A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  Some of the contestants, who have only ever seen the Indian version of the show, come into the room and try to touch the judges’ feet. Isn’t this what was expected? “Poor things don’t know how to behave when they meet a celebrity,” titters the eldest of the three judges, an actress everyone knows for her comedy roles. When one contestant prostrates himself before the judges, the producers scramble to pick him up. Some children come into the hotel lobby where the contestants are waiting. They don’t want to sing; they are just happy to spend the entire day sitting on the red velvet seats inside the air-conditioned hotel.

  Others don’t have gifts and don’t care if they make it through. “It’s enough for us that we got to meet you,” they say to the judges. Some take an aeroplane for the first time in their lives when they make it past the first round and are flown to Karachi, Lahore, or Islamabad for further auditions. Others haven’t got over the thrill of being in a hotel and turning on the taps at any time of the day or night to see a gush of hot water come forth.

  The contestants are in the running to win a car, a cash prize, and the chance to record an album, but everyone knows that the excitement of the show is the real prize. “We have to keep Pakistan’s background in mind,” the actress says when asked about the winner’s prospects in a music industry that is all but dead anyway. Might as well give these people a generator, she feels. It would be of more use to them.

  Ramsha, a fifteen-year-old contestant from Faisalabad, doesn’t have any interest in the prizes. She sings songs from the Bollywood film Aashiqui 2 and practises in the bathroom. She is going to Karachi for the next round of auditions. “I don’t even want to be the main singer,” she confesses. “I want to be a playback singer. I just want to be famous. I want that the world knows that I sing. I want to walk past someone and have them look at me and think, Oh she’s that girl, the one from Pakistan Idol. I don’t care about the prizes. Today you’ll get a prize, by tomorrow it’ll be gone. I want to be famous. That’s why I’m here.” At night Ramsha tries to sleep as her fellow contestants walk up and down the corridors of the hotel practising their scales.

  Only twelve of the thousands of contestants from seven cities in the country will remain for the final round.

  But ultimately, it is a clip of a young woman who doesn’t win one of these coveted spots, a twenty-two-year-old in Lahore who goes by the name Qandeel, that gets all the attention. In the clip, she prances on camera in a pair of hot pink and black heels, an equally pink pair of tights and a green silk shirt. Qandeel snaps her fingers and dances and sits on the hood of a car bouncing her head to the music playing from her mobile phone. “I’m a professional model. I do modelling, shoots, brand shoots,” she explains in a video recorded earlier at what appears to be her home. She sits cross-legged on a bed with an ornate headboard that has flowers and leaves carved into it. Her cheeks have been rouged and her eyebrows are swiped with too much dark powder. Her hair, parted down the middle, is pinned on each side with a schoolgirl’s barrettes. “I love singing so much,” she says. “It’s not just a hobby but a passion. I feel I can be Pakistan’s idol.”

  “What’s your name?” asks the actress judge when Qandeel walks into the room for her audition. “Pinky?”

  “Qandeel Baloch.”

  “OK, I thought maybe it’s Pinky.” She points to her outfit. “Everything is pink.”

  “You look so beautiful,” Qandeel gushes. “I always see you on TV, but Mashallah, you look so beautiful.”

  “Feel free to praise him too, or he’ll get offended,” the actress says, gesturing towards the male judge.

  “Oh there’s no point praising men; it makes no difference to them,” Qandeel replies.

  “But I’m sure men must praise you,” the third judge says.

  Qandeel says she is nervous. She puts on a little girl’s whining voice, and the judges cajole her to give it her best shot. But when she finally does sing, she is a natural. She isn’t rooted to that oval plastic mat like the other contestants. She walks forward, beckoning to the judges with her arms, beseeching them with her words, closing her eyes as she sways. She stares straight into the camera. She isn’t nervous; she is performing.

  Later, the producers add some effects to the clip. One judge has smoke billowing out of her ears. When Qandeel hits a high note, there is a sound like a spring recoiling. The male judge buries his face in his hands.

  When they tell her to leave, she strokes the hair falling from those two schoolgirl barrettes and gives a small smile and says in that little girl’s voice, “Don’t reject me, please.” She pouts. “I want to sing a song some more.”

  The actress walks over to her and holds her by the shoulders and leads her out. The male judge pretends to cry.

  “You fooled me,” Qandeel wails to the cameras waiting outside. “I told my parents I’m doing this audition and they’re so hopeful now. Now what am I going to say to them? They will just think, they rejected our daughter.” She is on the verge of tears, her breath catching on each word.

  “Don’t worry, cheer up, OK?” the actress says, patting her shoulder. “We’ll see you doing modelling some day.” As she walks away, Qandeel covers her face with both hands and lets out a wail. The show’s host pushes the mike towards her. She turns her back to him, doubling over as she sobs. Her shrieks echo in the hall. There is no one else there. The other contestants have gone away and it is now dark outside. The cameras follow her as she cups her face in her hands, the baby-pink-painted nails covering her eyes as she cries all the way out the door.

  “Poor Qandeel has wept off all her kajal [kohl],” the voiceover to the clip would later remark.

  Liars.

  All frauds.

  Watch it again. Do you see any tears?

  What I did there was my acting. Everything was planned from the start.

  It’s all bakwaas [fake].

  The audition clip is ratings gold. Qandeel is written about in one newspaper as ‘one of the most memorable’ Idol hopefuls. The reporter calls her Ms Pinky in the article, in honour of the hot pink tights and black and pink stiletto heels she wore.1 “A spectacle to behold.”

  * * *

  —

  Her five minutes on Pakistan Idol rack up well over a million hits on YouTube in just a few days but fails to get her more work. She is becoming desperate enough to work for free. She takes on small events and functions in farmhouses, at estates on the outskirts of the capital, some shows in Karachi. She goes to every fashion show she can. Mec shows her off and wants to introduce her to everyone. They quarrel. This is just a waste of time, she complains. These people just want to take my picture; there’s no money and no result. Later, when she is asked about those years, she will not go into detail about what she did to survive. You know what happens with girls, she would hint. You know what kinds of offers they make girls. You know how they try to misuse girls who are new to the industry. Talent is just not valued in Pakistan.

  She loves being in front of the camera and having her photo taken. Mec jokes that the camera “becomes hot” from taking so many photos before she gets tired of posing. But she is still too fat. The weight doesn’t come off, no matter how much she exercises. The samples that designers send for fashion shows are too small. Mec tells her he will keep trying to find dramas for her to act in, keep passing on her name and number to producers, but her chance to walk the runway is already over. There’s a certain age, there’s a certain kind of body, he explains. Focus on your singing and acting career, he advises her. Even when you’re eighty years old, you might still be acting and you can definitely still be singing away like a bird. She knows he is right.

  He remains one of the few people who has heard that naat of hers. No one is booking naat singers for their morning shows. They all want the same thing: put on those skinny jeans—or, for Eid specials, a bright shalwar kameez—and a pair of heels and sing a favourite Nazia H
asan pop song while shimmying—not too much, please, this is a family show—with the host.

  I tried a lot. I didn’t want to move forward in this industry the way other actresses move forward. Everyone knows what they get up to behind the camera. At least I’m better than that.

  One day she meets a man named Jalal at a party filled with media types. He hosts a show on television where celebrities play games and compete against each other. She doesn’t care about the show. When Jalal tells her he has represented Pakistan internationally as a black belt in tae kwon do, he is pleasantly surprised that a girl like her—an aspiring model or actress or singer; he isn’t sure what she is—is so curious about his sporting achievements. I could teach you, he offers.

  And so, three times a week, for up to two and a half hours each, she attends Jalal’s classes, held at a mall in the capital. She wipes her face clean of make-up and puts on the crisp white shirt and trousers that all his students wear. The other models Jalal teaches are spoiled. If he scolds them even once, they don’t come back. These girls have friends—men—loitering outside the class, waiting for them. He has no such complaints about Qandeel. He is impressed by her strength. Horsepower, he chuckles to himself when he sees her kick. When one of the boys in the class offers to take her home and makes a move on her, she uses that strength. “I really put him in his place,” Qandeel tells Jalal at the next class. He would think of those kicks years later when he finds out she has been killed. He wonders why she didn’t fight back. Then he reads in the newspaper that she had been given a sedative and feels proud that whoever did that had known she was a fighter.

  She doesn’t tell him she has wanted to learn to fight since she was a little girl. “I left my village to come to Islamabad,” she replies when he asks her where she is from. He doesn’t ask her anything else, and she never tells him about watching her brother practising his kicks and high jumps in the courtyard of their home in Shah Sadar Din.

  She’s trying her hand at acting. A television drama she has been chosen for falls through. Jalal sees another drama she stars in. She can’t deliver dialogue at all, he thinks. She has a pretty face, but she can’t act very well and she gets too emotional on sets. She sulks. Why is that girl’s role bigger than mine? Why do I have fewer scenes?

  Jalal suspects that she is struggling, and is proved right when she says she does not have the money to pay for classes. I don’t have the money for my rent or any household expenses, she tells him. Please help me find a job. He can’t do that, but he offers to let her attend his classes for free. Even when the modelling works out, she only makes up to 10,000 rupees for one photo shoot if she is lucky. Learn martial arts, he suggests; at least that’s a skill you’ll have if all other means of earning are closed off to you. He is thrilled when she is cast in an action production called G4. Her character beats up men. She is perfect for it. The project is cancelled.

  After a year or so, she tells Jalal she is leaving Islamabad for Lahore. Nothing is happening for me here, she says. Everyone says I need to go to a bigger city and try my luck. She is sad about leaving the classes. Some of his students keep up with her and later tell Jalal that Qandeel is doing very well in Lahore. She is on TV often. She is making a lot of money. Her Facebook page is full of glamorous photos. Jalal is surprised to learn that she is doing so well. When she dies and he finds out that she had been supporting her parents even when she did not have the money to take a taxi to and from his classes, he will remember how there was always a general perception that she was a rich girl. She has even made a music video in which she preens like a Western pop star, wearing a tiny skirt and fishnet stockings. “Make me wet, yet be my lover,” she sings.

  The music channels said the video was not good. They told me, “It’s too bold. The vocals are not good. It’s too bold for us.” They refused to air my video.

  When she visits Islamabad, she makes sure to call Jalal. He meets her briefly, and, seeing that she is the bright centre of a buzzing new crowd, does not try to see her again. When she asks him why he is avoiding her, he tells her he does not like her friends. She laughs and tells him that if he ever wants to see her, she will chase away the whole lot of those strange, colourful characters.

  She wants to go to Murree, a mountain resort town thirty kilometers northeast of Islamabad, because she has never seen snow in her life. She comes to Islamabad and pleads with Mec to drive her up there.

  “I doubt there will be any snow now,” he warns her. “It’s not the season.”

  She insists. Her skin has reacted badly to the heat of Lahore and humidity of Karachi. A brief spell in the cooler green climes of Murree is exactly what it needs. Just a day or two, she promises Mec.

  On the drive up there Mec laughs at her when she wants to stop and play with some children she sees on the side of the road. She crouches beside them and gives them fistfuls of candy and tells Mec she wishes she had money so she could pay for them to go to school.

  With great difficulty, they manage to get a tiny room in a guesthouse in Murree. Most places are closed or booked out for the season. Qandeel plays with her phone constantly, taking selfies and recording videos. She is happy there. When they sway in a chairlift above the mossy hills and the gossamer mist brushes her hair, she feels as though she could reach out and touch the sky. She makes a video for her fans.

  By the evening she is running a fever. They ignore it until it peaks at 104 degrees and then they have to find a hospital. It is raining hard and Mec has to return to Islamabad for a photo shoot. Back at the guesthouse, Qandeel tells Mec to leave and lock the door to their room from the outside. She wants to take her medicines and just sleep. She doesn’t want any food.

  When he is done with the shoot, Mec calls her from Islamabad. Poor thing could be lying in that room dead for all I know, he thinks. But she is awake and hungry. Come pick me up, she says. Bring something spicy with you, please. He gets a karhai [curry] made and drives for almost two hours to get to her. The door to their room has not been opened since he left. She looks much better. Let’s get some coffee, she says after she has eaten. Having slept off the fever, she’s been playing with her phone while waiting for Mec. She lies in bed and swipes through all the photos and videos from the trip. She uploads some of them to Facebook and Twitter.

  In one video she is messing around with Mec in the market. Her eyebrows peek out above her big black-rimmed sunglasses and she has pulled up the hood of her Barca jacket to loosely cover her hair. She pushes up her sunglasses and tilts her head from side to side, trying to find her best angle. Mec, in a yellow shirt and sunglasses, leans in behind her.

  “Ummmmm,” she says into the camera. “How I’m looking?”

  Mec grins.

  “Tell me,” she whines. A demand, the lilt of a petulant child: “How I’m looking?”

  THE BLUE-EYED CHAIWALA

  Not everyone seeks fame. Sometimes fame—the kind some people spend their entire lives courting—finds you. It is this kind of overnight fame that comes unannounced to a seventeen-year-old boy—a beautiful fair-skinned blue-eyed boy with a brooding stare—in October 2016 when he becomes one of the most recognizable faces in Pakistan. In just five days, two photographs of him on the social media site Instagram rake in more than 50,000 likes and thousands of comments. His fame spreads not just in Pakistan, but around the world. His “good looks” are featured on CNN,1 the BBC notes that his “piercing eyes” have “thousands” of Twitter users “love-struck,”2 and BuzzFeed describes him as “damn HOT” with “effortless high-fashion model looks.”3

  Very soon he is charming audiences on morning talk shows, being showered with offers to model and act, smiling and posing for countless photographs, and receiving a stream of marriage proposals. There have been many firsts for him this month: sitting in a chauffeur-driven car, flying in a plane, staying in a hotel, buying a suit. Before his new-found fame, he sold tea for a living in a market in Islamabad,
and he would worry about how to earn enough to ensure everyone in his family—his father, his two mothers and seventeen siblings—had enough to eat. Now he dines at five-star restaurants.

  What does he like to eat?

  “Bhindi.”

  His name is Arshad Khan, and he has become known in Pakistan and around the world as the Chaiwala, or tea-seller. He is famous for having done absolutely nothing.

  In 2015, Qandeel’s “How I’m looking?” video created a blueprint for the kind of fame that viral stars in Pakistan could achieve. The question—with her intonation and accent—was parodied endlessly and mimicked not just by the average Pakistani social media user, but by some of the country’s best-known singers and actors. It is impossible to know how many times the original video was watched—it has been copied and shared to hundreds of pages—but it led to Qandeel’s inclusion in Google’s list of the top ten Pakistanis searched for online in 2015.4

  By 2016, the year Qandeel was murdered, there were more than 44 million social media users in Pakistan.5 Facebook had the biggest slice of the pie, with 33 million users,6 followed by Twitter with 5 million and Instagram with 3.9 million. Arshad Khan, like Qandeel before him, had joined the ranks of a handful of viral stars: men and women who become household names, their images or videos spilling over from social media sites into millions of conversations on apps like WhatsApp, shared and forwarded on a loop until mainstream media outlets take notice and feature them on the news or on talk shows.

  Pakistan’s most well-known viral stars include Taher Shah, whose “Eye to Eye” music video briefly trended globally on Twitter, while his second song, “Angel,” racked up more than 2 million views on YouTube and Facebook in the first four days of its release;7 Asif Rana, whose passionate 2015 Facebook announcement of a tiff with his best friend Mudasir became the stuff of a thousand memes;8 and Shafqat Rajput, a barber in Bahawalpur who was filmed in 2017 applying flammable products to clients’ hair and whipping out a lighter to set their coiffures on fire before trimming them.9