‘Society Girl’ revisits gripping 1970 case of Mustafa Zaidi

The audience at T2F listened intently as journalist Tooba Masood-Khan, holding a copy of ‘Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Scandal’, co-authored with fellow journalist Saba Imtiaz, read an excerpt from the book that tells, as one of the authors put it, “a true crime story wrapped up in a social history”.

The book that was launched on Saturday evening revisits the gripping tale of Mustafa Zaidi, a famous poet and civil servant who was found dead in his bedroom on an October 1970 morning.

Shahnaz Gul, a married woman in her late 20s with whom he was having an affair, was lying unconscious in an adjoining room. The event drew a good number of literary enthusiasts, journalists and fans.

Both authors engaged in a detailed discussion about the book with moderator Sanam Maher. Explaining how this case caught her attention, Saba said that while working as a reporter, she found an Associated Press story from 1970 which described this case, and the headline was ‘Pakistan has its first jet-set murder case’. “Of course you’re hooked!” she added.

“I asked a senior colleague, Hasnat sahib, about it. He remembered the case very well, and of course he said the same thing which everyone has now told us in the last five years, which is Shahnaz was the most beautiful woman you’d ever seen.”

Saba said they interviewed people who might have been around at the time or had an interest in poetry. “After the second or third interview, we got a sense that there was a fairly established narrative about what had happened,” she explained.

“There was plenty of discussion about Mustafa and a lot of perceptions about Shahnaz, but nothing truly concrete to substantiate it,” she added.

She said Mustafa was portrayed as a family man, a person who had a wife and children, and who was a very famous civil servant, and something bad happened to him, and Shahnaz as the culprit, who had clearly done something wrong.

She explained that their initial goal was to solve the case. However, as they delved deeper into the context of the era, the story shifted focus.

“It became less about Mustafa and Shahnaz, and more about the broader events unfolding in Pakistan at the time,” she said, adding that once you get a sense of everything, it just feels like this is actually just one case happening in a country which is going through so many changes.

“It almost feels kind of bizarre to list them down — a military regime change, a general election and then a devastating cyclone in East Pakistan.”

Saba said that this story was not just about Shahnaz and Mustafa but about the forces that existed during that time: the press, the elite, the social structure, the power dynamics — all just as powerful today.

She pointed out that this story could have happened anywhere, and was not particularly novel. “This happens all the time; there must be a billion movies made on this: powerful man, younger woman, an affair, and a court case. This is very common. So that itself is just a crime case, but everything else that’s happening around these two people is what makes it really, really interesting.”

Tooba said she and Saba came across the case in several ways. “I actually came across this a little after 2015. My father had passed away, and a friend of his told me that my father used to really like Mustafa’s poetry, and their cases have some similarities,” she explained. She said that being a journalist who loves covering crime stories, she decided to do it.