Not everyone seeks fame. Sometimes fame—the kind some people spend their entire lives courting—finds you. It is this kind of overnight fame that comes unannounced to a seventeen-year-old boy—a beautiful fair-skinned blue-eyed boy with a brooding stare—in October 2016 when he becomes one of the most recognizable faces in Pakistan. In just five days, two photographs of him on the social media site Instagram rake in more than 50,000 likes and thousands of comments. His fame spreads not just in Pakistan, but around the world. His “good looks” are featured on CNN,1 the BBC notes that his “piercing eyes” have “thousands” of Twitter users “love-struck,”2 and BuzzFeed describes him as “damn HOT” with “effortless high-fashion model looks.”3
Very soon he is charming audiences on morning talk shows, being showered with offers to model and act, smiling and posing for countless photographs, and receiving a stream of marriage proposals. There have been many firsts for him this month: sitting in a chauffeur-driven car, flying in a plane, staying in a hotel, buying a suit. Before his new-found fame, he sold tea for a living in a market in Islamabad, and he would worry about how to earn enough to ensure everyone in his family—his father, his two mothers and seventeen siblings—had enough to eat. Now he dines at five-star restaurants.
What does he like to eat?
“Bhindi.”
His name is Arshad Khan, and he has become known in Pakistan and around the world as the Chaiwala, or tea-seller. He is famous for having done absolutely nothing.
In 2015, Qandeel’s “How I’m looking?” video created a blueprint for the kind of fame that viral stars in Pakistan could achieve. The question—with her intonation and accent—was parodied endlessly and mimicked not just by the average Pakistani social media user, but by some of the country’s best-known singers and actors. It is impossible to know how many times the original video was watched—it has been copied and shared to hundreds of pages—but it led to Qandeel’s inclusion in Google’s list of the top ten Pakistanis searched for online in 2015.4
By 2016, the year Qandeel was murdered, there were more than 44 million social media users in Pakistan.5 Facebook had the biggest slice of the pie, with 33 million users,6 followed by Twitter with 5 million and Instagram with 3.9 million. Arshad Khan, like Qandeel before him, had joined the ranks of a handful of viral stars: men and women who become household names, their images or videos spilling over from social media sites into millions of conversations on apps like WhatsApp, shared and forwarded on a loop until mainstream media outlets take notice and feature them on the news or on talk shows.
Pakistan’s most well-known viral stars include Taher Shah, whose “Eye to Eye” music video briefly trended globally on Twitter, while his second song, “Angel,” racked up more than 2 million views on YouTube and Facebook in the first four days of its release;7 Asif Rana, whose passionate 2015 Facebook announcement of a tiff with his best friend Mudasir became the stuff of a thousand memes;8 and Shafqat Rajput, a barber in Bahawalpur who was filmed in 2017 applying flammable products to clients’ hair and whipping out a lighter to set their coiffures on fire before trimming them.9
At the time his photograph was first taken, Arshad did not know about these viral superstars. He had never had a Facebook account. He could not read or write. His family and neighbours lived without electricity and did not watch TV.
Arshad was working at a dhaba (roadside café) in a Sunday bazaar in Islamabad’s G9 neighbourhood when Javeria Ali, a twenty-six-year-old photographer who was on a photo walk in the market, spotted him ladling out cups of milky tea. He was wearing a turquoise shalwar kameez with a white scalloped trim around the neck. His hair was slightly tousled, with a few stray locks falling above his dark eyebrows, and his cheeks were peppered with stubble. He wore a black thread looped around his wrist to protect him from the evil eye.
Ali routinely shot portraits of street children, pushcart vendors and beggars, uploading the images to the Facebook page where she advertised her wedding photography services and classes for aspiring photographers. This portrait felt no different. She took three or four pictures of the chaiwala while his head was bowed, then he looked up for a split second and stared right at her. She got the shot. Arshad didn’t even realise his photograph had been taken. Ali uploaded the photograph (captioned “Hot-Tea”) to her Instagram and Facebook pages on 14 October 2016. It was soon shared on various blogs and social media pages, with users commenting on the tea boy’s looks.
He had not seen his photograph on the news, and he didn’t think of the girl with the camera until she came back to the market, this time with reporters and camera crews. He found out they were looking for him. He panicked.
Arshad lived in a slum in the city’s Golra Sharif area and was entrusted with taking up to twenty of his neighbours’ children to and from the market with him. The children did odd jobs or begged, and when they weren’t trying to scrape together a few rupees got up to all kinds of mischief. When he saw the cameras and reporters, Arshad’s first thought was that one of the children had done something bad, maybe smashed the window of a car belonging to someone influential.
His memories of the day are hazy. He remembers Ali telling him she had uploaded his photograph to social media and it had gone viral. He did not know what that meant and remembers feeling fear. A longing to hide. His first instinct was to bolt. He recalls wandering around the city’s Blue Area neighbourhood, thinking he might go to a friend’s house and wait. His father kept calling his phone. One of the chaiwala’s relatives sold second-hand clothes in the bazaar, and he had called Arshad’s brother to tell him about the sudden commotion in the market. “I think Arshad has done something,” he said. “The media people are here looking for him.” Arshad was too scared to talk to his father. When he finally answered his phone, he said he would be home in ten minutes. After a little while, he stalled again. “Fifteen minutes,” he promised. Hours passed. He wondered if the cameramen had found his home. Would they film his mother and sisters? He considered never returning to Golra Sharif. “I only wanted to hide,” he recalled. “I wanted to disappear.” He wandered the streets aimlessly until the sun started to set. This was the last time for the foreseeable future that he would be entirely alone.
The two days after his photograph went viral were a blur of interviews.
Arshad went to work in the market as usual, but the area around the dhaba was crammed with people who had flocked there to meet the Chaiwala. Arshad had never seen such a big crowd of people in his life, not even at a political rally. They didn’t want to drink the tea he made; they wanted to take pictures and show him videos of news segments on him from around the world. They pressed against him as he spoke with one reporter after another. They asked him about his plans to marry (“I can’t get married before my two elder brothers. I haven’t thought about it”), and his favourite movies. He had only ever seen one movie, a Bollywood superhero film, in his life and had watched it on a knock-off mobile phone. He couldn’t remember the name of the movie. They urged him to send a message to his friends and family, who were probably watching him on TV. “There’s no cable and no electricity where they live, so how will they see my message?”
When a reporter asked him if he would like to work in films, he didn’t think much of the idea and told him, “I’ll work wherever I can and with whoever wants me. I’ll work in films if I can.” His family didn’t like that answer too much, so the next time he was asked about films, he said, “I’ll do good, clean, honourable work, and I haven’t thought about doing films or dramas. In my family we don’t do that and nor will we ever.”
He was whisked away to a television station for an interview and made to wear a suit. Before he went on air he heard a member of the crew speaking Pashto, the language Arshad and his parents spoke at home. He pulled the man to one side and pleaded, “Can you tell me what is going on? How is everyone in the world looking at my picture?” He remembered how the media would descend on the bazaar for a few days every year or before Ramzaan and Eid and interview shopkeepers and vegetable sellers about rising food prices, and he thought that their interest in him was just like their curiosity about the cost of a kilo of tomatoes. It would wane after two or three days, he imagined.
On a cold evening four months after that day, I meet Arshad in an apartment—a makeshift office, says his manager Fahim, a place to “do deals and whatnot”—in a residential area in Islamabad. Fahim wears a tight black T-shirt, purple velour tracksuit bottoms, and slippers that squelch with each step on the tiled floor. Everything in the apartment is brand new. Someone has thrown the box for a thirty-inch LCD TV on to the small balcony outside one of the bedrooms.
Arshad is skinny, and his black suit and shirt look a little too big for him. The trousers are baggy and a pair of pointed black shoes with silver buckles peek out from under them. He is tired and not feeling well today. His whole body aches. He went to see a doctor and was told that for five days he needed to eat simpler food and only drink the kahva (tea) that he is used to. No sugary drinks or juices or fast food. His doctor says he is “mentally weak.” His manager says he is just fatigued, but Arshad reminds them of his days hawking second-hand clothes, doing manual labour and construction work, and selling fruit and vegetables in the market. “This is no work for me,” he says. “I’ve had to do a lot more than this. It’s just a different kind of work.” His only task for today is to record a video: a congratulatory message for Kismat Connection, a TV show that has just aired its hundredth episode. He’s a celebrity now, and the producers of the show have requested a short video that they can air during the episode.
We go into the bedroom with the best natural light. The room is empty save for a folding table in the corner stacked with rolls of bedding and blankets. Arshad’s social media adviser, Rizwan, works in real estate and rents out apartments just like this one. He darts in and out of our meeting while he tends to a group of prospective clients in the apartment’s second bedroom. Arshad’s team now includes a personal groomer, a photographer, a speech therapist, and a psychologist who, Fahim explains, teaches Arshad “daily life things” and “does therapy on how to live your life.”
Fahim feeds Arshad the lines for the video. “Hi, friends!” he says. “No, wait, say, “‘Hi, doston!’ ”
“Hi, doston,” repeats Arshad.
“It’s me, Arshad Khan,” says Fahim.
“This is my Arshad Khan.”
The more emotionless Arshad sounds, the peppier Fahim tries to make his lines.
Fahim gushes, “I want to congratulate Taher Ali Shah and the whole team of Kismat Connection that they have completed a hundred episodes!”
“I congratulate Taher Ali Shah sahib and the whole Kismat Connection team for completing one hundreh episondh,” Arshad says.
“The whole team!” Fahim exclaims. “You need to sound excited. And say ‘hundred.’ Hund-rid. And epi-sote.” When Fahim enunciates “sote,” it sounds like someone has popped open a can of some fizzy drink. “Sote. Not ‘sondh.’ Sote.”
“Hund-reh,” says Arshad. “Epee-sondh.”
They do one take and then another. Sometimes Arshad forgets the name of the man he is congratulating. Other times he forgets to sound happy. He repeatedly stumbles over the words “hundred” and “episode.” He sounds morose.
“You need to sound happy,” Fahim explains. “Imagine if you bought a new car. I would congratulate you, right? Now imagine that I’m not near you. Maybe I would send you a video, right? That’s what we are doing here for Taher Ali Shah. He’s done something really big. Something we are happy about.”
“It’s not like he’s done some umrah [pilgrimage to Mecca],” Arshad quips.
Ten minutes later Fahim gets a phone call.
“Ep-pee-sone,” Arshad mumbles to himself. “Ep-ee-sone.”
Fahim leaves the room, asking me to try my luck. The door closes and Arshad turns to me. “What is this ‘episondh?’ ” he asks. “Is it the fashion shows? Or those programmes that people do?”
Without a camera pointed at him, Arshad is a fast learner. Between takes he whispers the words in English to himself over and over again. He learns to say “hund-rud” and “epee-sode.” When Fahim praises him for almost getting it right, he asks, “But what were the bits I got wrong?” Even when the sky begins to darken and Fahim turns his phone’s torch on to continue filming, Arshad doesn’t ask for a break or suggest they finish the video the next day. After twenty-five takes, Fahim decides that he can splice together sentences from the recordings and create one seamless video. Arshad claps his hands with relief. “We’re done? What a nuisance.”
Once the video has been wrapped up, Arshad slumps on a couch in the living room and stares at the new TV. A show on animals in the wild is on. “When Fahim has to teach me what to say and how to say it, I wonder how I’ll ever do all of this,” he explains, never turning his gaze away from a lion prowling on the screen. “I feel bad that he has to spend so much time trying to get me to do it right.”
“OK, I’ll explain to you what he means,” Fahim interjects. “He is confident. He’s not shy. He picks things up fast. But you have to remember the background he has. He didn’t watch TV for even a day in his life. He didn’t know who the people in the newspaper were. For him, words are just black-coloured lines. Now for someone like this to come into this world and to do these things is not easy. This isn’t his language and he feels tension that why am I not getting it? Why can’t I do it? I understand him, you see. I have an idea…” He snaps his fingers to get Arshad’s attention. “Don’t look there. Pay attention here.” He flicks a button on the remote and turns the TV off. “So, as I was saying, when he tries to do something and he can’t, then he feels shame. Right, Arshad?”
“Yes.” Arshad nods. “Absolutely.”
Arshad met Fahim on the third day after the media had come to the market. At this point, Arshad had been working in the bazaar for eight years. He had been at the dhaba for a little over two months and was making up to 600 rupees working three days a week. On the remaining days he picked up any work he could get. When the reporters and morning-show hosts asked him what he dreamed of doing, he said what any man who sees work as something provided by Allah so he can support his family would say: “When you’re working for fourteen or fifteen hours a day, you don’t spend your time thinking of dreams. And when you finally go to sleep, you’re too tired to dream.”
Fahim did not arrive at Arshad’s home in a big car like some of the other hopeful agents and managers. He knew that Arshad’s family thought that those who worked in showbiz were dishonourable, and films and television dramas were filth. Arshad’s new-found fame scared them, and his parents told everyone they were worried he would be kidnapped.
“My work is like worship, for me,” Fahim told Arshad at their first meeting. “The respect or humiliation we get in this world is in Allah’s hands, and he has given me work that brings me respect. I can help you get work that gives you izzat [respect] too.”
This promise buoyed Arshad as he entered a world utterly different to his own. “Before October, I knew my world and my work,” he explains. “I knew everything about it. Now I’m in a new world, with new people. The way they sit, talk, dress—everything is different. My world has changed completely.” He has made appearances at lavish weddings and met women who have wanted to talk to him and take pictures with him as they pressed their bodies against his. He sometimes thinks of the bazaar and how he would not even look at the women who came there, let alone dare to speak with them. He wonders how these women came to work in showbiz. If his sister ever wanted to become famous, if she wanted to work in show business like him, he would absolutely refuse to let her do so. It is no place for a woman, he feels. It can never be. On talk shows, when female hosts and guests sat next to him and talked so freely, his first instinct was to get up and walk away. He felt sharam (shame) and would try to end the conversation as soon as possible. He was aware that he did not sound like them. To this day he struggles to say words like fans (“phans”) and Facebook (“Phasebook”).
Arshad relies on Fahim and Rizwan to read his contracts. When a TV anchor asked him how he would give fans his autograph, he gave her what he thought was a perfectly logical answer for an illiterate person—“I’ll use my thumbprint”—but the audience hooted with laughter and clapped and Rizwan had to spend hours teaching him how to scribble out a signature.
It has taken him some time to become accustomed to probing questions about his personality, his life before he became famous, his likes and dislikes. “No one had ever asked me before what country I would like to visit, what food I liked or what my hobbies were,” Arshad explains. “I never wanted any kind of clothes or shoes or food. I knew what I was earning. I knew that I could have gone to any of these restaurants or shops and asked them how much something I wanted was. I wouldn’t be able to afford those things even if I saved my entire month’s salary. Then I would have felt sad. I never wanted to feel that way and so I didn’t think about what I desired.” But, slowly, Fahim and Rizwan’s dreams for Arshad became Arshad’s dreams for himself. Now he wants to act in commercials, films and dramas. He wants to model because it is easier for him to pose and wear beautiful clothes than to act. He wants to get an education and eventually open an institution to provide children, like the ones in his neighbourhood, with schooling.
All of this can only happen if his managers succeed in making him a star. Arshad has got what Fahim calls “over-the-night fame.” In the ten years that he has been managing artists, Fahim says he’s never seen anything like it in Pakistan. It usually takes years for people to get the kind of attention that Arshad has gained in a very short time. In the early days, when Arshad’s schedule included up to a dozen interviews in a day and meetings with people throughout the day to work on deals, the team was sleeping only three or four hours a night, and he was mobbed by fans wherever he went. “This is a star’s goal,” explains Fahim. “Stars are used to this and it’s what they work for. But Arshad never had these goals. He was tired and he got sick a lot.”
It is important to Fahim and Rizwan that Arshad think of himself as a star. “If we just tell him what to do, then he’s a worker,” Fahim explains. “If you make a servant a king, then he’ll never be able to maintain it unless he believes he is a king.” Fahim simpers and cowers in his chair. “A common man will sit like this.” He straightens his back, pushes out his chest and crosses one leg over the other. “But a king will sit like this.”
They try to teach him the habits of a star. They encourage him to be demanding. Fahim estimates that it will take him five or six months to train Arshad to expect things to be given to him with the snap of a finger. “If he didn’t do nakhra [make a fuss], I would make him do nakhra,” he says. “If he is a star with us, only then will he be a star in the market,” Fahim reasons. And once he starts behaving like a star, his fans will see him as someone to emulate and idolize. “A star’s fans think that he is bigger and better than them,” Fahim says. “Their idea of you is what they want to see. That’s what you need to give them.” And where the fans go, the industry follows. “If you’re a producer, why would you choose Arshad Khan for your movie over someone else? Star power. That’s why. The audience you can pull. The fans. If Arshad can guarantee that his movie will make 200 crore rupees, that’s a safe bet for a producer.”
However, four months after he was discovered, work has all but dried up for Arshad. In the last two weeks he has only appeared at a “meet and greet” breakfast and dinner with fans in Lahore—an opportunity for fans to take selfies with him. In January 2017 he starred in a music video with Muskan Jay, a singer and actress who was crowned “Mrs Pakistan” in 2016 in a Canadian competition. In the video Arshad played her love interest. He held Muskan close to him, hugged her and held her hands. A teaser for the video and a couple of photographs from the shoot were released online and quickly went viral.
The backlash was swift. Fans were not pleased. There were rumours of death threats from conservative family members. In an interview a few days before the video was released, Arshad apologized for the photographs. “Those photos were wrong, and no photos like this will come again,” he said. “I don’t want to work in films now. My family is getting angry about that.”10 Less than a week after the video was released, it was reported that Arshad wanted to quit show business. A member of Arshad’s team claimed that he wished to return to his work at the dhaba.11
“That was fake news,” Arshad says. “I never wanted to leave showbiz. It’s all fake.” He insists that while his family members are conservative—“namaazi,” explains Fahim—they are happy for him and only want him to do the best work.
I ask Fahim if he feels the novelty of the Chaiwala is wearing thin. After dozens of interviews and appearances on almost all the popular talk shows and morning shows in the country, Arshad’s rags-to-riches story has been told so many times over the last four months that it has lost one crucial element in a viral star’s ability to draw a crowd: it is no longer surprising or unique. If Arshad wishes to forge a career on the strength of one viral photograph—if he wants the modelling contracts, advertisement offers and invitations to appear on talk shows—he has to continue to give Pakistanis something they have never seen before.
The average Pakistani social media user may scroll past dozens of viral videos, memes and photographs a day. Viral stars like Qandeel knew how to make those viewers hit pause. Qandeel’s videos may have been scorned or dismissed as “attention-seeking,” but she knew how to create content that sparked conversation. “Qandeel Baloch gave the selfie generation a catchphrase when she uttered those three words,” declared an article naming the “How I’m looking?” video as one of the “10 notable quotes that defined Pakistan’s entertainment scene in 2015.” “The innocuous phrase was also quite revealing. [It] encapsulates our generation’s need for validation online.”12
Qandeel was aware that in order to sustain her audience’s interest, she had to continue to give it something worth watching—people could laugh at her, be shocked by her, send her hateful messages or make fun of her, but that meant they were paying attention to her. “For popularity, you have to show yourself, you have to take your clothes off, you have to do nude photo shoots,” she explained in an interview in 2014, well before “How I’m looking?” became her calling card. “To remain popular and ‘in,’ you have to upload strange photos of yourself on social media.”13
But Fahim insists that Arshad isn’t being talked about as much because he has become “exclusive.” “Actually, we have decreased his appearances ourselves,” he argues. He says that he has recently got enquiries about the Chaiwala from China, Malaysia, Greece and Dubai. “We want him to rest and relax. People think his fame has decreased, but we are making him exclusive. We don’t just give interviews to everyone any more.”
After the Muskan Jay video, Arshad’s team has become cautious about the offers that it accepts. There are no more music videos for now. Fahim refuses invitations for appearances at parties. “Girls, parties—we keep him away from all that,” he says. “I am scared that he’ll get ruined.” Arshad doesn’t have a Facebook account, and he is allowed to have a mobile phone but can only play games on it. He doesn’t take any pictures of himself or make videos or interact with fans on social media. His managers receive messages, calls and Facebook requests from women who want to propose to him or offer their daughters in marriage. Then there are the other, less tame requests and video messages. “I never show him those ones,” Fahim says. “I don’t want him to have those things on his mind. Whatever I think is good for a younger brother is what is good for Arshad.”
Arshad still doesn’t quite comprehend why his photograph went viral. How did one moment, one glance, change his life? “I still don’t understand what it is in that photo,” he admits. “People tell me that it’s my face. Others say I have good-coloured eyes. But this is my kismet from Allah. This is Allah’s doing.”
Some days he still cannot believe he is the Chaiwala. “Sometimes I think this is all a dream and it can go away any minute,” he says. “Just as Allah has ordained that the night takes away the day, He can take anything away from you in a minute. Things can come into your life suddenly, can also leave just as suddenly.” He says he cannot imagine going back to the life he used to have before he became the Chaiwala.
Fahim and Rizwan urge me to stay for dinner. They plan to have a big, traditional meal of grilled lamb. But it’s late and I refuse. As Arshad sees me out, he grins. “Forget this grilled stuff,” he says. “The next time you meet me, I’ll be a star. I’ll bring you a live lamb.”
Six months pass before Arshad is in the news once more. In July 2017 the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) states that Arshad and his family are from neighbouring Afghanistan and living in Pakistan illegally. A photograph has been shared on Arshad’s social media pages featuring the Chaiwala, his hair curling past his ears as it had outgrown the cut he was given by stylists in Karachi, receiving his brand new identity card as a Pakistani citizen. But NADRA officials claim Arshad obtained the card using forged documents. The media contact Arshad’s team for a comment. “Arshad Khan’s manager Malik Fahim…found the NADRA claim shocking,” an investigative story notes. “[Fahim] made it clear that he did not know Arshad prior to the Chaiwala becoming a celebrity.”14
The photograph of Arshad smiling with his identity card is deleted from his social media accounts. Nearly two years would pass before Arshad appeared on television once more. In April 2019, he is interviewed on a morning talk show and the hosts prompt him to make tea and ask him to say a few sentences in other languages he might speak. He confesses that he can speak Punjabi, but not very well. “Can you say, ‘This tea does not have enough sugar?’ ” the host asks him. Arshad repeats the sentence. The hosts are delighted. “This is the kind of stuff that will go viral!” they say. “No one has ever heard him speak Punjabi before.” The interview fails to generate any buzz.