The morning of July 15, 2016, when social media star Qandeel Baloch was found throttled to death in her parents’ house in Multan, I was lodged in a hostel next to Logan Airport, killing the days till my flight home to Islamabad. I’d run out my OPT student visa extension and the law firm that had employed me in the year since my graduation refused to sponsor me for a work visa. Others didn’t want me either. More than the outright rejections, it was the four job offers that had eventually been rescinded due to my “international status complications,” as one recruiter put it, that caused me to declare, sometimes out of anger, sometimes out of despair, “I’m going home forever—” And in each variation of the soliloquy, this word, “forever,” provided a dramatic flourish, a vent, but no meaning. I could still apply for grad school, find funding, manage another escape. After Qandeel’s murder, however, that “forever” took on a specific value. The inevitability of my doom.
This was the photo: a gloved forensic hand presenting the head to the lens as a specimen. The bruised face was washed by flashlight, a purple tongue protruded past swollen lips. And this the story. A week earlier, facing death threats after her most recent controversy involving a celebrity maulvi, Qandeel had fled Karachi to the house she’d bought for her parents in Multan. After one dinner, her brother fed her milk laced with sedatives. Then he strangled her in the name of honor, or so he claimed.
I fanatically read about Qandeel in my narrow hostel bed and in my mind, as in the news reports, the image from her death report fused with the glamor shots of her brief career. Yet I didn’t breathe a word about her to the assortment of people I encountered in the hostel. I spent that week in silence. Instead, I typed replies under articles my cousin Momina shared on Facebook. I pored over Qandeel Baloch’s videos, watched her dance clumsily in a chemise, badger a middle-aged man into blurting she was sexy, beseech Imran Khan to marry her. When my 8-bed dormitory emptied of others, I soundlessly masturbated with men on chat websites.
A day before my flight, in a dire attempt to empty my mind, I plucked a hardcover from the bookshelf in the lobby and dragged myself to a park opposite my hostel. Teenagers, dogs, children, tourists, and parents were amassed around a stone fountain. I sat on a bench close by, opened my book and found an empty postcard wedged inside as a bookmark. Printed on the back of the card was a photograph captioned, “Sonoran Night After Rain,” a long exposure shot that milked the Milky Way and suffused its green light over a desert plateau, the mesa punctuated absurdly with saguaros in bloom.
I remember looking from the postcard to the multicultural display of life by the fountain and thinking, “I’ve never let myself love before.” Until then, I’d existed as indifferently, as apolitically as possible and had excelled in life by reserving all energy for quantitative progress. By attaining conventional success, I’d thought I could live life on whatever terms I wanted. I’d never entered a relationship. I had no close friends. Although “I’ve never let myself love before,” wasn’t exactly a true statement, it reveals that in the discovery of the death and the postcard, I mistook my sudden fixation with Qandeel as a unique passion, as an unaccountable emotion that had been budding secretly within me long before I knew of her existence, for ten, twenty years, and then on the night of her death flowered like the first waxy blossom of a saguaro. Then it was undeniable, oozing from my pores like cactus milk, sprouting from my ribs arms ridged with spines, bisexual flowers alluring moths from the damp night. In this outflow of passion, I wrote and read about Qandeel, attended online vigils, followed related protests in Pakistan, ransacked the trove of Facebook videos she left behind, the songs, the interviews, the news bulletins. I cried for her, raged for her, I thought I loved her because of the turmoil I felt whenever I coaxed my thoughts in her direction, in the postcard image of cacti blooming by galaxy light.
In fact, I’ve never seen a saguaro or a desert. All the symbols I’ve ever created, found in found objects, epiphanic images, make zero sense in retrospect and contrary to the purpose of symbols, only confuse life’s meaning. They are thus naïve and even dangerous misreadings. This I realized upon my return to Islamabad. The birth of my emotional and political awareness, my so-called passion for Qandeel, was a collective fever dream. I was one among tens of thousands of somewhat liberal middle-class urbanites who had developed a serious intellectual and emotional interest in Qandeel Baloch after her murder. A generation that knew her as a vulgar clown of social media, who then, after she was killed, began to view her work as an act of political and sexual defiance in a violent patriarchy, and subsequently wrote books on her, filmed documentaries, demanded justice for her, lambasted media vultures for feeding on and exposing a working class woman to violence, cut out masks of her face to wear to Aurat March. Many of my Facebook friends replaced their profile pictures with Qandeel’s image. Only after she was sedated and strangled by her brother did they carve out of her a symbol of a migrant’s life on the margin, the plight of women in Pakistan, the defenseless, the outspoken and the brave.
I was no better. In Qandeel, I created a symbol of what I had buried with shame from myself, my family, a symbol for my sexuality and my troubled relationship with Pakistan. And once I could speak of my desire through this idol of my own making, I felt the panic of my life closing upon itself. I read into my fate a strangulation.
Home no longer existed the way I remembered it. The three-bedroom house I’d grown up in had been sold in my two year-long absence, as soon as death had finally delivered my grandfather from Alzheimer’s. My mother was now completely at the mercy of my uncle and aunt; social workers who had long supported us on their salary, they’d pocketed all of my grandfather’s measly inheritance, and moved the family to a one-kanal house in the gated colony of Naval Anchorage. The tiny mall here was called Anchor Mall, the sports club Anchor Club, and the mosque Anchor Masjid. Forty minutes outside the neat grid of Islamabad, there was nothing to anchor us here except the nameplate of our house. The place felt empty even though there were many houses in the colony, more or less the same kind of modern middle-class cubes painted either white or some shade of mud. Guards patrolled the streets at night, blowing on lonesome whistles every time they turned a corner. Despite their efforts, wild boar continued to terrorize our garbage bins at night. The empty lots were taken over by thorny native grass, plastic waste, and wild cannabis.
In Pakistan, weed is literally a weed! I joked to no one.
Now the family lived in a two-story house as ugly as the rest of them, despite my family’s Muhajir claims of sophistication (my Urdu, my aunt had always said, was polluted by my father’s Punjabi, although he’d died before I’d turned six). This new house was named “Chughtai Residence” like its predecessor, just as its occupants—all except me—had inherited the name, Chughtai, from their ancestors, the line stretching via Babur and Taimur to Genghis Khan.
The first thing I asked when I got home was, Where’s Mama? I had taken a cab from the airport because I didn’t want to ask my uncle or aunt for favors. By the time I got to Naval Anchorage, it was 4am and my mother had gone to bed.
The furniture of my childhood looked lost in the bright empty rooms of the new house. The walls smelled of fresh paint. The kitchen didn’t smell of food because most of the cooking occurred in an outdoor kitchenette. My uncle and aunt slept on the first floor with the twins. I slept upstairs in the guestroom instead of sharing the bed with my mother as I’d done for most of my life.
Where was my mother?
She’d disappear for hours at a stretch. My uncle only begrudgingly allowed her the use of his inherited Toyota so I assumed she was hiding in the many rooms of the house or had retreated to the kitchenette outside. I went from room to room calling her name. She was a housewife: I associated her with the house, the appliances, with the mauve presence curled next to my sleep.
“Have you seen Mama?” I asked my uncle on my third or fourth day back.
My uncle fumbled with his wireless earpiece, then furtively glanced at the ceiling, as if to indicate my mother was hung up there from the fan. In the days after my father died, before we left Faisalabad for Islamabad, Mama would wail that specific threat as she lay next to me in the bed. She’d shed her garb of resilience in the bedroom. She’d bite her nails and say, I’ll hang myself, I’ll take sleeping pills. When she didn’t follow through with her plans, I grew unafraid of her. In fact, continuing to love her, I became wary of her words. For otherwise all the lamentations of deprivation and promises of a happy life that she in turn uttered to me in the dark would’ve left me defeated and heartbroken.
“She’d be around here or there,” my uncle finally said, lying like a schoolboy and unable to meet my eye. I never had much respect for him, though his money bought my bread, paid my school fees, provided my mother with a roof over her head. This was done with endless sighs and reminders of his magnanimity. I remember once when I was crying inconsolably, he’d clamped his fat palm over my face.
“I sent her to the tailor’s to pick up the children’s clothes.” my aunt spoke in her knife sharp voice from the indoor kitchen. This knife voice, this scissor voice, this Qaf ke sath qainchi voice I associate with the Muhajir women of my family, a voice that can haggle through life. With each successive generation, the voice gets blunter. Will the twins retain any of it, I thought, when my aunt emerged importantly from the kitchen to repeat her words, her long braid swishing behind her. Aunty was the first woman to work in our family. Her expression was of someone who’d wrangled all she could out of a boorish world but was unhappy with the effort it had taken her and the little she’d gotten.
“Don’t worry. She’ll be getting back soon,” Aunty said.
“But the car is here,” I said.
Aunty shot me a look, a knowing, almost mischievous look. “I ordered a Careem specially for her comfort,” she said. “You thought they only existed in your America?”
Following my aunt’s braid, Tina appeared holding a bowl of mashed bananas. In their early forties, after enrolling Momina in college, my uncle and aunt had produced a set of twins my mother had secretly dubbed Yajuj Majuj. The couple busied their middle age spooning mashed bananas and Cerelac into the toddler’s mouths or shouting at Tina to fetch the milk feeder, the rattles and diapers. My mother had found them this thin, timid Christian girl from a slum outside Rawalpindi to help with the children. She couldn’t have been older than twelve and staggered when she held the formula-fattened children. Tina was the one who’d opened the door when I first arrived at Chughtai Residence in the middle of the night, quickly pulling a large dupatta over her head when she saw me, her eyes filled with fear and curiosity. Who are you, those eyes said, eyes trained to be wary of men in the night, though they must have known, must have been expecting Shaila’s son, back home from America— whatever “America” evoked in Tina’s imagination. She must have dusted the framed photographs on the TV trolley, and noticed among them the overexposed picture of my parents and I in front of a snow-covered church in Nathiagali, the photo of my grandfather and I posing on his scooter years before he forgot how to drive, and the recent one of me receiving an award at a debating competition from the Education Minister. She might have wondered as she wiped the glass with the hem of her dupatta, Who is this? What’s his story?
My mother returned hours later, wearing the makeup I’d bought for her in Boston and carrying a whiff of a perfume different than her usual (did they finally discontinue Charlie?) As I took her bags upstairs to her room, I joked she looked like a fashionable auntie— she’d dyed blond streaks into her hair. My mother laughed, bit off a hangnail. At fifty, she looked healthier than I ever remembered her. A treadmill in her room hinted at a transformed life, or at least the attempt at one. Upon my remark, she told me she was taking aerobics classes at Anchor Gym. This would later become the explanation for most of her absences.
As she took off her earrings at her deco dressing table, the one from her dowry, Mama told me to congratulate my aunt and uncle. Without knowing what I was to congratulate anyone for, I understood that she was asking me to behave in my uncle’s company. My mother, who never had a reason to reproach me or make demands of me, had long relied on a code to voice her maternal wishes.
“Your aunt talked to me about Momina,” Mama said. I looked at her reflection in the dressing table mirror.
“And? Now you want me to marry Momina? I haven’t returned for two days and you’re hatching a marriage plot!” I hadn’t meant to get angry. “They didn’t give you a penny from the inheritance and you want to place me in their jaws?”
“Uf, Faraz, you talk just like your aunt. I didn’t say anything to her. Momina was saying that you two used to be very close. She said you called her your girlfriend.”
“I was seven or eight then! Your father encouraged those jokes. I had no idea what I was saying.” I was angry because I knew Momina couldn’t have reported that to my mother. Though Momina and I were only superficially in touch, I trusted her to be sensible and likely repelled by the thought of marrying her cousin. It was my mother putting her words in other’s mouths, of course, turning others into her puppets because she was too timid to intone her own desires.
“There’s no need to fight, Baba,” my mother said. I apologized. She came and sat next to me on the bed, nudged my head into her lap. Only when I touched her did I realize the love I felt for her, as if it was sealed in her skin smell. Stroking my hair, Mama said, “Always so quick to anger, my little boy.” I changed the subject before even my anger could be attributed to my aunt, my grandfather, Genghis Khan…
“Take this fantasy of Momina and I out of your head,” I finally said. “We have, you especially, have always been treated as a second-class citizen here. I’ll never forget that.” And again, once again like so many times I said, almost as if to convince myself: “The only way is to get away. That’s why I came back, help you get out of here. Okay?”
And now who was uttering lamentations of deprivation and empty promises of happiness? My mother, having been on the other side knew what I was doing, but I think she was grateful for the charade nonetheless.
“Yes, yes, my dear,” she said, meeting my eye in the dressing table mirror, “Inshallah.”
We gathered for tea in the ground floor lounge. My mother displayed sets of embroidered rompers she’d picked from old Master Sahib and we took turns rubbing the fabric and inspecting the stitching. Yajuj Majuj played dodgem cars in their walkers a few feet away from us, bumping into each other with delighted squeals. My aunt broke the good news. The NGO she and my uncle led had won a big project grant from the Punjab Government. They’d work with Rawalpindi’s khawaja sira sex workers in a harm reduction campaign, screening individuals for HIV and handing out clean condoms and syringes. They’d been working with local trans communities for decades now, their philanthropy extended, I’ve always believed, to help those they find are far beneath them. If I had announced over tea that I am attracted to men I’m sure my dear uncle would have thrown me out of the house.
Regardless, I congratulated the couple. My aunt was quick to remind me, “Remember you used to be so afraid of them? When our khwaja sira staff would come over, you’d burst into tears. You’d say, ‘Why is this man dressed like a woman!’
“That’s not true!” I said. I had actually been fascinated by the khawaja sira who came to visit from the NGO, and others that came to beg in our streets. I remembered Hajji Sahib whose stained teeth looked like anardana, whittled and sour. He would laugh his phlemy, gummy laugh and regale me with stories of how he’d snuck into Mecca disguised as a man. One day my grandfather saw me playing with Hajji and scolded me for hanging with the “hijra,” warned me that the hijras would kidnap me, turn me into one of them.
“He was scared by the way they teased him,” my mother said. “He was a little boy.”
My uncle said, “The money will help us raise our salaries. Rearing these two devils in our old age isn’t easy,” motioning towards the twins. Old age? He was forty-five. “And of course, you’re back so we will be spending more on food and bills.” There it was then. The first stab.
Aunty said, “Once we save some money, I’ll decorate this place.”
The family regaled me with stories of the move the summer before, my aunt’s plans for renovations. My mother filed her nails with small, even teeth. She stole glances at me as she murmured praises of the new house. Was she proud of me? Did she really think I’d get her out of this damn house? My aunt interrogated me on sofa designs popular in the US. My uncle cut in—and what were my plans for the future? Did he fear I’d live off his coins after graduating with honors from a renowned business studies program? In Pakistan, my US degree would travel far. I could have my pick of any job— or so I thought. My uncle advocated applying for a government consultancy position he had read of in a newspaper ad. A government job is stable, my mother agreed. I bit my tongue. My aunt said with the same knowing look she’d given me earlier, “Did I tell you, Momina’s coming next weekend?” I felt sickened. “If only your grandfather was with us, the family would’ve been complete.” She had—I suspect they all had— forgotten about my father.
Teatime was disrupted when Yajuj knocked over Majuj’s walker. Babies crying! What commotion! They all rushed toward them in alarm. My aunt picked up her son and rocked him. “Shaila, this girl you brought is useless. Tina!” I put my cup down and wiped the sodden tea leaves from the corner of my lips. No one had mentioned Qandeel, though my family loved debating on current issues. She had died not even a month earlier and the media was obsessively covering the murder proceedings.
In a video, Qandeel soaps her legs in a bubble bath, moving her selfie stick around without breaking eye contact with the camera, her cheeks pulled in, lips pursed, then pouting. She doesn’t speak. In another bathtub video, she hums what sounds like a lullaby. I wonder in moments like these, did she think of her son, the infant she gave up at the shelter in Multan? She’d been barely eighteen then, a runaway wife. I’d seen the picture the news stations found of her from that time. She’s standing alongside her middle-aged husband holding her own arm. When I imagined her fleeing, though, I saw her not as the girl from the frozen picture, but a composite of her adult self and as the furtive Tina my aunt was screaming for. Qandeel’s voice from a phone interview after media channels unearthed her history, her real name, and asked about her son: My family married me off when I was seventeen. I wanted to study. I wanted to make something of myself. They married me to a brute. He would beat me, he’d burn me with cigarettes. I imagined that flight, the first escape from the village in early morning light, the dirty bus in which she fed the child under her burka, the diesel fumes, the anxious glances at the open door whenever the bus stopped. Finally, the heart of Multan, the anonymity of crowds, unnavigable city streets where the accent changed but the language was still Saraiki. At the shelter, the child became sick. They said, he’d kill you if anything happened to the baby. She traded her boy off for a divorce. She changed her name and started a new life. She became a stewardess for an intercity bus service.
Eight years later, escaping death threats, she’d flee again, this time from the city back to her parents’ house. Her brother would kill her a few days later. On that final bus ride to the town she’d run away from, did she ever think of her son, or the ghost of her own young self riding that same bus line in the opposite direction? In the end, those hard city years, the glimmer of infamy, the public outrage and humiliation, the awkwardly learned English—what had the trade-off been worth if she was only headed back home to her death? Did she think of all she had lost in the name of—survival? Freedom? In the name of what?
Encouraged by my aunt’s kneading, my little cousin whimpered into silence. Without transition, my family began arguing about the Panama Papers case ongoing in the Supreme Court; my mother and uncle not so much defending Nawaz Sharif as railing against Imran Khan.
“He’s a pet dog of the army,” my uncle said, his voice echoing in the room. His wireless fell off, and he wiped the sweat collected in his ear. The only time my uncle was animated was in mock fights in which no one won. He tapped my mother’s shoulder, “Isn’t that right, Shaila?” Shaila always agreed with her brother. After all when my father died, she too had left her husband’s city, took her son on an inter-city bus and ran back home, placed us right into the decorated laps of dear uncle and grandfather.
“Faraz, eat some nankhatai,” she said to me now in the middle of the argument, the act dropped for a moment, “Your uncle went all the way to G-9 to get it for you.” And before my uncle could harp about the perils he’d risked to buy nankhatai for me, I informed the room I had tried some already and it was delicious.
They resumed their shouting. My family always loved debating like this, splitting into parties and exaggerating their beliefs so as to win against the other. Agreement was never reached— that would spell defeat for all. Instead, the argument would be merely abandoned when it didn’t entertain anymore. They claimed this to be a family ritual learned from the older generation in the family house in Karachi, along with ghazals, old Bollywood songs, snippets of Muslim history. Momina and I too were regaled by our grandfather with stories of Babur charging into India, how he killed a rhinoceros in the Peshawar Valley on his way to Panipat where he destroyed Ibrahim Lodhi’s elephant army and installed himself as emperor of India. “We are from that blood,” my grandfather would say. “This is how we got here.”
How outraged they’d be if I told these people the illustrious founder of their clan pined for young men all his life, probably begged them to fuck him up the ass. I had imagined the argument that would break out after I’d quote from Babur’s journals how love for a market boy drove him to insanity. My aunt would vehemently protest, clarify that Babur was only a pederast, cultivating fondness for boys a common, even noble, practice in those days. What did she know about “those days?” Being a pedophile would be better than whatever I was.
After years away, I had difficulty following the disjointed arcs of family screaming. Was it just a lifetime of cohabitation that provides a sense of family? I could never comprehend how I came from these people, bickering around me in circles, but now I understood that the central desire we all shared in life was to prove others wrong, was to shake your fist at the heavens and spit your own mother in the eye if it came to that.
I scrolled my phone for news of Qandeel. The brother was in jail, and the parents refused to pardon him. The usual family tropes seemed to have been abandoned. Moreover, pressured by the outcry, the government was planning to pass a women’s protection bill. There was hope for retribution, though what is the justice for the dead? I looked at other news. Optimism despite all precedents! Terrorism was mostly eradicated in major cities, Karachi was safer than it had been in decades, the economy too seemed to be growing. The news read like an old man pleading for comfort in a wild-eyed mania. Like my family, I too tried to pick an exaggerated side. I desperately wanted to believe better times were ahead. I discovered a group of clerics had just decreed hetero-presenting trans marriage legal in Islamic law. Did my uncle know about this? When I lifted my head to interject with this information, I saw Tina standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at me. She averted her face and came in. Who had ever asked her about her opinion? She wasn’t even allowed to sit on the sofa, never mind the negotiation table.
As soon as my aunt saw her, she said, “Where did you go and die! My throat is hoarse from shouting. Do I keep you to make my life torture? Go away. I’ve put him to sleep myself.”
For the first time at home, I had a room to myself. That night after tea, and then many nights after, I locked the door, took off my clothes, and sat on my bed, placed the laptop between my legs, turned the camera on, and chatted with strangers online. Years ago, I’d figured out a specific angle, exposing to the webcam a curated slice of my body—from the curve of my nostrils, my lips and jaw, down my narrow neck, my Adam’s Apple, my shoulders and collarbone, my nipples peeking from thick chest hair, my elbows resting on my thighs, my pubes trimmed in a rough rectangle. The tilt of the laptop enlarged my lower torso and penis while my jaw looked slender and more refined.
But how I presented myself on the camera had less to do with personal aesthetics than what arrangement yielded the most favorable results while maintaining anonymity. I had begun “chatting” with strangers online during my sophomore year in college. Unable to find women at my university who were interested in me— though I knew there was some self-deceit involved in this explanation— I had turned to a webcam chat site. These were mostly the haunt of men, though occasionally a woman also flashed across the screen. It wasn’t my fault, then, that it was mostly men who found me attractive. I borrowed the tired lingo, told myself “I was going through a phase.” Miraculously even that was enough. For years, not dating, not hooking up, I jerked off with strangers across the world, often men with bodies of all kinds, clothed and unclothed, most of them concealing their faces. I discovered people with fetishes, curiosities, stories. They were so many of us lurking behind the web! I would never have had the courage or ability to find this dazzling variety in real life. Online I met sexy muscular men who asked me to breed them all night, some who yearned to connect with me again, there were others who typed long rape fantasies, subjecting me to whatever whim they desired. A man from Saskatchewan offered me $100 for my soiled underwear. Looking at my body, some presumed I was Black, some that I was Arab. Latino? Indian? What are you? Where are you from? I was an unknowable place. I invented names, I changed stories. I spent hours online. Only on this chat site did I ever feel free. I sucked in my stomach, I spat on myself, I stuck out my chest. I made demands of other bodies. I greased myself in front of an Iraq War vet while he smoked meth. A Texan mechanic showed me his girlfriend’s nude photos for forty minutes as I jerked off, an old woman from Italy told me she loved “cazzo nero.” There were exhibitionistic couples here too, trans men and women, and also men, groups of teenage boys who flipped you off, laughed at your body and called you a faggot, a pussy, a sandnigger. It didn’t matter. I forgot most people I met almost immediately— like one forgets people at a party. That’s how I quelled the disgust that’s been sliming my bowels for so many years. By not integrating my life, I could dispel anxieties of doom. I could exist outside myself and say, this is not me. It’s not the boy who’d developed crushes on his fourth-grade best friend and played “Circumcision” with him behind his couch, not the boy who sat in his grandfather’s lap every afternoon to learn to pronounce the Quran’s Arabic but wasn’t taught its meaning. And whenever his grandfather reached inside the boy’s pants and said, “What’s this?” it wasn’t me who replied, Flower.
What’s Flower doing?
I don’t know.
Is Flower sleeping or awake?
Awake.
Is he now?
Yes.
Badmash! Always awake, isn’t he?
That night I turned off the camera after ten minutes. The internet reception was shit. I scrolled on YouTube for Qandeel’s videos instead. After the story of her death had made international news (“Kim Kardashian of Pakistan killed by Brother for Honor—” how daft the West can be in attempting to see everything in context to itself), her Facebook page had been deactivated by whatever authority in Palo Alto deactivated the pages of the dead. YouTube, on the other hand, had been banned for three years in Pakistan and had only been legalized at the beginning of 2016. There wasn’t much Qandeel Baloch content on YouTube as a result, although individuals had begun uploading some videos on it since the Facebook page was taken down. I found a video titled, “I Am Sick But Missing You.”
It showed Qandeel Baloch in her bed. She was wearing her black mini-dress, pouting and speaking in her usual seductive and campy way, like a twenty-year-old begging a man for candy. She sniffled as she announced how terribly she burned with a fever.
“Yesterday you guys made so many requests, so many requests, saying ‘Qandeel make a video, Qandeel make a video,’ that’s why I’m making this video. It’s not like I like making them.”
Then her voice turned acrimonious. “You’re the ones who abuse me, malign me, yet you’re the ones who request, ‘Qandeel we need videos, we need videos.’” She looked at the camera with narrowed eyes. “How disgusting you double-standard people are. You like to watch my video, and then say ‘Die! Why don’t you die, Qandeel!’”
She sat up, played with her hair a little, “Listen. If I die, no other Qandeel Baloch is gonna come here, you won’t get another Qandeel Baloch for another hundred years. You guys’ll miss me then,” she said. Her voice changed, and she leaned forward towards the screen. She blew a kiss to her fans: “Okay, I have to go now. Okay, bye!”
“May you die soon, slut,” a “fan” had commented in March of 2016.
I played the video from the middle and looked at her face, fluttering in the bad internet like a flower forcing itself open. Her eyes were like those of the Moroccan boy. I watched the video again. As it played, I imposed the data I had collected, the facts of her life onto the video. I wanted to know the words and also the meaning—though I too was incapable of seeing her outside of my own context. I imagined again the bus journeys back and forth. And the conclusion I extracted was to serve myself: She’d been killed when her life had been integrated, the day her real name was excavated and publicized, and her family thus implicated. Only then did honor come into question.
In the early days of my chatsite adventures, I’d found the boy from Morocco. After a two-hour session involving much dirty talk, posturing and requests, all of it pinned onto a guileless confession of our mutual attraction, we showed each other our faces. What I remember are his narrow eyes and dark red hair, the shock of it, because it seemed impossible in my imagination for someone from Morocco to be a redhead. But he explained his family came from the mountains and then it made sense—I was thinking, of course, of the people in the northern mountains of Pakistan. He typed, “I love u, sexy” and I felt flattered by his unoriginal lie because he was gauche, a child, though he claimed to be married. When we were finished, I told him I was a virgin and wasn’t out to anyone and he said, Yes, he was the same, and we both started laughing. He wanted to add me on Facebook, but I never asked his name. When he persisted, I nexted him without a goodbye, and though I had no desire to continue browsing, I let the website connect me to person after person until his face blurred with his with his with his.
It was Momina who told me the deal with my mother. Twenty-one years old, Momina had moved to her university’s dorm and came back to visit every other weekend. She was conducting summer research with a well-regarded nuclear physicist. At the end of my first week in Naval Anchorage, she arrived with a blue fondant cake which read, “Con-grad-uation Faraz!” We sat at the covered end of the rooftop enjoying the evening thunderstorm drench the housing colony. Momina cut me a slice of cake. Her parents were still taking their siesta and god knows where my mother was? She’d slipped out before the storm and hadn’t been back yet.
“You know, Shaila Phupo is thinking of getting married,” Momina said, the inherited belligerence in her voice making it sound like she was daring me to challenge her. “They didn’t tell me but I heard Mama discussing it with Papa in the car. I think the man is Papa’s friend who lives in G-Block. Wasif Uncle.” She gave me a sympathetic look, and added, “I was so shocked.”
She didn’t say “re-married” or “married again—” but why did I care about that rather than the news of my mother sizing up suitors? I was taken aback but part of me thought, Of course. Wind lashed the trees. I looked out at the dark sky, at the corner of it emptying into pale gray. I said, “Your parents really want her out of the house, huh?” when actually what I was thinking was: both of us have found own separate escapes. After my father died, the subject of remarriage had been thrown about in almost a gossipy way. My grandfather had put his foot down then. He’d declared openly and loudly for all to hear: “My daughter will live with me forever. She’ll always be welcome in this house.” Twelve years later, he wouldn’t recognize his daughter. He whimpered when she took off his clothes and guided him into the plastic tub.
Momina vacillated in her loyalties. “Well, I don’t think anyone has put pressure on her. She has lived with us for eighteen years. I don’t think Mama and Papa have ever really wanted her out of the house even when finances have been hard. I think after you left and Dada died, and then I also left for college, there is very little left for her to do, you know? And I wonder if she’s finally considering, Why shouldn’t I also live for myself?”
“Aren’t you turning into a feminist,” I said.
She laughed. Putting a rubber band between her lips, she said in English, “I’ve always been a feminist for your kind information. I fought over the girls’ uniform at school, remember?” She flipped her hair over her face, gathered it at the nape, and spoke from the void, “I think it’s you who’s becoming a feminist. I saw you changed your Facebook DP to Qandeel Baloch’s picture.” She tied her hair in a high ponytail, herself looking like the cartoon of Qandeel circulating on the Internet.
“I don’t think you have to be a feminist to feel outraged at murder,” I said sheepishly. I’d never felt this outraged at any murder before this, however. A month before I landed in Islamabad, when I was still in the US, fifty people had been killed in a gay nightclub in Orlando— allegedly by a closeted Muslim man. Even that news I’d consumed like any other tragedy in print.
“Faraz, do you know there are millions who’d say she deserved to be killed? Even though ‘respectable’ people might not engage in the actual act of killing, so many propagate this mentality. Like Mama, who, despite all her social work said, ‘I’m not saying it was good what happened but ye sabaq lena chahiye ke apnay daairo se bahir na nikla jaye.’ And I said, will you kill me if I put a photo of myself in a bikini and she started shouting at me that I’m an atheist blah blah. This country makes me sick.”
“America isn’t all that great, either, you know.”
“I don’t care about America,” she said flatly. “How is that relevant?”
“We used to make fun of Qandeel Baloch.” I couldn’t help but remind her. “You sent me that video of her claiming she’ll strip dance if the cricket team won against India.”
Momina squeezed her eyes and shook her head in frustration. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. It doesn’t matter what she did. She was an entertainer. She squeezed her boobs. She told her viewers to shower with her. She shook her ass in a music video. Everyone was fine with that. All of that made her a joke or a slut or whatever, but that didn’t make her brother kill her. The moment she exposed Maulvi Qawi for meeting her in a hotel room, the maulvis were out to kill her. The moment the media revealed her real name to public, made bulletin news exposing her family name, her brother squeezed the life out of her. Her family was okay taking her money but the moment she was a threat to the system. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I didn’t really. All my life, Momina had been stumbling in my footsteps. I used to do her homework for her, I prepared her for her exams. They’d put me in a cheaper school than Momina’s until I won a scholarship for my O Levels for the same institution as hers. Despite my situation, the sympathetic glances of teachers, the empty afternoons when my mother picked me an hour late because she was chaperoning Momina in afterschool activities, I came first, occasionally second, in class. In the grander scheme of life, these little achievements didn’t mean much, but at that time it was all I had. No one could deny my intelligence. Even with extra coaching, Momina couldn’t match me. My aunt alleged I cheated on my exams. This was my slap back to the world. Unlike my mother, I refused people’s pity and I welcomed their resentment. After I won a full ride to my university, once I became an honored guest, only then did my aunt succumb. Now, over tea and rusk, she pushed getting me and Momina married. How preposterous, I often thought, to expect me to marry and bed the girl who symbolized the inequality of my life, not to say, the girl who I had taught to solve long division sums!
Now here Momina was, university-sharp, expecting answers.
“It doesn’t matter who I am!” Momina said, reaching an arm out into the rain. “I cannot survive unless I am tied to a man and conform to his ideas about me. If my father lets me wear jeans or go to a university, that doesn’t mean I’m free. Qandeel tried to be a free woman, and you saw what they did to her. And I don’t mean free because she showed skin.”
I thought, Momina, your father can’t make a pipsqueak without your mother. And then I felt ashamed for trying to find arguments against her.
“Do you feel like Qandeel?” I asked her.
She looked a little surprised, and she shook her head again as if to indicate my incompetence. When she spoke, however, her voice was slow and clear, as if she were giving a testimony, or perhaps talking to a dunce. “I know I’ll never know what her life was. I come from a well-off family, comparatively. I’m educated. I live in a major city. They haven’t married me off yet. It’s totally fine if I get a job. But yes, when I found Qandeel was killed, I felt pain you will never understand. I won’t be killed by my father, I know. Or by you.” She laughed. We looked at each other and laughed, the way we would have when sharing a funny video on Whatsapp.
Momina went on. “But I thought of your mother, actually. When I found Qandeel Baloch died, I thought of Shaila Phupo and I couldn’t stop sobbing in my laboratory. The lab assistant was so alarmed. Shaila Phupho’s life is supposed to be good! She was widowed and her father and brother took her back in. Her son will make good money, Inshallah. This is the best that she was expected to have, and what is it? She could not be allowed a minute to live outside someone’s mercy. Qandeel Baloch refused that mercy. But imagine if her husband had been kinder? Would her wanting to make something of herself not be justified then? Shaila Phupo can’t even say, the world has treated me badly so I want to do whatever the fuck I want.”
In the days after I met the Moroccan boy, I’d thought, if my mother dies, I will owe nothing to the world. If my mother dies I can disappear to any part of the planet.
Momina took out a tissue from her purse and smeared cake off my face in a rough, parental way. “Yes, I’m ashamed I made fun of Qandeel. There’s a vigil they’re holding for her in F-9 next weekend. We can go together? It’s also a demonstration to show support for the women’s protection bill they’re trying to pass.”
As she spoke, I stopped trying to entangle her in an argument, and grew increasingly impressed her intelligence, how her world was untouched by cynicism, or perhaps charged by cynicism. She argued like all of the Chughtais, except for something beyond herself. And it wasn’t just her intelligence that caught my attention. In that moment she looked so pretty, with her hands flying about in passion, her teeth a little large, her straightened hair frizzing in the rain, that I couldn’t help but think that if I married her, if she agreed to that, things won’t be bad. The idea lingered in my mind as I watched my cousin orate, lick icing off her fingers.
I saw myself as the master of the house, cancelling all renovation plans, telling my aunt at the dining table to shut up, wielding my stick, raising children, baby cousins, holding meetings, throwing tantrums, breaking plates in great fury. No, there could be compassion mixed with my deceit, my variety of tyranny could be mild like my uncle’s, and over the years, it could be confused with love. Where I’d feel guilt, where I’d fail, I could substantiate with money, objects, lively banter or stolid companionship.
It took me a second to realize what Momina was referring to when she said, “What do you think, do you want to go with me? To the vigil?”
This quashed my reverie and the answer that came to my head was: “No. No, I don’t want to go with you.” But instead of answering her question, I simply said, “Momina, I’m queer.” I came out to Momina on that rooftop, and in doing so, I handed her some power over me. She did not balk; she did not question me. We were emotional but there was nothing unusual about this coming out that I can report, except that Momina’s outpouring of support shamed me. Only a minute before, I was ready to sell her, and sell myself to the same instinct that had left me sickened when I was a child, when I had hidden behind the bedroom curtain and cried hearing my family argue about what should be done with me after they caught me doing something or the other wrong. Oh I had mastered their tricks. I was as repugnant as any of them, except circumstances left me unable to conform entirely to their morality.
And then, as if now that one part of the agenda was neatly wrapped up and we could circle back to earlier concerns, Momina said in English, “Faraz, I am so glad we will go to this vigil together. It means a lot that someone in my family gives a shit about this.” Oh, I was so exhausted. I realized I had no desire to go to any protest or vigil. I just wanted to sit in my bed and eat the rest of my cake and maybe jerk off and feel a little bit better. But of course, I knew, I’d go with her, for her sake I’d show up and show up again. I’d stand in line with all the other women dotting the barren landscape like saguaros, their arms offering to the sky banners like soft waxy flowers. And then what?