India, July 5 -- In October 1970, Mustafa Zaidi, a high-ranking former bureaucrat and famous poet was found dead in his bedroom in Karachi. Shahnaz Gul, a beautiful young socialite lay unconscious on the floor. She was 26, he had been 40. Both were married with two children each, and had been having a very public affair. The Zaidi-Gul scandal shocked Pakistani society and revealed the sordid underbelly of Karachi elite culture. Zaidi had been "an enforcer of the country's power structures". He was friends with the greatest Urdu poets of the time: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Josh Malihabadi, Naseer Turabi. He had also published six collections of poetry (some of his most iconic poems were quite brazenly about Gul). Ordinary people could recite his verses from memory. The press couldn't get enough of the case. Mainstream newspapers wrote about Zaidi and Gul's "love sessions," his stamina in bed, "sex instruments" found in his house... details so scandalous that "newspapers were banned from the houses of 'respectable' families". Meanwhile, Pakistan was imploding. The Zaidi-Gul story "withstood war, the breakup of Pakistan, and a regime change," write Pakistani journalists Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan, in their meticulously researched, politically astute and very, very juicy book, Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies and Scandal. Imtiaz and Masood-Khan build the narrative adeptly, with thoroughness, sensitivity - and suspense. Intrigue starts from the epigraph, which consists of an impassioned verse from one of Zaidi's poems - "Countless were saved by the raging waves / But I, drowned by a longing met / Tell me. Do you see my blood on anyone? / The entire city has washed itself clean" - followed by a stark statement from Gul during her trial in the court case that followed: "My behaviour towards the deceased was never warm hence there was no question of it becoming cold." Zaidi is still remembered as a hero, the love-struck troubled poet and altogether brilliant man; "Shahnaz has now been reduced to a stereotype of a femme fatale, and no one has ever attempted to show her treatment at the hands of the press and the state." This is a modern retelling and the idea is to vindicate Gul, or at least present her side of the story. She is on the cover, but is harder to profile. Much of her life is conjecture and she was remembered differently by different people, so Imtiaz and Masood-Khan explore the possibilities of who she may have been. They focus on what happened to her, what she had to endure, how she was seen and spoken about. Society Girl shows how the Zaidi-Gul case underscored the chasm between East and West Pakistan. It was a way to distract people from the political crisis unfolding. Over a week after Gul's arrest, the deadly Cyclone Bhola hit the islands on the coastline of East Pakistan, killing more than 200,000. West Pakistan's media covered it as a minor event while devoting reams of newsprint to Zaidi-Gul. The book quotes a politician who then said "that the newspapers of West Pakistan were too busy in getting Shahnaz Gul's measurements - they didn't have a lot of space for East Pakistan." Later, as the country went into a landmark election, the press continued to find ingenuous ways to keep the case on its front pages. That year, as Karachi prepared for New Year's Eve, the most important night in the high-society calendar, Imtiaz and Masood-Khan write, "It would perhaps be the last New Year's that Karachi spent so hedonistically. In later years, New Year's would bring bad news - war, the independence of Bangladesh and the breakup of Pakistan, the news that tens of thousands of soldiers were prisoners-of-war in India, the fact that the state had taken over several key industries in a campaign of nationalization, sounding a death knell to the wealth and prestige of many of the country's richest families... Soon, all that would be left of the elite's glory days would be their memories and legacy Sind Club memberships. But that night, as the drinks flowed, no one could imagine the nightmare on the horizon."...