The rap star of Karachi: ‘My veil cannot take away the talent I have’
Her phone has been buzzing with nonstop messages and calls. Eva B, once a little-known rapper from the Karachi urban-slum settlement of Lyari, has become Pakistan’s newest music sensation, racking up millions of views on YouTube.
She is not just the first female rapper from Pakistan, she is the first veil-wearing female rapper from Pakistan’s Baloch minority. She says her brother had told her if she wanted to rap she had to wear a veil, but that it is now a part of her identity and personality as a musician.
“I don’t feel comfortable or can’t perform well if I don’t wear it. The veil just covers my face; it cannot cover or take away the talent I have.”
Her big break came when the 22year-old was playing with her phone and took a call from the music producer for Coke Studio, a webcast that since 2008 has showcased the country’s biggest musical stars. “Since I didn’t get as many calls as I get now, I picked it up,” chuckles Eva B, in the first interview she has agreed to since that call.
“He introduced himself and asked me if I would like to sing for the franchise – I said who does not want to work with Coke Studio?” Soon after came the track Kana Yaari, which became the top trending YouTube video in Pakistan, with 3.2m views by the third day of its release.
Writing in Urdu and Balochi, the young rapper, who says her name comes from Eve, the first woman, and B for Baloch, touches on a plethora of problems facing society. Her songs include Qalam Bolega (The Pen Shall Speak) and Tera Jism Meri Marzi (My Body, Your Rights).
Eva B’s musical journey began when she got a computer with a folder of songs by Eminem. Not knowing what genre she was listening to, a young Eva B loved the style and rhythm of the music.
Curious, she asked people what this amazing style of music was called. “It is rap, and you have to write your lyrics and sing,” she was told. Teaching herself the basics through the internet, Eva B started rapping in 2014.
“Through my rap I wanted people to hear my story and the story of women in Lyari. I come from a place where only a few girls got to work and my society doesn’t consider a girl who raps to be respectable – I wanted to challenge that,” says Eva B, while playing with a tattoo on her right hand that reads “mother”.
Her mother was supportive but her brother asked her not to rap, saying it was not appropriate. She said his friends would tease him about his sister being a rapper and every time she uploaded a freestyle rap song to her YouTube
channel, fights would erupt in their house.
“Neighbours would come and listen as my brother scolded and fought me,” she says.
As a consequence of her brother’s disapproval, Eva B stopped performing rap from 2015 to 2019. But she kept writing new songs. “I was burning inside and writing about societal restrictions on girls, on Lyari and more,” she says.
In 2019, she was approached by Patari, Pakistan’s largest Pakistani music streaming platform, to write and perform a song. She did not have musical or audio equipment so she recorded it using her mobile phone.
Overnight, she started being known as “Gully Girl”, named after that track – a retelling of the 2019 Bollywood film Gully Boy, about a boy from a ghetto in Mumbai who dreams of making it big in rap.
But Eva B had to go through a lot of hardships before her time was to come.
“I would have to lie to my brother if I had to go for recordings. I would say I was going to university. Even when I had to rehearse for Kana Yaari in Coke Studio, I lied back home about having to attend a friend’s wedding. I would ask everyone to schedule me before nightfall so I could make an excuse at home more easily,” she says. After recent success, however, her brother no longer disapproves.
Lyari, with a young population of 2.2 million, is best known to the outside world for its violence, gangsters and drugs. Over the course of a decade, hundreds of people were killed and thousands left the town; peace returned in 2017 after police operations. She says Lyari is also famous for its footballers, artists and musicians but “the violence had become our identity, sadly”.
Women in Lyari or across the country, she says, are talented but many consider themselves inferior and dependent upon their male counterparts, their identity restricted to being someone’s daughter, sister or wife, with their every move scrutinised.
As she talks her phone keeps buzzing and she puts it on silent mode. “Women have to work hard to claim their space in society,” she says. “We have to snatch it if it is not given.”