The move displays the kind of breathtaking shortsightedness that deserves a slow-clap that ricochets sonorously off the empty heads of the (no-doubt fat and mustached) bureaucrats who let this happen in the first place. The picture of the Afghan girl with the staring green eyes is one of the most arresting and iconic images of all time. Virtually every person on the planet has stared into those bold green discs and thought everything from “The poor refugees” to “I should get me some contact lens solution”. So penetrating was the image of a teenage Sharbat Gula (that’s her marvelous name, by the way) that it’s now a well-known Halloween costume. There’s even a documentary made by Steve Mccurry, the brilliant photographer who snapped her picture, detailing his efforts to locate Gula (‘where is she now?’) twenty-or-so years later. Alas Mccurry found her still living in Pakistan as a refugee, married and weathered with a handsome jaw. Her eyes, though still green, were much sadder.
The picture of the Afghan girl with the staring green eyes is one of the most arresting and iconic images of all time
All of which was fine until last week, when it was “discovered” that Gula had been living in Peshawar with a false ID card. This is why we have tried to deport her (although to use the inclusive “we” when talking about the KPK government stings me so). The moment the proceedings were made public, the media had a field day, and Gula’s image shot through the world like it was 1989 again. Amnesty International even wrote a press release saying how sad it was that what was once the face of Pakistan’s generosity to its neighbor’s refugees has now become the face of its vindictiveness. Had there been a PR person somewhere near, this story could have been controlled and perhaps even turned into a tool to spotlight the plight of Pakistan’s infrastructure under the weight of generations of refugees that have nowhere else to turn. But no, instead we went Brexit on Gula. As it happens, the worldwide uproar did (eventually) lead to us sentencing her to a fine rather than deportation, but even that’s not a story you want traveling around.
One of the exquisite ironies here is that the facial feature that made her world-famous is also something most people don’t see because she wears a shuttlecock burqa (another column altogether). Of course the same is not true of our BuzzFeed-endorsed “chaiwala” Arshad Khan, who was made famous because a photographer took a picture of him pouring tea with his blue eyes staring at the camera. In many ways it was like the male version of the National Gergraphic Girl, though not nearly as charged with the drama of Oriental Tragedy.
Within days of the picture appearing everywhere, the bemused 18 year-old Arshad had been washed and preened and paraded on various TV shows to talk about his newfound fame. (‘Aapko KAISA lagraha hai?!’) No subsequent photographs of him were quite as good as the original, and there was something rather absurd about seeing pictures of him in an ill-fitting sherwani with blow-dried hair gazing into the distance - the most blatant form of fetishisation. I don’t mean male objectification, exactly, but rather the idea that the good-looking among the underprivileged should be gawked at and paraded around and applauded for being, well, you know, good-looking!
Not that there is anything wrong with looking for beauty. I was in a marketplace once with a friend who runs a beauty line when she spotted a girl with high cheekbones, clearly the maid to this powdered monstrosity in leopard print ahead of her. My friend went up to the woman’s employer and began talking about modeling for an upcoming campaign she was shooting. The woman beamed and smiled demurely, until she realised we were enquiring about her employee and not her, at which point she became rather feral and hurried off in a huff towards the dried fruit, maidservant in tow. I remember wondering if the modeling world would be right for the girl - would it make her happy or just complicate her life even more?
Which brings me back to Arshad the chaiwala: my fear for him is that he has been brought into a world that will inevitably chew him up, like an E True Hollywood Story, forcing him down from the heights of fashion’s Olympus back to the tea stall. It’s almost exactly the plot line for a genderbender version of My Fair Lady. I do hope that he is able to make a successful career as a male model or whatever else he chooses to be (“wouldn’t it be loverly?”) but my dark heart predicts that he, like so many other viral sensations before him, will be dropped by the gimmick-hungry media and “fashion fraternity” that are currently trying to exploit him, which in this particular case will be not pretty at all.
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