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 the 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.
The event has been put together for a TV channel to celebrate one of its dramas airing a hundred episodes. A representative from the channel tells Khushi that he’s brought over the awards that will be handed out to the show’s actors, producers and directors. She goes over the guest list with him. He insists that two army brigadiers be seated on a crystal-studded cream-coloured leather sofa placed at the runway’s halfway point. Other guests include gym instructors and a property developer.
The event includes a fashion show, live music and a children’s tableau before the prizes are given out. “May Allah reward your hard work,” the man murmurs to Khushi as he looks around the hall, which is usually rented out for weddings. An electrician has finally hooked up the lights, and Khushi watches as the catwalk glows in flashes of red, blue and green. “Inshallah,” she says fervently.
Her real name is not Khushi—“happiness” in Urdu. Like Qandeel, none of the girls here use the names their parents gave them. Just a few days after she was born, Khushi’s father was promoted. He worked for the national flag carrier, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), and he named his baby girl after a dear friend, an air hostess. When this friend heard about the promotion, she came over with a box of mithai (sweetmeats) and gave the infant her first taste of sweetness, letting her lick a dab of honey from her finger. “Look,” she said to the new father. “Her arrival has brought happiness into your home.”
On the morning of 8 October 2005 Khushi was sitting outside her family home in Dhirkot, Kashmir, a little over three hours away from Islamabad, with her cousin. The two girls chattered away as they dipped pots into the cool stream of water that ran by the house. At 8:50 a.m. the velvet green blanket of shisham trees on the hills around Khushi’s home seemed to shimmer like the surface of the stream. The ground trembled. Khushi remembers screaming her sister’s name, not knowing if she answered because she could not hear a thing over the ringing in her ears. “Thirty-two hours later we finally found her in her bed, covered in concrete,” Khushi says. “When the earthquake came, she probably didn’t understand what was happening.”
Seventy-five thousand people died that day. It was one of the worst natural disasters Pakistan had experienced. It was the month of Ramzaan, and after the rains stopped, after Eid went uncelebrated, the aid workers finally arrived. Fourteen-year-old Khushi and her four sisters spoke English, Urdu and Kashmiri, and were snapped up to help interpret for the international rescue teams streaming into the valley. By the time Khushi was fifteen, she was earning 25,000 rupees a month working with a community-based development project. “My father no longer had his job with PIA and our home was a pile of rubble,” Khushi says. “We desperately needed the money, but my father insisted that I continue to go to school. I’d just started ninth grade, and I would go to work after classes.”
Three years later, even as billions of rupees changed hands for development programmes and reconstruction efforts, children were still studying under the open sky and going home to clusters of temporary settlements. One day Khushi travelled to a village near Dhirkot, where the residents pleaded with her to help them get a school rebuilt. Their children had to walk to another village to go to school and many had dropped out because they couldn’t make the journey. Khushi knew there wasn’t much she could do. It was her job to interview locals, listen to their problems, create an agenda and present it to her employers. Aid trickled down slowly.
“I went home and told my father that I needed 30,000 rupees to help out a friend who was getting married,” Khushi says. “Then I walked straight back to the village with that money and my savings.” The villagers learned that she was terrified of water, and every day while the school was under construction three or four people would escort her across the swaying bridge over the river that ran beside the village. Eleven years after the quake, the village still does not have a proper mosque, and Khushi hopes to return some day with enough money to get one built. “I want to help build the mosque with my own hands,” she says. “That’s my wish. Inshallah.”
Khushi left Dhirkot for the ruins of Muzaffarabad, just twelve miles from the quake’s epicentre, to work for a Turkish NGO rebuilding schools and hospitals, but after six months the work had wrapped up and she was without a job. A friend mentioned an opportunity at a furniture shop in Islamabad that sold expensive, intricately carved wooden pieces to the city’s bubble of foreign aid workers, diplomats and journalists. “I travelled to the capital for an interview and I was told, ‘Your education isn’t good, your way of talking is not good, and we need an educated girl,’ ” she recalls. She then applied to a real-estate firm in Islamabad where she was hired as a receptionist. She moved in with her brother and his wife in January 2009.
“Everything was new for me, and everything was different,” Khushi says. “I only knew the village.” Her boss was kind to her, treating her as a daughter while she struggled to find her feet. “There were [foreigners] there and I was expected to serve them alcohol even during the day when they would come for meetings,” she says. Soon her boss’s son was offering her alcohol. “He would say, ‘Come to parties with me, come sit with me, have a drink with me,’ ” she explains. “‘I told my boss, ‘If I wanted to do bad things, I could go anywhere in Islamabad. I don’t need to work here.’ ”
When she left that job, she spent three months doing nothing. Her engagement to a man she had met in Islamabad had ended, and she had no work. By then she had become the primary breadwinner in her family. “My brothers are good boys, but when their wives are around, their colours change,” she says bitterly. “They don’t make that much, and whatever money they bring home, they hand over to my sisters-in-law. That’s just the way it is.” Back in Dhirkot, her parents had come to rely on the 15,000 rupees she had sent home every month. In Islamabad she paid half the rent, another 15,000, to stay in her brother’s apartment. She needed to make some money and fast.
When her sister sent her the designs for some clothes she wanted made, Khushi got her tailor to make copies. The clothes sold, and she set up a small boutique named after her mother, Gulshan. “I even had one or two designers stock their clothes with me,” Khushi says. “We would split the money fifty–fifty.” Soon she was selling shoes, costume jewellery and purses. Two years later, however, the boutique was gutted in a blaze. Her stock of clothes was burned to ashes.
“I was very disheartened,” Khushi says. She was back to being unemployed. “I just went back to my village and I cried for two weeks.” She lay in her bed, unable to move. What now? she remembers thinking. How could she start again from scratch? But when she looked around her home, still without doors as her parents struggled to put things back together slowly after the quake, she knew there was no other way. She had to go back to Islamabad.
When she returned to the city, she applied for every position she could find. At her first job interview a man at a marketing firm sneered at her. “I was wearing a shalwar kameez and had a dupatta on my head,” she says. “I didn’t wear make-up. This man said to me, ‘Sorry, you don’t meet our standards.’ Yes. That’s exactly what he said, can you believe it?” The next few interviews weren’t too different. “Why are you wearing a hijab?” “Your clothes aren’t so nice.” “Don’t you have branded clothes?” She rattles off the responses she got. “Sometimes I would laugh about it. But it made me cry. What country was I living in where I couldn’t get a job because I wore a hijab?”
She finally found work with a retailer who paid her 8,000 rupees a month to visit markets and convince shopkeepers to stock his shampoos, soaps and perfumes. She had earned 40,000 a month with the real estate company and struggled to make ends meet. The daily excursions to the market frightened her. Some shopkeepers were polite and sent her away with chai paani (refreshments). Others leered at her, asking her more and more questions about the products so she would linger, stroking her fingers as she handed them a bottle of shampoo or body wash. She lasted six months.
Khushi’s father had always wanted her to be an air hostess. “You’ve got the height,” he would remind her. “Your sisters do not.” One evening a friend pointed out the same thing. “You’re a tall girl,” he mused. “Ever thought about modelling? You could make a lot of money very fast.” His girlfriend Aliya was a budding designer and she needed someone for a shoot, he told Khushi.
But when Aliya met her, her face fell.
“I could see that she didn’t like the look of me,” Khushi remembers.
“We’ll need to do a lot of changing with you,” Aliya sighed. Khushi had never been to a beauty parlour in her life. “We’ll need cutting, we’ll need a dye,” Aliya complained.
“I just thought, Who would make all that effort for me?” Khushi recalls. “Who would spend that kind of money on me?”
But Aliya rejected her anyway, saying, “Your thighs are too big.”
Khushi reached out to her former boss at the real-estate company for help. She had known him since she was eighteen, and despite his son’s behaviour, she’d stayed in touch. “Lose some weight and I’ll pay for a makeover,” he promised her. He introduced her to a photographer, who offered to put her in touch with some models who could mentor her. She needed a portfolio, a Facebook account, and a diet, the photographer advised. Khushi spent the next few weeks looking up exercise videos on YouTube and lost ten kilos by the end of 2015. Once she’d had a few photographs taken, her brother created a Facebook page for her and uploaded the images. Soon there was a message blinking in her inbox: “I’m having a show tomorrow. Can you come audition?”
“Do not wear a shalwar kameez when you go to the show,” advised Summi, a model who had befriended her. “Shalwar kameez don’t work here, and the only ones that do are the branded ones. Get yourself some jeans.”
Khushi had never worn a pair of jeans in her life. She called her photographer friend in a panic. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “My friend will take care of you.” He dispatched her to a shop in one of the largest malls in Islamabad, where a girl helped her choose four pairs of jeans and some shirts. When the time came to pay, the bill was a whopping 35,000 rupees. “They were branded clothes, you see,” she explains. “Mango.” Her former boss was called in to help. “I tried to pay him 10,000 rupees for the clothes, but he refused to take it from me,” Khushi says. “I kept thinking, I’ve never taken money from anyone in my life before. I felt so ashamed, but I took it quietly. I didn’t have a choice.”
Back home, she timidly stepped out of her room to show her brother and sister-in-law her new outfits. “You’ve taken to wearing jeans and shirts, now don’t start wearing anything less,” her brother said, joking. She draped a big shawl around herself and headed to the rehearsal.
“Walk,” commanded the show’s organizer. Khushi took a few steps forward and the other models sniggered. “If you want to wrap your big shawl around you and walk the runway, then sit at home with a chadar draped around you,” she snapped. “Take off your shawl.” Khushi pulled it off, but kept tugging at her shirt as she crept forward. Once she reached the end of the runway, she froze. “I didn’t want to turn around and walk back,” she recalls, laughing. “I didn’t want anyone to look at my bum in those jeans.”
The organizer needed to see her walk in heels. Khushi had never owned a pair. “I was five feet nine!” she exclaims. “Why would I wear heels?” She was sent to the nearest market to purchase a pair of four-inch heels and then went home and put them on, tottering around so she could learn how to walk without stumbling.
The next day she went to the Pearl Continental Hotel in Islamabad for the show. The organizer pulled her to one side. “Walk with confidence,” she advised. “Don’t look around you. Just look right at the camera. Just think—there’s only the lights, the camera and the applause. Look haughty, just like the professional models.”
Her walk wasn’t great, but Khushi got through the show without falling over. As far as she was concerned, that was a win. Once the photographs from the show came in, she put them up on Facebook. A few days later a male model messaged her. “Stop working for these smalltime coordinators in these shows,” he told her. “If you want to make it in this industry, you need to meet Mec.”
Mec is one of those men who you cannot imagine ever having been a little boy. It’s as if he’s never been without his distinctive handlebar moustache, his brightly patterned satin ties, jackets that are a touch too long and shoes with an extra wedge of heel. He doesn’t try to convince you otherwise. How long has he been in this industry? “It’s been so long, I can’t even remember.” But if he had to estimate? “You could say that 80 percent of the models here in Islamabad were brought into this industry by me.” How did all these girls find him? “Is that even a question? Everyone here knows Mec.” How long has he been working with Khushi? “From the very beginning. Ever since I’ve been in this line of work.” “It’s been a little more than a year,” Khushi, who is sitting with us, interjects.
It’s the day of Khushi’s show, and when the girls arrive they throw their arms around Mec’s neck and bend to hug him where he is perched on a black pleather sofa. His face rises like a flower and they air-kiss him twice, their lips hovering near each rounded cheek with a smacking Muah! Muah! Yesterday, a new girl came to Khushi’s rehearsal. She had come to Islamabad from Peshawar and wanted to work with Mec. Her head was covered with a dupatta and she wore a shalwar kameez with long sleeves that trailed past her wrists. She was quiet, lingering outside the circle of girls flitting around Mec. She’s back today, her head uncovered. Someone has had a chat with her about how Mec likes to be greeted. She sidles up to give him a kiss and a quick hug.
The girls arrive in packs of three or four, clamouring for Mec’s attention from the moment they enter the room.
“Sir, look at my dress!”
“Sir, where is my dress? I need to see if I brought the right make-up.”
“Sir, I’ve brought my own dress. It’s a bridal dress, sir—it’s so beautiful.”
They are bright and lovely, with tumbles of caramel or blonde hair, eager as kittens. Each one wants to be the girl Mec likes today, the one with the best make-up and most beautiful outfit, the one who will be the last to walk the runway. The showstopper. Mec is known to play favourites. “Sometimes, if a model catches his eye, he will forget the others in the rush to promote her,” Khushi says. “Selfies on Facebook, special shoots, nice clothes, videos for YouTube.”
Mec turns to the girl who has brought her own outfit. “Put it on and show me,” he instructs.
“Sir!” She pouts. “What do you mean, sir? Sir, [my dress] is outstanding, trust me.”
She gets a laugh out of him. “Behave yourself,” he chides.
She giggles. The others seem to wilt.
They pull handfuls of sparkly silk and satin from their bags and he leaves the room so they can change. He pauses at the door. “Girls! Girls, listen,” he says. He claps his hands. “Girls, you need to take care of your things, OK? Put everything in your bags and take it all backstage. Everything goes there. Nothing stays in this room.” They nod in unison like schoolgirls on a field trip.
Mec is nervous about this show. It’s for a TV channel, so that means he couldn’t promise promotion to any other media outlets. “Now if I can’t do that, then why would any designers give us their clothes?” he complains. The channel has a small budget for this event. It’s not the kind of show he is used to. There are only twelve girls walking the runway and they’ll get their make-up done at a parlour. “They didn’t even have a budget for a make-up artist! Just imagine!” There’s only one designer who has agreed to participate, and he is currently on his way over from Peshawar with the clothes on the back seat of his car. “No showsha, no glamouring, you know?” Mec sighs. He pulls out his phone to find out when the designer will arrive.
“Where have you reached?”
The man cannot hear him. He repeats himself. There’s no answer.
“Where are you?” Mec snaps.
The voice crackles on the other end.
“Lo. You told me you’d be here at eleven a.m.”
There are some excuses about traffic.
“Just come. Quickly.” He sulks. “I was going to remind you to get me some paneer. Now forget it.”
The man says something that gets a wide smile from Mec. “OK, baba, OK. Thank you. Come. We’re all waiting for you.” Mec hangs up. He looks mollified. “You know, the cheese in Peshawar is excellent. And this designer is coming from there, as I told you. Bring me some, I told him. He’s bought me a kilo. A kilo!” One of the girls walks in. She wears a heavily embroidered kameez that cinches under her breasts and flows out.
“Sir, isn’t it beautiful? Didn’t I tell you?” she asks. She sways from side to side. The sequins on the fabric are motes of light.
Mec agrees that it is beautiful.
“Can I wear my tights under this?”
He gives his permission.
The girl turns to leave and then pauses. “Sir, can you get the toilets cleaned? It’s smelling so much.”
Mec gives her a tight smile. “Sweetie, can’t you see that I’m giving an interview here?” he says in a sing-song voice. “Is this the time to talk to me about toilets?” Any chance she had of being the showstopper vanishes. “They love me a lot, you know,” he says, watching the girl walk away. “Poor things rely on me.” He taps one cheek and then the other. “One will kiss me here, and another here. They’re like this with me. We are like a family.” And these days one particular member of the family has Mec wrapped around her finger.
He introduces her with a flourish. “Meet Qandeel Two! QB2! Miss Bushi!” he says when she arrives at the venue. She walks almost on tiptoe in her platform heels, gingerly taking one tiny step at a time as though she is afraid to fall over. Bushi is a small, doll-faced, twenty-two-year-old girl from Abbottabad. Her hair falls in tangles to her waist, and she has thick bangs that she caresses to the side every time she talks. She features in every video Mec posts on Facebook these days. There’s Bushi lip-syncing a Bollywood song in the back seat of a car; Bushi at Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi, pointing out his grave; Bushi wearing sunglasses as big as saucers, playing with her hair and stroking her necklace as she whispers, “I am Barbie doll;” Bushi in full bridal make-up at a salon, asking, “I’m looking hot, na?”
Mec likes Bushi to dress the way Qandeel did. He has even bought her the sunglasses she had. Sometimes he creates little skits for her videos, just like the ones Qandeel became known for. In one Mec sits next to Bushi and eats voraciously from a plate of food.
“Sirrrrrrr,” she trills. “Sir, how did you like my food?”
The camera pans to Mec giving a thumbs up.
“That’s it?” She pouts.
Mec flashes a peace sign.
She giggles, one hand with its long red lacquered nails covering her mouth. “Hmm! So delicious!”
In another Bushi sings the latest Coke jingle. Someone hands her a glass of water. She purses her lips and pushes the glass away. She wants a Coke, not plain old water.
The videos have hundreds of likes. “So innocent.” “Nice movement of beautiful model.” “When I see Bushi’s videos, I remember Qandeel.”
Mec’s girls are less kind. “Prostitute.” “You know she’s been married two times?” They say she’s managed to make enough money to buy her own home. “You know how much money she spent doing it up?”
If Bushi knows that the girls talk about her this way, she doesn’t seem to care. She has been in the industry for three years and is now finally getting some attention. A video of her cooking skills racked up 2,500 likes on Facebook alone, Mec claims. “You know how many offers we got just based on that video?”
The comparison to Qandeel thrills Bushi. “I love it,” she says. “Love,” she repeats in a breathy voice. “She was so successful, but then…” She clicks her tongue and shakes her head mournfully. Bushi tends to behave like she is always being filmed.
But as much as she dresses and behaves like Qandeel, Bushi cannot come close to what Qandeel meant to Mec. None of these girls can. “Qandeel used to sleep at my side whenever she was here in Islamabad,” Mec says. “I wouldn’t even turn in my sleep. Totally still. I didn’t want her to be disturbed. I didn’t want her to wake. And I never wanted her to think any wrong things while we lay together. No funny business.”
Qandeel shared an apartment in Islamabad with her sister Shehnaz, who had moved to the capital from Shah Sadar Din and found work at a beauty parlour. The apartment complex is small, with the sand-coloured buildings huddled close together. There is a small garden in the centre, the grass patchy and yellowing. The paint has crumbled off the walls in swathes. Empty plots ring the complex, and in the winter a chilling wind whistles through the stairwells. There is a high school and a Montessori nursery further down the road and a small market just a few minutes’ walk away, with shops selling auto parts. Mec says he was the only one who could convince Qandeel to leave this apartment, to meet people. “She wouldn’t even go to the market,” he remembers.
Qandeel was content staying in her room for days. She liked to be alone, Mec explains. Years later, she visited the city for work and stayed at a hotel. Mec stayed with her but needed to go home to pick something up. Lock the door from the outside, Qandeel told him. I’m not going anywhere.
He had just reached his house when he received a frantic call from her. Someone was trying to get in. “They’re knocking on the door!” he remembers her screaming. “Someone is trying to come in. Come back immediately!” She refused to hang up until he promised he would call the hotel’s front desk. It was just the cleaners.
In her room she would write in her diary, watch videos or read things online and message Mec. She would ask him questions about the people she read about or saw on the news or in the videos. “Why are people talking about that person?” she would ask. “She didn’t have a single friend, no friend, nobody,” Mec insists. “She trusted me the most.”
Mec likes to hold his phone out to anyone who asks him about Qandeel and scroll past hundreds, if not thousands, of messages from her. He affectionately called her Sonu. He strokes the screen. There are photographs of clothes and shoes laid out on a bed. “Which dress shall I wear?” the message reads.
His finger swipes down.
There is chatter about a possible date, an ex.
Swipe.
Snatches of songs, recorded late at night when she could not sleep.
Swipe.
“Happy Valentine’s Day!” Small red hearts, a photograph of a rose.
“She spent three Valentines with me,” he says. “She gave me a perfume.”
Swipe.
They talked about her family and her marriage, he confirms. He knew about it all. It didn’t mean much though. “I have two girls who have just joined me after fighting with their families,” Mec says. “I know that once they are on TV, once the relatives can call up everyone they know and say, ‘Our girl has come on television, you should definitely watch her show,’ then everything will be fine. That’s how it is. And once the paisa [money] starts coming in, everyone is happy. Then they can’t wait to meet the girl again.”
That’s how it was with Qandeel, he says. They agreed not to tell anyone else about her husband and son. “We didn’t hide anything,” he bristles, “we just didn’t talk about it. I know what these girls go through. I know what their lives are like. Now if a girl is going to sit in front of you and talk about her sick mother or her father who has cancer, or if she tells you, ‘I go home and shoot up,’ you’ll say, keep her away from me.”
With him, the girls get a chance to get out of their homes, to see what life could be like, he says. “People only see what’s on the screen, right? What is it that they say about Qandeel? ‘Bold thi, brave thi.’ That’s what they saw. She scared easily. You show me one girl here who was born with a golden spoon in her mouth. They are all struggling. It may be all glamour here, it may look good on screen, but these girls go home and eat the same daal roti as the rest of us.”
I meet Khushi again, two months after she organized that fashion show, on 17 January 2017. Once again it’s a day of new beginnings for her. “I’m done with modelling,” she says. “I got out after that show.” She has had to start again once more. She has a new job now at an up-market gym and is trying to become a personal trainer. It’ll take her two or three months, but she’s started chatting with women who visit the gym in the hope that they’ll hire her once she’s certified. Her friend, another model, makes 40,000 rupees a month teaching these women yoga. Khushi has heard of one trainer who made 300,000 rupees in a month.
When Khushi started modelling, she only told her mother and one brother. Her father believed the money she sent them every month came from a job at some company like the real-estate business she used to work for when she first came to Islamabad. Her mother agreed to stay quiet, but made her promise three things. “Don’t stay the night with some man, don’t do drugs or drink. You can die, you can starve, not have anything to send back home, but do not sleep with a man for money,” Gulshan told her daughter. “The day you do that for money, I’m dead to you. If you send me money that a man has given you to stay the night with him, that money is haram for me.” It had been hard for Khushi to keep these promises and still make enough money to send home every month.
The show that day had gone well, but Khushi had barely managed to scrape together enough money to make it happen. When she called one of her sponsors for the 50,000 rupees he had promised her, he told her she could have it but at a price. “Come get your cash,” he said. “But that little friend of yours, what’s her name? Sunny? You leave her here.”
Khushi knew this would happen at some point. But she also knew that once she started selling her models, she would be no different to other women who had tried and failed to make a career of organizing shows in Islamabad. “They got greedy,” Khushi says. “They would take two or three girls with them when they would meet any sponsor. Bold si dressing karo [dress sexy], they used to tell the girls. Wear tights. Leave with your money, without the girl, that’s how it is done.” These organizers would sell their girls, put on third-rate shows and pocket the rest of the money. “Their reputations are in the dirt now and no one will give them a single rupee.” Anyway, Sunny found the amount offered laughable.
Khushi has not heard from Mec for more than a month now. “Mec isn’t giving his models more than 3,000 rupees per show,” she tells me. “Maybe you can pay your phone bill with 3,000, but there’s not much else you can do.” The last time they spoke, Mec told Khushi he had a show lined up for her to walk in. Each model would be paid 12,000 rupees by the organizers. Of that, Mec would give each girl 4,000. It was generous by his standards.
“I refused to do the show,” ’ Khushi says. “Maybe that’s why he isn’t talking to me.” Her model friends told her she was a fool. Sunny no longer talks to her. You’re ungrateful, Khushi was told. Most managers don’t give their models a penny. “The show gets you publicity,” they say, pocketing the entire amount the organizers hand over for the girls. ‘What more do you want?’ Others dole out 1,000 or 1,500 rupees to each girl. At least Mec doesn’t do that, his girls say.
Of course, there are other ways to make money. It starts at the shows. A model might catch the eye of someone sitting in the front row. The girl can be found on Facebook, or the show’s organizer can be pressed for her phone number. Sometimes there is a selection process. A show organizer can get in touch with a manager like Mec to request photos of models to take part in a show and be available “later.” The girls can make 7,000 rupees each for the show and 20,000 for the party afterwards at one of the farmhouses on the outskirts of the capital. “Pay parties,” Khushi explains. “If some low-level guy wants you at his party, he can get away with 10,000 or 7,000 rupees per hour. But if you get a high-level ka bunda—a landowner, a businessman—you can get double that.”
The requirements are easy enough: sit with the man’s friends, laugh at some jokes, a little dancing. “Whether you like it or not, you have to smile, you have to dance, you have to drink,” Khushi says. “One politician worked out a deal with a friend of mine: four hours of partying or attending a wedding, with everything—drugs, drinks—but sex included. That’s charged separately depending on what he feels like after the event.” If the girl meets someone during the event who makes an offer, she’s free to meet him afterwards and the politician does not object.
At the parties the girls are introduced as “my friend” or “Islamabad’s top model.” The girls network, they flirt. Each person at the party is an opportunity. The host might be called the day after and asked about the pretty girl in the white dress and gold sparkly heels.
A girl might get lucky at the party and make a khaas friend: that special someone who pays up to 150,000 rupees a month and installs her in an apartment or house. Some girls have several khaas friends and one of these friends might invite the girl to Dubai. “They go there for shoots,” Khushi explains. “The ones in which you only wear a bra and panties.” She grins. “The only time I was called to do one, I said, ‘Give me a crore [10 million rupees] and I’ll be on the first flight.’ They never called back.”
If Khushi were to break her mother’s third and most important rule, she could do “night spends.” Some girls beg their managers to pick them for these opportunities. “A friend of mine charges 20,000 rupees per hour,” Khushi says. “Gold chains, branded dresses and shoes—you can afford all this with night spends, and even more if you keep yourself well groomed and maintained.” Khushi’s friend is very happy with her rate, but other girls compare theirs to make sure they aren’t asking for too little. Some girls boast about their fees. These girls can pull in big sums, but they end up spending most of it in order to attract new customers. “We have to look perfect,” Khushi explains. “Your hands, feet, hair, make-up, gym membership—all of it adds up.” There is an emphasis on brands, with some girls shunning those who cannot afford designer clothes and shoes. They clearly haven’t made it, they think.
If Khushi chooses to keep the promises she made her mother, she cannot live in Islamabad as a model. On paper, models here are paid per outfit for even the biggest of shows, and a new model can make 8,000–10,000 rupees per outfit, whereas someone like Khushi, with nearly two years of experience under her belt, can demand 15,000–20,000. A girl starring in a television commercial can get up to 10,000 rupees, and a “brand shoot” for a catalogue or magazine can get a model 25,000 at best. But without a manager, even one who would give her a fraction of these amounts, Khushi isn’t booking any shows or shoots.
And the offers that are on the table are less than promising. “There’s a really good opportunity here in Lahore,” Khushi, a friend of hers said on the phone just a few days ago. He knew she was looking for work. “Why don’t you come here?”
“For whom?” Khushi asked. “And how much per dress?”
“This isn’t a per-dress kind of job,” the man said. “It’s more like per hour.”
Khushi was confused.
“Can’t you understand what I’m saying?” he said, annoyed. “Per hour. Two or three clients. Get on the first bus to Lahore and I can get you 90,000 rupees for a few hours, and lakhs [hundreds of thousands] for night spend.”
“Three men? Together?” It was the first question she could think of.
“What’s the big deal? I have girls who book five clients for a night. Together.”
Khushi couldn’t believe he was saying this to her.
“Here’s the thing, Ali bhai,” she replied. “I have six clients. My six brothers. Two are in Karachi, but don’t worry, I’ll get them to come to Islamabad. You just put your mother and your sister on the first bus here.”
“Have some shame, Khushi,” Ali snapped and hung up.
Until two months ago, Khushi had been making 80,000 rupees a month through modelling and small roles in television dramas. She would spend 30,000 of that to buy clothes, food, and medicine for her parents and load it into a car headed to Dhirkot. She had never told her father how she paid for everything, and he had never asked. But three months ago her eldest uncle received some photographs and videos on WhatsApp. The images of Khushi and clips of her runway walks had been pulled from Mec’s Facebook page. “Your daughter dances in clubs,” her uncle shouted at her father. “She works with people who supply girls. They do shows in the day and parties at night.”
Khushi’s father sent her a single message: “You need to stop all this. Either you keep me in your life or you keep this job of yours. Finish up everything and come home.” She replied, “I’ll come home. But who will pay for your expenses every month?”
She says she is fine with no longer being a model. She dreams of setting up her own small women-only gym. She’s been receiving marriage proposals. If she were still in the business, she knows that no man would even consider her. “Every man likes to go to parties with a model on his arm, every man likes to flirt with these models, every man likes to chat for hours with these models, take selfies and make it their DP [display picture] on Facebook,” Khushi says. “But no man wants to marry a model. That model could pray five times a day, but if she says to this man, ‘I am going out to get some shopping done,’ or, ‘I need to meet someone,’ he will think, Who is paying for her shopping? Who is she going to meet? If her phone is busy when he calls her at midnight, he will think, She’s ignoring me, she’s degrading me, she’s talking to her lover. The girl could be talking to her mother, her father, her sister. But if her phone is busy, that’s what the man will think. No man will marry that girl.”
Since I last met Mec, Bushi has all but disappeared from his Facebook page. There is no mention of QB2 any more. I ask Khushi what happened to her. “Who knows? Some models’ boyfriends will force them to leave the field. And some girls realise that there’s only one of three endings to their story: either they marry some rich man jo retire honay waala hai [who is about to retire]. Duniya se retire [Retire from this world]. He dies, but leaves you enough to live off. Or they will marry someone who already has children and a wife. The man will make you his second wife, but will never give you the rights or love that he gives his first wife. The girls might marry these men out of desperation, because they’re tired of trying to make ends meet. And others will never get married and they’ll continue to model and eventually they’ll be told, ‘You’re too old to model.’ ” Khushi shrugs. “I don’t know which ending Bushi got.”