6 Quotes by Sanam Maher

In the distance, smoke plumes from brick kilns where men, women and children will spend their entire lives on their knees under the sun cooling, patting, stacking, packing red bricks that are sent across the country. They will never leave that burning land, always thousands of rupees short of freeing themselves from their debts to the kiln’s owner

Five days after the world found out that her name was Fouzia Azeem, Qandeel received a legal notice from Fayyaz Leghari, a lawyer in Gadai, a town 20 kilometres from Shah Sadar Din. He wanted her to stop using ‘Baloch’ as her surname or claim to be a Baloch woman. ‘You have no relation (sic) with any Baloch family or tribe,’ Leghari wrote.

At 11.25 a.m. on 16 July 2016, Adil Nizami, a twenty-five-year-old rookie reporter from Multan, broke the biggest story of his career. ‘Famous model Qandeel Baloch has been killed,’ he blurted out in a live call that interrupted 24 News’ regular morning bulletin.

A journalist, will tell you about a place not too far from here, where the tribal belt of Balochistan province starts, where the women are not given any shoes. When you don’t understand what he means, he will impatiently explain, ‘If you’re not wearing shoes and you walk outside, where will your eyes remain? You’ll never look up—never look at any man—if you’re scared of where your naked foot might fall when you leave your home.

My childhood crush once gave me a name.‘Qandeel?’It’s the name everyone knows me by.Q—QueenA—AppealingN—NaughtyD—DazzlingE—ElegantE—ExquisiteL—LovelyWell, that’s Qandeel.But Qandeel who?Qandeel from Shah Sadar Din, a girl who belongs to the Baloch Ma’arahtribe.Qandeel Baloch.Yes. That worked. Qandeel. It was a beautiful name. What did it mean?Qandeel ka matlab hai roshni. The light.

As Shah deftly steers the conversation, Anwar bibi and Azeem’s explanation for why Waseem killed Qandeel comes out muddled, a version that has been told, retold and then untold and erased over the last few months.