Fault Lines in Karachi

To the world outside and especially to us in India the period from late 1970 to the end of 1971 would suggest a single narrative dominated Pakistan—the federal crisis concerning East Pakistan. In November 1970, the province was hit by a devastating cyclone. In the national elections a month later, the Awami League gained a majority and in the normal course its leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman should have been invited to form the government in Pakistan. For many in West Pakistan this was their worst nightmare on the threshold of becoming a reality. By March, a military crackdown was underway, which soon morphed into a genocide in East Pakistan. By December 1971, however it was all over and the country stood divided into two.

Yet this, what appears in hindsight as a national trauma, is not what solely dominated West Pakistan’s mindset through this time. Instead, a murder— ‘a tale of sex, lies and scandal’—moved to centrestage and captured the public imagination. This book is the story of that mystery—a former high-profile civil servant Sayyid Mustafa (also known as Mustafa Zaidi) who was also an accomplished poet with a significant fan following is found dead in October 1970 in his apartment in Karachi. With him, unconscious and seemingly oblivious to what had happened to Zaidi, was the beautiful socialite Shahnaz Gul then in her mid-20s and married with two children. Zaidi then in his mid-forties was seemingly happily married himself with a German wife and two children, but recent dismissal from service (in part a fallout of Pakistan’s complicated politics) meant he was depressed and volatile. By mutual consent his wife and children had moved to Germany, and he was supposed to join them there but that required official permission, which was not easily forthcoming.

The theme of the news story that followed was, not surprisingly, adultery. The trajectory of the police investigation soon changed from suicide to murder—perhaps almost inevitably Gul would soon “become the focus of the undivided attention of the country’s police, politicians and press generating thousands of headlines over the course of the year.” That Zaidi was a popular poet and at least a few of his poems were about Gul further fuelled this frenzy then and continues to make this celebrated case a conversation stopper in Pakistan.

How and why this happened is compressed in Society Girl, an engrossing narrative of what was described as being Pakistan’s “first jet set murder case”. In uncovering the mystery, the authors have juxtaposed the sad story of Zaidi and Gul against the wider change of Pakistan’s federal crisis to illustrate how a society scandal got prioritised over historic developments that ultimately led to the breakup of the country. As the suicide became a murder investigation the book also reveals just how much a cocktail of high society sex and adultery can grip societal imagination and the deep layers of misogyny that underwrote public and personal mores.

The balance of evidence and probability suggests that Zaidi did die by suicide in a state of depression. The case against Gul was driven largely by media interest and innuendo and by the sentiment that an adulteress was capable of anything. She was finally acquitted, but the process of the investigation and the legal proceedings is revealing both of social prejudices as equally of how a high-profile media circus can blindside so many people, or allow them to be willingly distracted from the larger drama of the breakup of their country.

The book is a riveting archival investigation written with a fine sense of drama and an eye for detail. This story of a society scandal and a deep tragedy for those directly impacted, is also in many ways a fascinating snapshot of the social history of upper-class Karachi and Pakistan in a transformative year of its history. A gripping read and highly recommended.

About The Author

TCA Raghavan

TCA Raghavan is a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan and Singapore. His first book, Attendant Lords: Abdur Rahim and Bairam Khan: Courtiers and Poets in Mughal India, was awarded the Mohammad Habib Prize by the Indian History Congress. He is also the author of The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan and History Men: Jadunath Sarkar, G S Sardesai, Raghubir Sinh and Their Quest for India’s Past. His latest book is Circles of Freedom: Love, Friendship and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle

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