it is a young boy who delivers cups of tea, cigarettes and greasy fast food to the hostesses. They take quick naps between trips or stay the night there, sleeping on thin foam mattresses thrown on the floor, stripping down to tight white T-shirts that they wear tucked into the shalwars that the company issues them. A new girl is pointed in the direction of the hostess in charge. Naseem has been here since 2002. It has taken her more than a decade to work her way out of the buses, to the ticket counter and finally into this air-conditioned office with her own computer. She pairs new hostesses with older ones for the first three or four trips, until the girl is confident enough to do the announcements and manage passengers on her own.

  Naseem believes she can weed out the ones who will cause her trouble and spot those who will learn to step nimbly away from the hands that cup their bottoms or the fingers that “accidentally” caress their breasts as they hand out the food boxes to passengers. “Men observe the women to see what they’re like,” Naseem warns new hostesses. “They will treat you accordingly.”

  She doesn’t care what the women do in their own time. She just doesn’t want to hear about it. “People say this is no job for a woman,” she likes to say. “They say we become bad in this line of work. But the ones who are already spoiled are bad even in their homes.”

  If a new girl knows what is good for her, she will nod her head vigorously at this point.

  * * *

  —

  He doesn’t imme
diately recognize her when he first glimpses her. Could it be…? he wonders, squinting to see the girl’s face in the bright afternoon sunlight. Traffic snarls around the chowk (intersection) and his bus is nowhere in sight. He calls out her name. She turns, startled. Who knows her name here?

  When he gets back to the shelter, he goes straight to Fatima’s office.

  “Guess who I met today?” he asks. “Fouzia. Remember, the girl with the baby? The one who used to sing for us?”

  They had all wondered what had become of her.

  “How was she?”

  Aslam pauses before answering the question. “Ma’am, she…I think she…” He fumbles for an answer.

  “What?” Fatima is impatient.

  “Ma’am I think she’s doing something wrong…” He trails off.

  “Like what?”

  “I think she’s working on stage as an actress.”

  “Stage? Did she tell you that?”

  “Ma’am, she didn’t have to. You know how these women…how they dress. A bit bright and gaudy.”

  He turns to leave. “Ma’am, if I’m honest, it did not feel good to meet her. She was standing at Ghoora Chowk all alone. Dressed like that. I asked if I could help her with anything, if there was any help I could offer. She told me she was leaving Multan. She said, ‘Now I’m going to go much further than this.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  It is 2011. She lives in Islamabad now. She meets a man who goes by the name Mec—a snappy little nickname he coined for himself as media event coordinator—and everyone tells her she needs to work with him if she wants to make it in the industry, if she really does want to become the singer she’s dreamed of becoming for years. They meet in her friend’s office and she waits quietly, watching his face as her friend plays a naat, a religious hymn she has sung for him. The phone isn’t the best, and she thinks the recording makes her voice sound tinny.

  He doesn’t look too impressed.

  “Mec sir?” she interrupts the naat. “Sir, listen to my naat, please. Let me sing for you.”

  Years later, he loves to recount this moment. He imitates her. He remembers looking across the table in that office of the marketing company where she worked and thinking how this woman from Multan who wears a hijab wants to enter showbiz? Yes! He would insist to everyone who asked about her once she became famous. She was a scarfian! A hijab waali [woman who wears the hijab]! “She came to the city from the village,” he would remind them. “She couldn’t become bold all of a sudden.”

  She has a good face. There’s a bit of “innocency,” he notes. And the voice isn’t bad. Maybe she could land a couple of morning shows during Ramzaan (Ramadan) with these naats.

  “Will you do ramp walks?” he asks.

  She pauses. “Whatever you say, Mec sir.”

  The girl wants it bad. He doesn’t want to seem too eager. “OK,” he says. He agrees to work with her. She beams. “Don’t be so happy, my dear. You’re a bit overweight,” he remarks. That takes the smile right off her face. But it’s OK, he reassures her; even the fatties can be worked on. “You just need to have an artist within you.”

  It is the first time anyone has ever acknowledged that, yes, she has an artist within her. No one, not her family, not the man she married and left had believed in her. She had then fallen in love with a man she had met here in Islamabad, but even he had not supported her decision to stand on her own two feet. “I don’t want you to get into showbiz,” he had pleaded with her. He thought she was doing it for the money. “Don’t worry about money. What do you want? A house? I’ll get you a house. A car? What more do you want?”

  What she wanted was to be a star. She left him.

  Now that she had Mec on her side, the only thing holding her back was “Fouzia.” If she wanted to be a star, she needed a star’s name. A new name for a new life.

  “Candy?”

  No, that didn’t work.

  “QB?”

  There was a popular singer who went by that, and she didn’t want to share a name.

  My childhood crush once gave me a name. It’s the name everyone knows me by.

  Q – queen

  A – appealing

  N – naughty

  D – dazzling

  E – elegant

  E – exquisite

  L – lovely

  Qandeel.

  But Qandeel who?

  Qandeel from Shah Sadar Din, a girl who belongs to the Baloch Ma’arah tribe.

  Qandeel Baloch.

  Yes.

  That works. Qandeel. It’s a beautiful name. What does it mean?

  Qandeel ka matlab hai roshni. Qandeel means “the light.”

  THE MODELS OF ISLAMABAD

  In November 2016, I travel to Islamabad to meet Mec, Qandeel’s manager, to learn more about her years as a model. He invites me to a rehearsal for a fashion show at a banquet hall.

  The fashion industry in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, is tiny. When Qandeel started out as a model here, she hoped it would get her noticed so that she could have what her heart was set on: a career as a singer. But in Islamabad, there was only one show a month on average and she was competing with dozens of aspiring models, all scrambling to be picked for the catwalk. Most of these models, and photographers and fashion designers eventually headed to Lahore or Karachi, vying for the chance to be part of the multiple couture and bridal fashion weeks organized there throughout the year or a glossy spread in the weekend magazines devoted to the lifestyles and fashion choices of a new crop of starlets, socialites and influencers.

  As I wait for Mec, I am introduced to the show’s organiser, a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Khushi Khan. She stands out. While most of the models at the rehearsal are young and small, with almost prepubescent bodies, all bony shoulders and arms that you could probably encircle with the fingers of one hand, Khushi is older than the others, and tall, with broad shoulders and a full figure. While many of the other girls have faces that are heavily made up, with thick liner drawn around their lips to ensure a full-looking pout and broad strokes of baby-pink blusher layered over powdery foundation the colour of weak tea, Khushi’s face is scrubbed clean, and she has creamy pale skin, small eyes and a mouth with a perfect peaked Cupid’s bow. She is ordinary, almost plain, with a shawl draped around her shoulders like a cape, which billows behind her as she walks.

  A year ago Khushi was one of these girls, crowded into a room outside this banqueting hall, waiting to get her hair and make-up done, drinking cups of tea to calm her hunger pangs. Now, she is trying to work her way up the ladder from the ramp. “I like modelling, but what I would love to do is to organize the shows,” she confides to me in a low, rasping and deep voice. “I’ve never organised a show before and everyone has told me, ‘You can’t do this.’ ”

  When she couldn’t find investors to lend her the money for this event, Khushi used her own savings. “I need to prove that I can do this,” she says. “I’m not getting any benefit from this thing. Not one rupee. But hopefully the next one will bring me some benefit.” She pauses. “If there is a next one.” She needs to make sure the show is perfect.

  “Funky walk!” shouts Khushi from her spot at the end of the catwalk.

  The model, Sunny, skips down the runway as the DJ turns up the volume on one of the songs from the playlist for the show. It is a number from the 1999 Bollywood film Taal. Sunny looks like she may have been four or five years old when it was released. She is very thin, all sharp angles and skin stretched taut over prominent cheekbones and strong jaw. She teeters on a pair of six-inch platform heels that make her legs look like toothpicks piercing wedges of cheese. Sunny flicks her long mane of caramel-streaked hair and winks at a carpenter squatting on the floor, then beams at two men tying red satin sashes into fat bows on the backs of the chairs that line either side of t
he ramp. The men are still, quiet. Their eyes follow her, the sashay of her bony hips in skinny jeans, the shimmying shoulders under a lacy T-shirt. One of them raises his phone to take a photo of her.

  “When you do a funky walk, you wear Western clothes, pants and a shirt, and you do a little shimmy and swing your hips while you walk,” Khushi explains. “OK, normal walk!”

  Sunny halts mid-prance. Shoulders pulled back, hands on her waist, elbows jutting out, she clip-clops forward in an imitation of the models she has watched walking the runway in YouTube videos. There are no smiles for the labourers now, only a grim-faced stare at the end of the catwalk where Sunny imagines a pool of flashing cameras and photographers yelling her name.

  “Bride walk!”

  Sunny’s elbows droop. She slows down. Her movements are languid, every step forward weighed down by layers of silk brocade. Her fingers pluck at the border of an invisible dupatta to draw it across her face. She looks demurely down at her feet. Then she hears something and pauses. She looks up.

  “Khushi, the call to prayer is sounding,” she calls out. “I can’t walk during the azaan.”

  The music is turned off. The labourers trail out of the room for the midday prayers.

  “What about walking without the music?” Khushi asks. “We just need to make sure the ramp is fine.”

  Sunny strolls forward and then stumbles. Her pencil-thin heel is stuck in a tiny gap between the planks that were hammered together to create the ramp this morning. This is exactly what Khushi was worried about—the last thing she needs is for a model to tumble on the runway in front of the four hundred guests who will attend the show tomorrow. She yells for a carpenter. Sunny wriggles her foot out of the trapped shoe and lopes off the runway.