Daily Times

Not everyone seeks fame. Sometimes fame—the kind some people spend their entire lives courting—finds you. It is this kind of overnight fame that comes unannounced to a seventeen-year-old boy—a beautiful, fair-skinned, blue-eyed boy with a brooding stare—in October 2016 when he becomes one of the most recognizable faces in Pakistan. In just five days, two photographs of him on the social media site Instagram rake in more than 50,000 likes and thousands of comments. His fame spreads not just in Pakistan, but around the world. His ‘good looks’ are featured on CNN, the BBC notes that his ‘piercing eyes’ have ‘thousands’ of Twitter users ‘love-struck’, and Buzzfeed describes him as ‘damn HOT’ with ‘effortless high-fashion model looks’.

Very soon, he is charming audiences on morning talk shows, being showered with offers to model and act, smiling and posing for countless photographs, and receiving a stream of marriage proposals. There have been many firsts for him this month: sitting in a chauffeur-driven car, flying in an airplane, staying in a hotel, buying his first suit. Before his new-found fame, he sold tea for a living in a market in Islamabad, and he would worry about how to earn enough to make sure everyone in his family—his father, his two mothers and seventeen siblings—had enough to eat. Now, he dines at five-star restaurants.

What does he like to eat?

‘Bhindi.’

His name is Arshad Khan, and he has become known in Pakistan and around the world as the Chaiwala. He is famous for having done absolutely nothing.

Arshad was working at a dhaba in a Sunday bazaar in Islamabad’s G9 neighbourhood one October day when Javeria Ali, a twenty-six-year-old photographer who was on a photo walk in the market, spotted him ladling cups of milky tea. He was wearing a turquoise-colouredshalwarkameez with a white scalloped trim around the neck. His hair was slightly tousled, with a few stray locks falling above his dark eyebrows, and his cheeks were peppered with stubble. He wore a black thread looped around his wrist to protect him from the evil eye.

Ali routinely shot portraits of street children, pushcart vendors and beggars, uploading the images to her Facebook page where she advertised her wedding photography services and classes for aspiring photographers. This portrait felt no different. She took three or four pictures of the chaiwala while his head was bowed down. He looked up for a split second and stared right at her. She got the shot. Arshad didn’t even realize his photograph had been taken.

Ali uploaded the photograph (captioned ‘hot-tea’) to her Instagram and Facebook pages on 14 October 2016. It was soon shared on various blogs and social media pages, with users commenting on the stunning looks of the ordinary tea boy.

There are more than 44 million social media users in Pakistan—Facebook has the greatest piece of the pie, with 33 million Pakistani users, followed by Twitter with 5 million, and Instagram with 3.9 million. With Ali’s photos, Arshad joined the ranks of a handful of viral stars: men and women who become household names, their images or videos spilling over from social media sites into millions of conversations on apps like WhatsApp, shared and forwarded on a loop until mainstream media outlets take notice and feature them on the news or on talk shows.

In 2015, Qandeel Baloch’s ‘How I’m looking’ video created a blueprint for the kind of fame that viral stars in Pakistan could achieve. The phrase—with her intonation and accent—was parodied endlessly and mimicked not just by the average Pakistani social media user, but by some of the most well-known singers and actors in the country. It is impossible to know how many times the original video was watched—it has been copied and shared to hundreds of pages—but by the end of the year, the viral video led to Qandeel’s inclusion in Google’s list of the top ten Pakistanis most searched for online in 2015.

Besides Qandeel, some of Pakistan’s most well known viral stars include Taher Shah, whose ‘Eye to Eye’ music video briefly trended globally on Twitter while his second song, ‘Angel’, racked up more than two million views on YouTube and Facebook in the first four days of its release; Asif Rana, whose passionate 2015 Facebook announcement of a tiff with his best friend Mudasir became the stuff of a thousand memes; and Shafqat Rajput, a barber in Bahawalpur who was filmed in 2017 applying flammable products to clients’ hair and whipping out a lighter to set their coifs on fire before snipping them.

Of course, Arshad did not know about these viral superstars. He had never had a Facebook account. He could not read or write. His family and neighbours lived without electricity and did not watch TV. He had not seen his photograph on the news, and he didn’t think of the girl with the camera until she came back to the market, this time with reporters and camera crews. He found out they were looking for him. He panicked.

The above excerpt has been published with permission from Aleph Book Company

Published in Daily Times, July 7^th 2018.