Baked mud walls. A modest compound. A charpoy in the corner. An open kitchen at another end with a woman fighting adamant fumes from the chulha (earthen stove). Standing at the bottom of a staircase, a girl and a boy crane their necks to watch a pair of hands wrapped around a TV antenna on the terrace of the house. The owner of those hands — the rest of her is still out of sight — calls out to her siblings: “Signal aa rahi hain (Is the TV receiving signal)?” The boy runs indoors to check, and returns saying, “ Abhi nahin (Not yet).” The hands go up in despair for a second, only to grab the antenna with renewed vigour. A shake or two, and the TV starts to crackle. A pleased young Fouzia Batool climbs down and proceeds to dance around the TV. With a flick of the wrist, she keeps her tasselled hair from tickling her face as she sways to a Noor Jehan song. The younger siblings gape in silence as Fouzia ignores her father and elder brother’s disapproving looks.
Pakistan’s love for Noor Jehan, who was honoured with the title Malika-e-Tarannum , the queen of melody, is no secret. So it’s not out of the ordinary for youngsters from conservative rural households to listen to her songs. Except the scene described above is from the life of a celebrity that the same country is reluctant to accept as its own. The scene is from the popular Urdu show Baaghi (Rebel), which went on air in July 2017, a year after 26-year-old Qandeel Baloch, arguably Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, was killed by Waseem, her younger brother she is shown doting on in the show. A slew of documentaries — including BBC’s The Killing of Qandeel Baloch: One year on and Qandeel’s self-shot videos — garnered millions of views on YouTube as Pakistan’s patriarchal society became the subject of worldwide criticism.
Journalist Sanam Maher takes the outrage a step further with her book
Maher’s outrage, however, is not a flurry of angry words that come down heavily on the faux sense of honour ( ghairat in Urdu) that claimed Qandeel’s life. From its first pages, tracking a rookie reporter from Multan who breaks the news of Qandeel’s death, to the last where Maher visits her grave in her ancestral village (a “mound of dirt indistinguishable from the many others around it”), the book stitches together the troubled, short life of Qandeel, who suffered indignity even in death. Many who slut-shamed Qandeel for her provocative videos made a hero of the man who smothered her with pillows, evident in online posts such as: “Finally #QandeelBaloch murdered. Someone had to do it. She was a disgrace for her country” and “She’s certainly gonna suffer in hell. Her brother did well”. Maher pieces together diverse narratives from Qandeel’s family and friends to investigating officers, lawyers, and clerics, allowing the stories to do the talking. The book has the quality of an investigative report, balancing rage with restraint.
In the process of recreating Qandeel’s life, the author finds many others like her, crushed between the desire to break moulds and afraid of society’s castigation. The desire, however, proves stronger in most of the cases we encounter in the book — strong enough to push a housewife to audition for Pakistan Idol (the footage of Qandeel being rejected by the judges in 2013 is still one of her most-watched videos on YouTube), to nudge a relief worker in Dhirkot, PoK, into chasing the arc lights of Karachi’s fashion world, to motivate a battered sister and wife to start the country’s first helpline for victims of cyber bullying. In the form of parents, brothers, neighbours, husbands, employers and even passers-by, Pakistan’s patriarchal systems deliver successive blows to the self-esteem of women who dare to defy. Particularly disturbing are the accounts of women in the fashion industry who, in a desperate bid to escape servile domesticity, succumb to exploitation. That includes Qandeel, who, despite her reservations about such assignments, agreed to dance at weddings before gun-toting men and escorted wealthy men to parties and overseas trips. She wept to her friend Mec about not having enough work, the social media likes notwithstanding.
For a person who challenged a country’s collective conscience and sense of propriety, Qandeel led a lonely life. Most of her videos, available online and some sent to a handful of friends, were filmed during sleepless nights. Lying in bed, mostly in the company of stuffed toys and fluffy pillows, she spoke to the camera about her dreams, about official diktats that forbade love (her Valentine’s Day message against a presidential warning on celebrations went viral), about her favourite cricketer (Shahid Afridi) and her wardrobe.
Ironically, she died in sleep induced by sedatives administered by her brother, who then smothered her. One can say that the last video of her — dead, her face bloated, her lips blue — is not something that she would have liked the world to remember her by.