Of death and distraction

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.

- Saudamini Jain

She was 26, he had been 40. Both were married with two children each, and had been having a very public affair. The Zaidi-Gul scandal shocked Pakistani society and revealed the sordid underbelly of Karachi elite culture.

Zaidi had been “an enforcer of the country’s power structures”. 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. The press couldn't get enough of the case.

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.