Latest revision as of 06:27, 13 December 2024

[edit] The murder, the scandal

Avijit Ghosh, Dec 8, 2024: The Times of India

Shahnaz Gul and Mustafa Zaidi at an event
From: Avijit Ghosh, Dec 8, 2024: The Times of India

Shahnaz Gul leaving the Karachi commissioner’s office
From: Avijit Ghosh, Dec 8, 2024: The Times of India

In 1970, Pakistan was seduced by a sex scandal like none before. Mustafa Zaidi, a 40-year-old gifted poet and an influential ex-civil servant personifying rizz, was found dead at his residence on a “hot and dry” October morning in upscale Karachi. In another room, Shahnaz Gul, a devastatingly attractive socialite in her mid-20s, lay unconscious. The two were married, but not to each other.
Over the next many weeks, indeed months, the case became a not-so-magnificent obsession of the public and the press. Every lurid detail of the love affair — some factual, many fictional — found space in newspapers in the pre-privacy era and was gleefully lapped up by the gossip-hungry public. Was it suicide or murder by poison? All doors were shut from the inside, but was a third person around? Was Gul just a socialite, or an undercover spy/smuggler? Everyone had an opinion and a theory on the case. The more bizarre, the better.
Now nearly five-and-a-half decades later, a methodically researched and compellingly narrated book, Society Girl, reconstructs every jagged line of a cold case that never went cold. The book, written by researcher Saba Imtiaz and freelance journalist Tooba Masood Khan, is many things: a probe into an affair where love morphs into hate’s wretched ‘other’, an exploration of mentalities, Zaidi’s especially, and an uncomfortably close look at Pakistan’s high society in times when nightlife revelries were endless and desires sleeveless. “The book doesn’t just look at these two people but also the world they were living in. It is more of a social history of Pakistan told through this case,” says Masood Khan.


A Poet Is Born


Zaidi grew up in Allahabad (now Prayagraj) in pre-independence India. North India’s premier literary town, where he graduated in English literature, nourished his creative side. His first pen name was Tegh Allahabadi and his debut verse collection, Zanjeerein, was prefaced by the celebrated Firaq Gorakhpuri. He was besotted by a Hindu lawyer’s daughter, though it’s not known if she reciprocated his feelings. In his youth, Zaidi twice attempted suicide; the first time in Allahabad, the second in Lahore, where he migrated to in 1951. In one of his poems, he remembered what he had left behind: “Mere ghar ke udaas chaukhat par / Kya kabhi chandni utarti hai (Does the moonlight still arrive on the sad threshold of my house).


In Lahore, Zaidi struggled like most displaced by Partition before finding his feet as a civil servant and a poet, the renowned Josh Malihabadi being his mentor. Fluent in Urdu and English, in 1957 he married Vera von Hill, a German he had met in the UK and impressed by reciting poetry. She, in time, became the mother of his two children. By all accounts, the marriage worked well. Vera accepted Zaidi’s philandering ways. The book recounts her opening the door for a friend while her husband is enclosed with a Pakistani heroine in a bedroom. By the late 1960s, Zaidi was the district commissioner of Lahore. That didn’t stop him from being an amateur aviator and crashing a plane near the Indo-Pak border. 


Lust, Love And Longings


Gul grew up in Gujranwala. Those who knew her say she wasn’t either “highly educated” or a poetry lover. “People would remember her alabaster-like skin, perfect features, wavy hair,” the book says. She came from a wealthy and conservative family in Ludhiana that migrated to Gujranwala during Partition. When 17, she was married to Saleem Khan, a “dull” UK-educated divorcee — his first wife was a Brit — and about 30 years her senior. She had two daughters from the marriage. They lived in Karachi.


Sometime in the late 1960s, Zaidi and Gul met at a wellheeled club. She was, by most accounts, like a song Zaidi couldn’t get out of his head. Gul too responded to his easy charm. “This seemed like a relationship born out of lust, not literature,” the book says. But the affair’s tenor changed with time. An upright officer, Zaidi was among 38 civil servants of a total of 303 govt officials purged by President Yahya Khan in Dec 1969. He sent his wife and children away to Germany, moved to a rented quarter, not far from where Gul lived. Letters show he wanted to go to Germany, but the state wouldn’t permit it. 


It was around this time that the relationship, especially from Zaidi’s side, gathered dark undertones. Both, it seems, wanted the relationship on their own terms. He wanted marriage, but she didn’t. The divergence of desires led to bitterness and, consequently, devious behaviour by the poet. At one stage, the book says, Zaidi not only tried to implicate Gul in smuggling but also privately printed flyers (pamphlets) of her topless photos, carrying a blurb, Christine Keeler of Pakistan. The photos were discovered after his death.


A model, Keeler was at the centre of a sex scandal involving top British politician John Profumo in 1963. Shahnaz, a five-poem series by Zaidi on his inamorata, underlines the liaison’s changing trajectory and rhythms. The second poem (see box) celebrates the body, the fifth is melancholic and accusatory. 


A City Shows Its Colours


Urban Pakistan’s upper crust had a split personality in the 1960s and early ’70s. The elite was superficially modern — Scotch for men and saris for women, two key ingredients — but conservative at its core. Extra-marital affairs were discreet. The circumstances and the crime scene of Zaidi’s death on Oct 12, 1970, took the lid off. “The case had all the elements that draw attention anywhere in the world: power dynamics, relationships, high society, social structures, but also because the protagonists — a homemaker who was occasionally out in society and a poet who was a former member of the bureaucracy that was largely considered beyond reproach,” says Imtiaz.


Gul was arrested and tried both in court and by the media. Anything and everything was written about her. “The Pakistani press prioritised Shahnaz over the historic developments taking place in the country; running stories large on conjecture and short on facts, but all meant to sell newspapers and to shame a woman for having an affair. Instead of seriously investigating the allegations of murder, the press chose to focus their narrow gaze on morality and sleaze,” the book says.


After admitting to the affair before the police, which as the Dawn newspaper coyly reported, included “love sessions”, Gul denied everything in court. She denied having poisoned him or ever having sex with him. The case dragged on for 18 months and despite the political turmoil all around, Pakistan was consumed by it.


The country’s maddening degree of attention and devotion to the case can be best illustrated by two examples. First, when Zaidi’s body was exhumed for forensics, Urdu newspaper Hurriyat published 15 photos of the event! Second, a month after Zaidi’s death, Bhola, the deadliest ever recorded tropical cyclone, plundered East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) claiming at least 3,00,000 lives. But West Pakistan’s press privileged the sensation over the human tragedy. As the case continued to be heard in court, Pakistan fought and lost the 1971 war against India, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.


In May 1972, in a 32-page judgment, the court finally ruled in Gul’s favour. Her ordeal was over. She never spoke to the press thereafter.


The authors worked for five years to piece the story together. ‘Notes on a Scandal’, a true crime podcast emerged from the project in 2022, further renewing interest in l’ affaire Shahnaz-Mustafa. “People still talk about it. At least once a year on his death anniversary, an event is organised in Karachi or online. Apart from his poetry, there is almost always a reference to how he died. Similarly, Shahnaz is very much alive in people’s memories,” says Masood Khan.


Adds Imtiaz, “The case endures in public memory because it was largely seen as unsolved and due to the myriad conspiracies around it which have only grown over the years.” Shahnaz Gul resumed attending cocktail parties and receptions after the judgment. She passed away sometime in the early 2000s. The book says there were no obituaries. If any real-life love and hate story deserves a web series, this is it.


HE WROTE FOR HER


Fankar khud na thi, mere fan ki shareek thi / Woh rooh ke safar mein badan ki shareek thi (No artist herself yet an accomplice in my art / In the breath’s journey she was in my body) 
(From Shahnaz 2, published in the book, Society Girl. Zaidi wrote a series of five poems for Gul. Translation: Sadia Khatri)