Making dollars
There she was, poor thing, arrested by the airport authorities on a technicality. The supermodel had cash on her that had exceeded the legal limit. Exceeding by, you know, 5,000 percent.
What was she doing, smuggling half-a-million dollars out of the country? We don’t know. But not knowing has never stopped anyone in the country, especially our spirited news media, from explaining what had actually happened.
One of those theories: she was one of the many women that former President Zardari and his Interior Minister Rehman Malik were using to smuggle cash abroad. That planted custom officials let them through every time.
Okay. But if these individuals already had custom officials on their side, then why go through the trouble of hiring models to… Shush! Don’t ask any questions right now, here she comes, making an appearance in court!
And, boy, were these court appearances TV rating pullers! It was a media circus at the courts, with all the channels covering her entry. Her fashion choices were taken apart by on-call style gurus. Her very gait was compared to her runway sashays. Her expressions were scrutinised endlessly.
She herself didn’t stick to any particular motif for her appearances, which ranged from demure white shalwar kameez, to gangster-chic hoodies, to sleek all-black ensembles. The lady didn’t dial it down.
She could have been granted bail from the get go, given how custody procedures in the country are generally flexible when it comes to women and minors. But the court had to take a populist position and keep her locked up. Because she had become, overnight, the national symbol of corruption and of the rich being able to get away with anything.
The media, far from reporting on how not being granted bail was a bit unfair to the lady, was questioning her “VIP” accommodation in the judicial remand instead. Nothing short of a revolution-era Bastille-prisoner-like haggard image of her appearing at the courts would have sated the righteous.
At the end, her lawyer Latif Khosa was able to get her bail.
She still appears in court. These appearances are still media events. And her hearings have had more than a dozen adjournments by now. The buzz seems to have fizzled out by now.
Her lawyer’s plea: she hadn’t entered the plane yet, he pleaded, and was going to transfer the amount to her brother, who was coming to collect it from her. Let her go.
A hard-sell, this, but stranger things have happened in our courts.
