Qandeel Baloch promised an online striptease to celebrate
Pakistan’s cricket victory over India. Pakistan lost and the dance never
happened. Qandeel is dead. Her brother strangler her to death and unabashedly
declares that he killed to save his family’s honor – the so called and dreaded
honor killing.
No I am not writing to mourn. I am not writing a tome on societal
maladies either. I am writing for a free spirit that did rock the core of a
society that is still rooted to its feudal past.
Fauzia Azeem is one of those garden variety teen from rural
Pakistan (one can read rural South Asia instead) who was married off to an
older man, birthed a child and then divorced; a life full of pangs of pain.
She had a free mind. Her mind soared. She buried her olden name.
She could have the namesake like Icarus or Phoenix; but she chose a befitting
name Qandeel, that in Arabic means LIGHT.
Light she was. She asked Imran Khan, one of the most
handsome men in her land to marry her. He was a village girl and yet her
sweet-nothings and her cooing absurd* undulated the hearts of Pakistan’s urban
uppity. She became a light in her own right. At her death, she was a star with
over 750,000 Facebook followers.
Qandeel had a very short life. Her social media life started
in January of 2014 and ended in July of 2016. And that two and half, indeed,
was her real living.
Reuters reported that on the wake of Qandeel’s killing,
Pakistan is about to pass law against honor killing. Let this be her legacy.
Let this be her epitaph.
Mohammad Zaman
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