A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  The others titter and nod knowingly. They have no doubt that this really happened.

  Statistics point to an altogether different reality. In 1997 the Asian Development Bank reported that the district of Dera Ghazi Khan is “the least developed division of Pakistan, with more than 50 percent of the population below the poverty line.”6 Even sixteen years later, life was not much better for most of the people of Dera Ghazi Khan—the district was one of eleven in Punjab where a quarter of Pakistan’s poor reside.7

  There’s another story about Shah Sadar Din that many of the men I meet in Dera Ghazi Khan are proud of. In March 2009 the Sri Lankan cricket team was visiting Lahore for a match when it came under attack. The bus transporting the players was hit with hand grenades and fired on. Seven people, including six policemen, were killed that day. And, the story goes, two of the attackers were boys from Shah Sadar Din. The following month the New York Times reported that Taliban insurgents “are teaming up with local militant groups to make inroads in Punjab” and warned that the “dusty, impoverished fringes of Punjab could be the next areas facing…insurgency” in Pakistan. Quoting a senior police official, the story noted that “militants have gained strength considerably in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan.”8

  Religious fervour here is a particularly violent strain. “It has nothing to do with Islam,” feels the Daily Pakistan’s bureau chief, Shaukat Iqbal. “It’s just the society there. People might not even know how to read the kalma [declaration of faith], but they’ll say they are Muslim.” He’s scornful of the locals. “Ask them their age and they’ll say, ‘I’ve bathed forty times in my life, so I am forty years old.’ In this day and age.”

  “This is a criminal kind of area,” Siddiqui says. The locals say landlords and tribal chiefs hold sway in the villages and towns in the district, and they maintain their influence by making sure no one bands together against them. Petty feuds quickly spiral out of control, often goaded on by the landlords. And when it comes to women, they warn, even a whiff of disrespect can get you killed. In February 2017 it was reported that at least one woman is killed and five others tortured over domestic disputes every day in south Punjab.9 Siddiqui tells me about a woman who had been murdered by her husband just the other day. He only remembers this incident because he found it odd that the man didn’t shoot the woman, as is the norm here, but strangled her. The others chime in with their tales: a man who killed his mother and two sisters but who can be found in his home village this very minute because he never went to jail; a woman whose legs were cut off because—well, they’re not actually sure why; a girl who was found with a boy a few days ago and the boy was immediately packed off to Saudi Arabia, while the girl…no one tells me what the girl’s father did to her when he found out.

  It’s not just women who are at risk. Three days after Qandeel was murdered, a man died after five men chopped off his arms, lips and nose. The attackers ran off with the man’s severed limbs, leaving him to bleed to death by the side of the road. He had been having an affair with a married woman who lived in Paiga village in Dera Ghazi Khan district.10 In February 2017 the nose and lips of a twenty-two-year-old man were cut off after he eloped with a girl. Members of the girl’s tribe accused the man of kidnapping her. When she was “recovered” and returned to her parents’ home, she was declared kari—black, a woman who has lost her honour—and sold. In most cases, a woman who is found with a man to whom she is not married is murdered right away. Alternatively, the couple is brought before a jirga, or council of elders, and—following the custom in many villages in Dera Ghazi Khan district—the man has to pay a penalty and the woman is either killed or sold for the same amount as the penalty.

  “It might be a big deal for you, but for us these are small things,” says one reporter who doesn’t want to give his name. “If we started highlighting all these cases, then the entire media industry of Pakistan might as well come and set up shop in the district. It’s not that we don’t respect women,” the reporter wants me to know. For instance, he points out, women are held in such esteem that if there is a clash between members of two tribes and three or four women from one tribe visit the home of the opposing tribe’s chief, they can ask for forgiveness or a truce and return to their homes without a scratch or a hand laid on them. “That is how highly we regard our women,” he says.

  If they want to go to school or college, they are given permission to do so. At the City School in Dera Ghazi Khan—a branch of a well-known expensive private school based in Lahore—many of the female students are the first in their family to be educated. Women who wish to work can get jobs in their village or the district as teachers. “But the way that Qandeel was, we just cannot accept a woman like that,” the reporter says. “What she was doing was wrong. And if you’re doing something wrong in your own home, but you keep that within those four walls, that’s all right. But she was doing things—dancing, singing—for everyone to see. Our religion doesn’t allow this, our culture doesn’t allow this, our area and our traditions do not allow this.”

  Since July 2016 the people of Shah Sadar Din have had to explain their culture and traditions to the outsiders who streamed in when news broke of Qandeel’s murder. “There have been so many murders here since then,” the reporter says. “But Qandeel was a bit famous, a bit well known, so maybe that’s why it got highlighted.”

  The locals find the attention distasteful. If they were initially curious about the media, they now find its presence disrespectful. “Qandeel’s relatives say that her father should not continue to meet these journalists,” the reporter claims. “People in the village say that they are being given a bad name with all this media coverage.” They have started to refuse to give interviews, and Safdar Shah says that some have warned him not to bring any more reporters or camera crews to the village. It has become difficult for outsiders to meet or interview Qandeel’s relatives or friends of the family, who don’t want word to get out that they have been giving information to the media, particularly as the court case against Qandeel’s brother and her cousin Haq Nawaz continues.

  The answer to the question of whether people in Shah Sadar Din knew about Qandeel before Malik Azam ran a story revealing her identity changes depending on who you talk to. “We all know each other here,” says Hussain, a man who lives a few steps from the mosque around the corner from Qandeel’s home in the village. “We knew who she was. We knew that Qandeel Baloch is Fouzia Azeem. It’s you who found out later.”

  He claims that many people in the village liked to watch Qandeel on television when she appeared on talk shows or interviews or sang and danced. Siddiqui says he knows of people who liked Qandeel’s Facebook page, even though none of them would admit to it today. “Her brother’s friends used to watch her videos,” he says. “They wanted her.” Hussain explains that as long as it was only people in the village who knew who she was, there was no problem. The moment the rest of the country found out, they felt disgraced.

  Few mention Mufti Abdul Qavi. He might visit from time to time and have a family connection to the village, but most of the people here do not seem to revere him. In some conversations the mention of his name elicits titters. “That horny cleric,” one man calls him. “Not many people here know Mufti Qavi,” Hussain claims. When the selfies and video from Qandeel’s encounter with Mufti Qavi went viral, there was chatter in the village about the cleric’s roots in Shah Sadar Din. A few days later, when Malik Azam’s story revealed that Qandeel was from the same village, hundreds of thousands of people across the country suddenly knew the name Shah Sadar Din, and it wasn’t because of the riches in the banks or the expensive land or anything else the villagers are proud of.

  But there are also those who say they only found out that Qandeel was one of their own when the Daily Pakistan story came out. Five days after Azam’s scoop was published, Fayyaz Khan Leghari, the vice chairman of the union council in the neighbouring town of Gadai, sued Qandeel for 50 mi
llion rupees in damages for adopting Baloch as her surname. He wanted to threaten her with a greater penalty, but fifty million was the maximum amount he could claim in such a case. He says that the tribe that Qandeel belongs to—the Ma’arah—are not Baloch, and their attempts to claim otherwise are lies.

  “I just wanted her to tell the truth and to be honest,” says Leghari, a short, mild-mannered Baloch man in his forties. “Baloch people all over the world contacted me—they even offered monetary help if I needed it—because they were so worried about what people would think of them if they believed Qandeel was also Baloch.”

  A friend sent him the link to a video Qandeel uploaded on to her Facebook page. Leghari watched her kneeling on her bed, wearing a traditional black and pale-yellow Baloch woman’s embroidered shirt. She had veiled her face with a dupatta. She called herself Balochi Laila and dedicated the song to her “Indian lovers and fans.” She wore an ornate silver headpiece which twinkled and chimed as she shook her hips, raised her arms and thrust out her chest. She played with her veil before finally taking it off.11

  “That was totally against our Baloch traditions,” Leghari says. “Baloch people are honourable and our women cover themselves. They do purdah [veil themselves] and she is showing off her naked body and saying she is Baloch. If someone is not Baloch and they—with their behaviour and their actions—defame us and ruin our name, I take offence at that.” Giving notice of the case to Qandeel, he warned her that her bid to achieve fame and “cheap publicity” was hurting the sentiments of the Baloch people. They were supposedly extremely dejected by her behaviour.

  Ultimately, whether they claim they knew Qandeel’s identity all along and or say they were unaware of it, the locals took action. The easiest thing to do was to turn their sights on her family, especially her younger brother. Waseem used to run a small mobile phone shop in the village marketplace, funded by Qandeel. While Hussain claims that Qandeel would sometimes visit the village late at night, arriving and leaving before any of her friends or extended family could find out, others say that she would ask her driver to stop at the edge of town and wait for Waseem so she could hand him wads of cash. When she sent money to her parents, he would allegedly pester them for a handout.

  The mobile phone shop, just big enough for three or four men to stand in at a time, is nestled inside the village’s main marketplace. It has a clear glass exterior and the latest mobile phones are displayed on glass shelves. Waseem soon sold it off. It was the second business he had run into the ground since Qandeel started giving him money. He liked to drink and lounge at the local dhaba with his friends, sucking on the gurgling pipe of a hookah or smoking hashish-laced cigarettes. He was known as a “loafer type” and a man of short temper. “He kept bad company,” Hussain says dismissively. “All their evenings would be spent outside the home.”

  Waseem’s parents say that after the Daily Pakistan story revealing Qandeel’s real name, their son was taunted. “You have no shame,” he would be told by friends and strangers. “You are worth nothing.” Hussain remembers someone jeering at Waseem, “Your sister is singing and dancing in her knickers and you’re living a luxurious life with the money she earns.”

  “They would say, ‘You have no honour. Your sister dances naked,’ ” says Hussain. People would go to Waseem and ask if he could download his sister’s latest clip on to their phones. Hussain quickly clarifies, “I have never seen them. I’ve never seen any of her videos.”

  Soon people from Shah Sadar Din who worked with Qandeel’s brother in Saudi Arabia were mocking him, Hussain claims. “They told him that his sister was bringing dishonour to their village. They would have thought it was necessary to do something about this. They would have thought about killing her.”

  The day Qandeel was murdered, a reporter who did not wish to give me his name was on his way home from a neighbouring district. He stopped to have some tea with friends, five of whom were from Dera Ghazi Khan; one was a visitor. “The minute I heard what had happened, I said, ‘This is great news,’ ” the reporter confesses. The five men from Dera Ghazi Khan agreed, but the visitor was appalled.

  “How can you say this?” he asked. “A woman has been murdered.”

  “Go ask anyone in our area,” the reporter explained. “They will all say the same thing. You can think it’s illiterate or savage. But if I travel anywhere in Pakistan and I’m asked where I’m from, if I say Shah Sadar Din, then the immediate answer will be, ‘Oh! Isn’t Qandeel Baloch from your area?’ At least we don’t have that to worry about any more.”

  When I ask if it matters that the murder goes against the laws of Pakistan, the reporter looks slightly puzzled. “The law can be broken, but we can never break the rules of our culture,” he explains. “To break the law is nothing at all. These laws can be written and rewritten. But the rules of our culture have been around for centuries. To break them is very, very difficult.” At the end of the day Qandeel brought her fate upon herself, he feels. “Islam tells us to hide our sins,” he says. “So why did she highlight all of hers?” Then he sighs. “But may her sins be forgiven. After all, she was human too.”

  The others in the room nod and murmur, “May Allah forgive her.”

  * * *

  —

  On the morning of 16 July 2016, Attiya Jaffrey, a police investigator, was at home when her husband called out from his usual spot in front of the television—he was obsessive about watching the news and staying up to date. “Qandeel has been killed,” he told her breathlessly.

  Just a few weeks ago her husband had told Attiya about this woman and her meeting with a cleric from Multan. Didn’t Qandeel live in Karachi? was Attiya’s immediate thought. This would mean the murder was outside her jurisdiction. Then her heart sank when she heard the anchor say the body had been found in a house in Multan. What was this woman doing here? she remembers thinking. Then Muzaffarabad was mentioned and she sighed with relief. This neighbourhood was nowhere near her patch. She watched the breaking news play over and over again, saw the media frenzy as reporters jostled for space outside a small house at the end of a lane. “Thank God it’s in Muzaffarabad,” she said to her husband. “This case is going to get very crazy.”

  And then her phone rang. It was her superior, City Police Officer Azhar Akram. He wanted her to come to Qandeel’s house. He was already there with a few other officers and they needed a female officer to accompany the body to the morgue. He wanted a woman he could trust with the job.

  It was no secret that Akram thought highly of Attiya. He would praise her in front of other investigating officers and cite her work as an example of efficiency and professionalism. Even though she was a woman, she was so good at what she did, he would say to some of Attiya’s colleagues. Attiya tried not to worry that Akram’s request that day could mean he wanted her on the case. She reminded herself that it was routine for additional officers to be called to the scene of a crime if it was a high-profile case or if extra bodies were needed to handle a crowd or family members.

  By the time Attiya got to Qandeel’s house, the crowd had swelled. It felt like she was in the middle of some festival, not a crime scene. The officers at the entrance opened the gate a crack for her to squeeze through as reporters and cameramen jostled to see past her.

  She couldn’t believe this small, grubby house was Qandeel’s. Cigarette ends, ground underfoot, lay on the floor outside Qandeel’s room. Inside, the body was laid out on a charpoy on a red sheet patterned with white snowflakes and crystals, a pillow under the head. The room was a mess: on a table were scattered two mobile phones, a purse, an open packet of hair dye, a bottle of mustard oil, a passport, and a one-way plane ticket. Two suitcases were open on the floor. Clothes and make-up spilled out of them. Attiya could see past a door on the right to a narrow courtyard and a small kitchen, where dirty dishes were stacked at the sink. The room was small—you could walk across it in a few strides, and the charpoy,
positioned directly under the fan, took up most of the space.

  She looked at the body. The stomach had started to bloat. The green shirt with orange embroidery looked uncomfortably tight. There were small gold earrings in the ears. The face was tinged blue. The swollen lips were a deep plum. There were scratch marks on the face, near the eyes and the nose, the blood dry by the time the body was discovered. A female constable was collecting the cigarette butts from the floor. Tests would reveal traces of Waseem’s DNA on the butts. Did he stand outside his sister’s room and have a smoke before or after she went limp and stopped flailing and kicking her feet against the man who held her down with all his weight? The constable snapped rubber gloves on to her hands. She took Qandeel’s hands in hers and gently swabbed the tips of her fingers and looked under her nails. Had Qandeel clawed blindly at anyone she could reach when her face was covered with the sweat-stained scarf that had been around her brother’s shoulders? This is not, Attiya remembers thinking, the work of a single man. The fan spun slowly above the charpoy.

  Qandeel’s mother was crouched by the charpoy so quietly that Attiya only noticed her when she smoothed her daughter’s shirt and covered her chest with a white dupatta with pale flowers on it. She was not crying or wailing. She didn’t like it when anyone tried to touch the body. The police needed to check if Qandeel had been raped.

  It was stifling in there in the July heat and there were no windows in the room. “Is this really Qandeel Baloch?” CPO Akram asked nobody in particular.

  Over the next few days Attiya couldn’t stop thinking about the body. She felt furious every time she remembered how a reporter had yanked off that red sheet—the ambulance crew, the fools, had arrived without any white ones so officers had used the sheet to cover the body as it was carried out of the home.