When I spoke to singer and actor Meesha Shafi in July this year, it had been six years since our first meeting. Then, Meesha had been in Karachi for a taping of Pepsi’s Battle of the Bands, where she performed and was one of the judges, and we met once she had wrapped up filming. A few months earlier, Meesha made headlines when she alleged that one of the music industry’s biggest stars, Ali Zafar, had sexually harassed her — allegations that he has always denied. She faced considerable backlash online and in the media. I wanted to know how the experience had impacted her.
Her hotel room was dimly lit, and Meesha remained in the shadows, with only a lamp in a far corner of the room switched on. It was quiet, the sounds from the busy road nine floors below muffled by the closed windows. Meesha had wedged herself into the corner of an overstuffed sofa. Shooting had wrapped that day, and, after a week of 1am finishes, Meesha had got off early. I remember thinking that I’d expect a pop star to be out with friends, not alone in a hotel room after an early wrap. But for the past few months, as Meesha would tell me, she had been feeling “broken”.
In April 2018, Meesha, in a tweet, accused actor and singer Ali Zafar of multiple instances of sexual harassment. It was the first such high-profile case in Pakistan since the #MeToo movement of 2017 forced a reckoning with claims of sexual harassment and abuse that had gone unchecked for decades in almost every industry in countries across the world. For months, accusations against Hollywood producers, beloved actors and comedians made headlines.
Both Meesha and Zafar are stars in Pakistan, and while she made her Hollywood debut in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) opposite Riz Ahmed, Zafar was forging a career in Bollywood.
In her tweet, Meesha claimed there had been multiple incidents of “harassment of a physical nature” by Zafar. He denied the claims, and in June 2018, he filed a defamation case against Meesha for damages of 1 billion rupees (more than $3.5m at the current exchange rate but estimated to be over $8m seven years ago). Meesha filed a complaint regarding the alleged harassment before an ombudsperson overseeing such issues in the workplace, and it was rejected on technical grounds that she and Zafar did not have an employer-employee relationship (an appeal is pending). In January 2019, Meesha was placed under a court-ordered gag that restrained her from making any statements that could be deemed defamatory against Zafar while his case against her was heard. She could not speak about Zafar’s alleged harassment.
In the months after she tweeted her allegations against Zafar, a torrent of abuse and ridicule targeted Meesha on social media. “Why her, when he could be with anyone he wanted?” many asked online. Her looks were mocked, and she was called “shameless”, a “whore”, a liar, and publicity-seeking.
“I felt like in speaking out, I had lit my life on fire, and it had been meaningless,” she says during our conversation this July, recounting those “rapid fire” attacks on her character. If I remember correctly, she asked, “What was the point?”, repeating the question almost a dozen times during our last meeting. Now, six years later, Meesha has released an album, Khilnay Ko, meaning “To Bloom”, that answers the question.
‘I was that bad news’
We are on a Zoom call, as Meesha is now based in Canada. It is early in the day for her, and her children are on their summer break. She tried to make sure they are occupied while she’s on this call, but her 11-year-old son comes looking for her. She mutes our chat while she fields his questions. Her face is bare, her hair pulled back, her blush pink sleeveless shirt giving a glimpse of the small M&M tattoo on her arm – a nod to her husband’s and her initials. When she speaks, her sentences are measured, with pauses as she reflects on what I’ve asked. I quickly learn not to interrupt.
Meesha, her husband, and their two children migrated to Canada in 2018 – a plan that had been in the works since 2016, but online, a narrative was spun that she “fled” the country after Zafar filed his case. In making the new album, Meesha has looked closer at the stories that were told about her. “It was so easy to villainise me,” she says.
She feels the suspicion and the disbelief that her allegations were met with came partly from an idea that the public had of her as a powerful, outspoken woman who had successfully carved a niche for herself as a solo performer in the music industry. She was known for her power anthems and pop-rock sound, and her playful style that melded desi fashion with biker jackets, tattoos and a signature red lip. “But this persona dehumanised me,” Meesha says. “My perceived strength was used to attack me.”
Many asked how “someone like her” would put herself in a position where she might be harassed. Why had she “allowed” the harassment to occur more than once?
Meesha’s home address in Lahore – where she and her husband lived with their children, then seven and four – was shared on television during the media frenzy that followed her accusation. As the online attacks against her grew, Meesha deactivated her social media accounts. The trolling was almost enough to drown out the voices of other women who tweeted similar allegations (and who subsequently withdrew their claims or were also sued for defamation by Zafar). Zafar claimed the social media accounts were fake or linked to Meesha. “They are trying to make me out to be Pakistan’s Harvey Weinstein,” he said in a television interview.
When actress Iffat Omar appeared in court as a character witness for Meesha, she was trailed by a crowd of Zafar’s fans chanting, “We support Ali Zafar” and “Stop lying”.
The case became a litmus test in Pakistan for how we understand consent and what constitutes “inappropriate” behaviour or sexual harassment. Because Meesha’s original tweet did not spell out the nature of the alleged harassment, a guessing game ensued, with social media users debating what might have happened. Meesha recalled that when she returned to shoots after her tweet, some people on set joked that they didn’t know if it was OK to even shake her hand.
When I spoke with Hasham Ahmad, one of Zafar’s lawyers, in 2021, his comments echoed the sentiments online and in the media. There was a limited understanding about how assault or harassment is experienced, and why many are unable to speak about it. “If you don’t react to something, how would someone know if you’re allowing it or not?” he asked. If a woman does not consent to something – especially in a situation involving a friend – Ahmad explained, “You just have to say [to the perpetrator], ‘You went a little overboard, so you better behave.’ That’s it.”
Many were suspicious of Meesha’s motivations, implying she had something to gain. “You better have something [to back up your accusations], not only your greed,” one prominent TV anchor said on his show, referring to Meesha. One news channel ran a segment where actors and singers weighed in on the case. They debated who the “guilty” party might be.
“We rarely have the TV on at home – the news, on a good day, is noisy and bad,” Meesha says. “But now, I was that bad news.”
‘Something to hold on to’
Meesha started writing the songs on this album in March 2019. Melodies and snatches of lyrics came to her while she was doing laundry or washing the dishes.
It was her way of “processing”, and a return to the reason she first started singing at the age of seven. “While I was praised for my talent, I wasn’t singing for that affirmation,” Meesha explains. “Music and singing always soothed me.”
Music was a balm, the comforting soundtrack to her childhood in Lahore. Every afternoon, Meesha’s nani, her maternal grandmother, would complete her chores and retire to her room. The blinds were lowered, the house silent save for the ceiling fan, and in that cool quiet, her nani would lie down, a small radio nestled in a palm cupped to her ear. The radio crackled to find a station with the Bollywood tunes Meesha’s nani listened to as a girl. The grown-ups slept, the music from the radio tinny and low, as Meesha padded into the kitchen and climbed onto a countertop to open the cabinet where the ketchup bottle was kept. She would sip that sweet, bright sauce for a hit of sugar and listen to the music as it echoed through the house.
“Making the album gave me something to hold on to and reclaim an essential part of my sense of self,” Meesha says. “At night, when all the day’s work was done and my family was sleeping, I turned to my music – just like my nani all those decades ago.”
She wrote at her kitchen table, the lights dimmed, a bay window shadowed by an ornamental pear tree. The seasons changed, and she kept writing: moonlight reflected off a blanket of snow, the tree burst into white blooms, the flowers wilted. Every night at the same time, a train would go past the house, its chug and whistle piercing the dark quiet. A recording of that train plays on the album’s Interlude I, with a muffled audio note where Meesha, her voice quavering, tells someone, “It was very overwhelming … the pressure on my very immediate wellbeing was very big. I was very, like, I was very overloaded …”
“My discomfort or pain had become a public spectacle,” Meesha says. The song Sar-e-Aam (In Public), one of the first that she wrote, addresses this spectacle. The lyrics include some of the words that were used to describe her online: “shameless”, “floozy”. In the video, Meesha’s frame is engulfed in a black and white jacket, covered with scribbles, that balloons over her shoulders. “That is how big my shoulders had to become,” she explains. “I was carrying so much.”
The song’s languid, bluesy melody would be perfectly at home playing low, late at night, the chatter of friends rising above it. But as Meesha sings, Deep was the night / my eyes wet with tears / Just me, and me alone / Not many friends in sight, it turns melancholy. It is a song about being alone in a crowd.
She had been forbidden from speaking about her experience while Zafar gave interviews and tweeted. “I felt silenced right after I had found the courage to use my voice,” she says. “My daughter asked me at that time why I didn’t laugh any more,” Meesha recalled. “I was working on this album while my problems were very much present. It’s not as if I was past the worst of it. I was processing everything as I was writing, and the work was coming together as I was experiencing the fallout of speaking up.”
Meesha recalls listening to the finished track for Sar-e-Aam for the first time. “One line in, and I started crying.” It felt like a release. “It was like puncturing a place where pressure had been building up within me.”
Online, Zafar and his supporters had used the hashtag #FaceTheCourtMeesha, implying that Meesha was too scared to do so. While the album’s music and lyrics gave vent to Meesha’s emotions, its visuals answer such accusations: for the video for the song Azaab (Torment), director Awais Gohar trailed Meesha during a day of hearings.
There are some sonic throwbacks. The familiar staticky crackle of a radio sets the tone for Nirmal (Pure), a song that Meesha describes as “a lullaby, a tune of disassociating” that disintegrates into a sonic crash, all electronic clanging and menacing, sawing cello strings, as if the song’s gears have been forced to grind to a halt. “Nirmal is all rainbows and unicorns, expressing a desire to see the world with a soft gaze, but that is illusory – a child’s view of the world that I have retreated to from time to time as an adult until reality intruded.”
I ask Meesha how she felt about sharing all of this with a public that had attacked her in a previous moment of vulnerability. “I spent my life avoiding being vulnerable or sharing private feelings as it made me uncomfortable,” she acknowledges. “And now, an action of mine – that tweet – had rendered me vulnerable.”
The album helped her “digest the experience”. She did not focus on what reviews might say. “I made it for myself. I did not give a damn how it would be received or interpreted, because it gave me something to hold on to at a time when I couldn’t control anything that was happening.”
‘Carrying my experience’
The Urdu language and poetry, she explains, helped her feel comfortable with expressing herself. “Poetry felt like protection,” she says. “This was not prose, an interview or a conversation. I was creating a poetic work, and that enables you – depending on your agility as a writer and Urdu-speaker – to say anything you need to in a beautiful, clever way.”
After years of feeling “humiliated” and exposed in the spotlight, Meesha’s lyrics allowed her to hint at what she was going through without yielding private details. I see the concealment that poetry offered when listening to the titular track, Khilnay Ko: To bloom / light is essential / yet the seed asks for darkness. I think of that reference to “darkness”, to a desire to retreat, when Meesha talks about difficult days. “Panic attacks were part of my new reality,” she says. “You go from being unable to [take] a driving test because you refuse to be behind the wheel, to refusing to leave the house, to refusing to leave your room, to being unable to leave your bed.”
What was muscle memory – in her case, performing – slackened with fear. In 2022, for instance, Meesha shot a video with her brother, Faris, for Coke Studio. She had written the song, Muaziz Sarif, and it was her 12th time performing on the show. It should have been easy. “But night fell, and I could not get my performance right. I was flying to Lahore the next day for cross-examination in court, so we only had that day to film. The video was a one-take shot, and every time I messed up, we needed to reset the shot. I felt so embarrassed before the crew.”
She had written the lyrics that thumbed a nose at critics – How can you quell a rebellious spirit? – but now she could not say them. If you watched the video – as 11 million people have, to date – all you saw was Meesha descending from a red-carpeted staircase in a crisp white collared shirt paired with a sari. Her bejewelled nails flash, her headpiece twinkles and with a wink of an eyelid speckled with glitter, she kicks off the chorus. She dazzles, bright as the light glinting off a shard of glass. When I rewatch the video after we speak, I view it differently. I’m reminded of a lament Meesha makes on Azaab: Cloaked in shadows / I’m afraid I might forget / I was made of light / I’m at risk of turning to dust.
But with time, and with the album’s release, the panic attacks subsided. Meesha passed her driving test last year. “I had been carrying my experience for so long that it felt good to set the weight of it down,” she says. She travelled back to Pakistan to launch the album in Lahore, her hometown, as “an act of reclamation”.
The director Sarmad Khoosat moderated a Q&A at a screening of music videos from the album, and his first question was, “Where is the angry song?” It’s a question that Meesha’s co-producer, Abdullah Siddiqui, asked her many times: “Where is the anger?” But as she explains, “Anger eclipses what lies beneath: shame, resentment, bitterness. I had to deal with those feelings. I let it all come to light.”
‘I was made an example of’
Khilnay Ko makes meaning of Meesha’s experience over the last seven years. After listening to it, I thought of her question to me all those years ago: “What was the point?” I wonder if the “point” of her experience was to lay bare the culture of silence that persists in Pakistan when it comes to claims of sexual harassment or abuse. In these seven years, we have witnessed how women continue to be attacked online when they share their experiences, and how the legal system can be used to target such women. “You cannot expect survivors to come forward [if] the next thing the accused does is weaponise defamation laws to silence them,” Nighat Dad, a rights activist and Meesha’s lawyer, told Time magazine in 2020.
In 2021, I spoke with Bahzad Haider, a lawyer representing Leena Ghani, an activist who accused Zafar of inappropriate behaviour in 2018 after Meesha made her allegations, and who is also being sued for defamation by him. Haider quoted an Urdu saying to explain that defamation cases in particular can be challenging, dragging out for years: “To go to court, you need shoes made of iron, and hands made of gold.” It is an expensive, challenging process.
“I was made an example of,” Meesha says. “But speaking out is always an act of war.” Perhaps the point was to remind us of this. And the album offers solace: there is relief and freedom to be won in that war, even when it comes at great cost.
In 2019, Meesha countersued Zafar for defamation. As their hearings continue in court, Meesha remains under a gag order. The Supreme Court has given her permission to attend hearings via Zoom. Her children now know about the cases. In that kitchen where Meesha wrote her songs, the calendar on the fridge lists football practice, playdates and school events alongside “hearing”. Her children will glance at the calendar for times when their mother cannot be disturbed during a court hearing. And then the busyness of their lives continues. Another summer has passed, but the pear tree outside the kitchen window is still in bloom.
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