In 1970s Pakistan, when former bureaucrat Mustafa Zaidi is found dead under mysterious circumstances and his lover Shahnaz Gul arrested as the main accused, news reporters rush to her house to closely observe the movements inside―when were lights turned off, whether her husband Saleem Khan’s car was parked outside.... “Saleem Khan was found strolling in his house in a worried state,” reported a Pakistani daily.
In 2020, despite a raging pandemic, the ‘mysterious death’ of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, too, became the most important news. News channels competed for ‘exclusives’ and ‘big breaking’ and set up camp outside his and accused Rhea Chakraborty’s houses, promising crisp coverage of even the slightest brush of air.
From the 1970s to now, sensationalism seems to have only deepened in the age of social media. Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan’s Society Girl takes you inside Karachi’s high society of the 1970s when ‘society girls’ rose to prominence, forging bonds with important persons in power. It is also a stark commentary on the media trial that happened then and has normalised in today’s time.
Society Girl revisits the controversial case that shook the nation and unsettled the fulcrum of the high society structure, aided by the political turn of events. Newspapers filled front pages with juicy details and images of the accused and Zaidi’s family members. Women were pitted against each other and narratives constructed―Zaidi’s wife, the widow in white and a mother of two, received sympathy, whereas the emotionless, femme fatale Gul, also a mother of two, was painted as the fallen woman.
There are striking similarities between the case of Zaidi and Rajput. The latter is said to have died by suicide following depression, while his then partner, who was arrested, underwent brutal character assassination. Mental health, in Rajput’s case, was largely pushed to the fringes, as it was in the case of Zaidi, who was also a poet. “Our investigation makes a few things clear. One is that Mustafa had clear, difficult struggles with his mental health; he described them eloquently and frequently in his correspondence and how he was suffering,” write the authors.
One could read the book as Zaidi’s case study or as an intelligently written satire that proves nothing remains changed. Perhaps this is why Priya Kapoor, director of Roli Books, decided to bring this story to India. “On a friend’s recommendation I listened to ‘Notes on a Scandal’, the podcast by Tooba Masood-Khan and Saba Imtiaz,” she says. “I was hooked because there are few true crime podcasts from the subcontinent to begin with, but this was exceptionally good because the storytelling and writing was excellent. When the hosts announced they were working on a book, I jumped at the opportunity and wrote to them immediately.”
Kapoor thinks the book is better than the podcast. “At the face of it, the book is about a mysterious death, a scandal and a trial. But they have examined moral policing, media ethics and how women are treated differently in the criminal justice system,” she says. “I felt a lot of what they wrote about would resonate with readers in India, too, where media trials are common.”
Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Scandal
By Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan
Published by Roli Books
Price Rs595; pages 352