Review: Society Girl by Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan

Hindustan Times

05-07-2025

In October 1970, Mustafa Zaidi, a high-ranking former bureaucrat and famous poet was found dead in his bedroom in Karachi. Shahnaz Gul, a beautiful young socialite lay unconscious on the floor. She was 26, he had been 40. Both were married with two children each, and had been having a very public affair. Scene of the crime: Karachi. Pakistan in the 1970s. (Marka/Universal Images Group via)
At the time, Karachi was an exuberant city with a thriving nightlife, 'a bevy of eligible men, and more glamourous women than anyone could count.' Socialites dressed in sarees with short sleeveless blouses. There were parties, nightclubs hosting belly dancers and cabarets, and a whole lot of drinking. The Zaidi-Gul scandal shocked Pakistani society. It revealed the uninhibited excesses and the sordid underbelly of Karachi elite culture.
352pp, ₹595; Roli Books
Zaidi had been 'an enforcer of the country's power structures' at a time when the 'Pakistani civil services were people who would not kowtow to politicians.' He was friends with the greatest Urdu poets of the time: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Josh Malihabadi, Naseer Turabi. He had also published six collections of poetry (some of his most iconic poems were quite brazenly about Gul). Ordinary people could recite his verses from memory. Gul, with 'alabaster-like skin, perfect features, wavy hair,' was 'a woman whose beauty was so legendary that even 50 years after they had seen her, men could describe her skin, the way she blushed, the contours of her body...'
The press couldn't get enough of the case. Reporters camped outside Gul's house following her and her husband's every move. Mainstream newspapers wrote about Zaidi and Gul's 'love sessions,' his stamina in bed, 'sex instruments' found in his house...details so scandalous that 'newspapers were banned from the houses of 'respectable' families.'
Meanwhile, Pakistan was imploding. The Zaidi-Gul story 'withstood war, the breakup of Pakistan, and a regime change,' write Pakistani journalists Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan in their meticulously researched, politically astute and very, very juicy book Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies and Scandal, based on their popular 2022 podcast Notes on a Scandal.
The scandal is so sensational, it wouldn't have needed much of a storyteller to tell it well. Imtiaz and Masood-Khan have built the narrative adeptly with thoroughness and sensitivity — and suspense. Intrigue starts from the epigraph, which consists of an impassioned, kind of feverish, verse from one of Zaidi's poems ('Countless were saved by the raging waves / But I, drowned by a longing met / Tell me. Do you see my blood on anyone? / The entire city has washed itself clean') followed by a stark statement from Gul during her trial in court in the case: My behaviour towards the deceased was never warm hence there was no question of it becoming cold.
Throughout the book, this mind-boggling case is pieced together by juxtaposing the differing often outlandish accounts from newspaper archives, police and forensic reports, court documents, fresh interviews with people who remember. Small details are big hooks — and all of it is analysed. They go back to the roots of the story, the characters, Pakistan, and the changing times. They make sense of Zaidi's mental and emotional fragility as well as his history of obsessive love by looking at his unwilling move to Pakistan a few years after Partition. In Allahabad, Zaidi had been a rising poet, known as Tegh Allahabadi (his first collection of poetry was prefaced by Firaq Gorakhpuri). He was also madly in love with a girl on campus — Saroj Bala Saran, a great beauty, who would go on to become a judge at the Allahabad High Court. After he attempted suicide (for the second time), his brother took him to Lahore where Zaidi spent years mooning over Saran. How much did Partition and the involuntary move to Pakistan impact him?
Zaidi, so vividly remembered in memory and the public domain, jumps off the page in colour. The darker his actions, the more complex and sympathetic a figure he becomes. 'Every year on Mustafa's death anniversary, the same images do the rounds... People forward long posts on Facebook, offering the same narrative, adding in new, unverifiable, fantastical details each time,' He's still remembered as a hero — the love struck troubled poet and altogether brilliant man, while 'Shahnaz has now been reduced to a stereotype of a femme fatale, and no one has ever attempted to show her treatment at the hands of the press and the state.'
This is a modern retelling and the idea is to vindicate Gul, or at least present her side of the story. She's on the cover but is harder to profile. Much of her life is conjecture, she was remembered differently by different people, so Imtiaz and Masood-Khan show the many possibilities of who she was — and focus on what happened to her, what she had to endure, how she was seen, how she was spoken about.
Co-author Saba Imtiaz (Courtesy Roli Books)
After Zaidi's death, his demise, the affair, the evils of Karachi high society, even some kind of international smuggling ring was pinned on her. She was accused of tipping him over, for using and discarding him, of murder. Revenge porn was found in his house, but it only became more fodder to further shame Gul. The hundreds of copies of a vicious and sleazy pamphlet, with topless photos of Gul, calling her the 'Christine Keeler of Karachi' — a reference to the 1963 Profumo scandal in UK, which brought down the government when it was discovered that Christine Keeler, a young woman who had an affair with John Profumo, the British war secretary, was also involved with a Russian official — led the crime branch to investigate angles of 'smuggling, spying and sex.'
Imtiaz's 2014 novel, Karachi, You're Killing Me!, a crime-comedy about a young reporter in Karachi looking for love, was adapted into the Sonakshi Sinha starrer Noor (2017) set in Mumbai. Society Girl is a naturally, gloriously cinematic book — true crime, love, obsession, sex, a period drama set in the lives of the rich and the beautiful. It also has an eerie resemblance to the Sushant Singh Rajput suicide case, the blaming, shaming and arrest of his girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty and the nasty press coverage all while the pandemic enveloped the country and migrants walked hundreds of kilometers back home during lockdown.
Society Girl shows how the Zaidi-Gul case underscored the chasm between East and West Pakistan. It may even have contributed as one of the final nails in the coffin of the relationship between the two parts of the country — it was a way to distract people from the political crisis unfolding. Imtiaz and Masood-Khan zoom out of the case to show the panorama of Pakistani polity and society in which it unfolded.
Co-author Tooba Masood-Khan (Courtesy Roli Books)
When Zaidi and Gul met in 1969, they write, Pakistan was on the cusp of change, revolution was in the air, and there was a sense of hope amongst its people. Anti-regime protests had brought down the decade-long regime of Ayub Khan. He was replaced by Yahya Khan — but it looked like military dictatorship was going to end, and the country was going to emerge as a democracy. Pakistan was going into its first election based on universal adult franchise. The charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had formed a new political party. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had emerged as a public hero in East Pakistan where also gaining momentum was the vision for a classless state and autonomy from the ruling elite of West Pakistan.
Over a week after Gul's arrest, the deadly Cyclone Bhola hit the islands on the coastline of East Pakistan, killing more than 200,000 people. West Pakistan's media covered it as a minor event while devoting reams of newsprint to Zaidi-Gul — the book quotes a politician who then said, 'that the newspapers of West Pakistan were too busy in getting Shahnaz Gul's measurements – they didn't have a lot of space for East Pakistan.' Later, as the country went into the landmark election, the press continued to find ingenuous ways to keep the case coverage on its front pages — reporting that Gul ate home made food for the first time on the day and that she did not cast her vote on jail. While campaigning, Bhutto had even used the narrative linking Gul with the excesses of Pakistani leadership (especially Yahya Khan) and declared that he would not allow Gul to leave the country and, to a cheering crowd in election rally, that he would punish her for her crimes.
That year, as Karachi prepared for New Year's eve, the wild most important night in the high society calendar, , Imtiaz and Masood-Khan write, 'It would perhaps be the last New Year's that Karachi spent so hedonistically. In later years, New Year's would bring bad news — war, the independence of Bangladesh and the breakup of Pakistan, the news that tens of thousands of soldiers were prisoners-of-war in India, the fact that the state had taken over several key industries in a campaign of nationalization, sounding a death knell to the wealth and prestige of many of the country's richest families. The nightlife, too, would eventually die out when Bhutto barred the sale of alcohol to Muslims. Soon, all that would be left of the elite's glory days would be their memories and legacy Sind Club memberships. But that night, as the drinks flowed, no one could imagine the nightmare on the horizon.'
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.