When asked about the nature of his work in a 1973 interview in The Atlantic, Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously always thought his oeuvre being called ‘magical’ realism was simply untrue. I simply describe life in Latin America as it is, he said; “surrealism runs through the streets”. If it sounds magical or astounding…well, that’s life. Similarly for Pakistanis, life here is almost always surreal, and Society Girl, Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan’s non-fiction foray into the mystery behind the biggest case of the seventies is just that: life, with a liberal splash of gobsmack.
The book is part reportage, part social history, and part earnest explaining of things to non-Pakistanis. Mustafa Zaidi was a well-regarded Urdu poet and successful bureaucrat until Ayub Khan’s government unceremoniously fired him; he had a devoted, more-assimilated-than-a-local German wife and two children. Zaidi met “second-tier” socialite Shahnaz Gul, young and beautiful wife to a much older, previously married businessman Saleem Khan, and what happened next would titillate the collective imagination of the country for months. Even now, if you ask a Karachiite of a certain generation about Shahnaz or Mustafa, they will know exactly what you mean.
Non-fiction is an iceberg genre to write. The book in hand – the tip of the iceberg – is a distillation of months of research and interviews; masses of information that have to be sifted through to form a coherent narrative. And unlike fiction, you cannot invent things to fill in the gaps. Creative non-fiction is a convenient way to circumvent the issue of what color coat a person wore, or whether it was raining on a particular day, but non-fiction is exacting. This is especially true for a story such as the Zaidi-Gul case, where veering into judgment would defeat the purpose of the narrative, which the authors say is an effort to provide some clarity around the gossip and salacious rumor-mongering that still marks the case.
This is a task that is rendered even more difficult by the fact that archives in Pakistan are largely still basements of news organizations, or government institutions crammed with stacks of crumbling papers and moldering books. Libraries are scant, and largely in similar woeful states of neglect. A historian of my acquaintance once told me the remarkable story of discovering stacks of crucial historical documents casually disintegrating in a corner of a verandah of a feudal home. The Zaidi-Gul case is also more than fifty years old; many of the interviewees quoted in the book have passed away; anyone wanting to uncover more about what happened will find themselves with a scant pool of people to speak to.
The authors have been judiciously neutral in their narration of events, even at times candidly revealing that some interviews were from people who may not have perfect recall of events. Imtiaz and Masood-Khan have painstakingly recreated not only the case, but the social milieu of Karachi and Lahore in the seventies, which in itself is both a locus of nostalgia for Pakistanis, as well as one of the most somber times of upheaval the country has ever seen. Between Ayub Khan’s dictatorship, the 1971 war and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto taking the helm of the country, the Zaidi-Gul case was also a masterstroke in diversion. The authors point out how when Cyclone Bhola hit East Pakistan in 1970, it didn’t make headlines in West Pakistan – a poet and the object of his affections did. For context, Cyclone Bhola is on record as the deadliest cyclone in Bangladesh’s history (some sources assert it is the deadliest ever), claiming the lives of up to half a million people. In West Pakistan though, hardly anyone knew the extent of the devastation. Whipping up interest in a scandalous murder instead seemed opportune for the state and the press.
Society Girl dwells a fair amount on the lives of the rich and idle – women, in particular. Several of the women who used to party with the Khans have been interviewed for the book, and most of them are dismissive of her. She was peripheral to the scene, it seems; a beautiful but only mildly interesting woman, with a decidedly plain husband. It’s an interesting parallel to the way the book highlights the way the press fell upon Shahnaz Gul. From the discovery of Zaidi’s body to the legal proceedings, Shahnaz was painted as a murderous femme fatale, capable of everything from immorality to international smuggling; a licentious siren. On the other hand, Mustafa Zaidi was consistently represented - and continues to be - as a tortured soul, a poet with the passionate feelings that are only to be expected from one. It helped that he was indeed a talented creative, with many admirers, and was additionally a competent and upright civil servant. He was also obsessed with Shahnaz, writing florid love poems addressed to her and publishing them in magazines and telling all his friends about how madly in love he was with her. All accounts of their relationship include him insisting on marrying her.
This case is an important example of the damage an irresponsible, unbridled press can do, completely akin to the way present day tabloids operate. Accounts of how Shahnaz Gul was hounded by press photographers, with some trying to jump over the wall of the police station where she was held, or peering up her protective chadar while leaving court, are disturbing. The press would print lurid interpretations of events, describing things they had no way of knowing – how thin she had become, that she wept all day, and so forth. Clearly no photographer was reprimanded for their breaches of a private citizen’s privacy, nor were there any checks upon the press to report the proceedings in an ethical way. It doesn’t seem like any apologies were subsequently issued, or mitigating articles written about Shahnaz Gul after she was exonerated for the murder she was accused of – if there were, the book does not include them, and given the depth of research the authors have undertaken, they would have found them had they existed. As the book points out, the press’s approach was “slandering Shahnaz to glorify Mustafa”. It’s a somber thought that when all this happened, Shahnaz Gul was merely in her twenties, grappling with an alleged lover fourteen years her senior, married to a man even older – and then spent her life forever labeled “that woman”.
Society Girl is a welcome addition to the non-fiction scene in Pakistan. It’s compelling to read a story that is indeed intriguing and contradictory, a story that is deeply local, and a decadent fin de siecle slice of life: a turning point socially and historically, and that bygone world where people went dancing and nightclub-hopping, had torrid affairs, wore fabulous outfits and were snide about each other fifty years on to interviewers. That version of privileged Pakistan has long fled. It was shallow and self-absorbed, as privilege tends to be, but it was also that glamorous, sophisticated, out-of-reach glitter that the very best scandals are made of – and, as Society Girl shows, make for a juicy story.
Mina Malik is a writer and poet based in Lahore. She is the co-founder of The Peepul Press and prose editor at The Aleph Review.
