“You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.” — Françoise Gilot, the French painter who loved Picasso, left him on her own terms, and refused to be remembered just as his muse. There are many who would assert that Pakistan’s former first lady Bushra Bibi should be dismissed as a woman of no substance. She did not, they argue, earn a place in the national imagination by winning over crowds with her speeches or marching for the downtrodden.

They would rather say she just weasled her way to the top through wedlock. Her new husband, former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and her previous one, Khawar Maneka, were both men who loomed large in the public eye. One was a cricketing legend who had abandoned his storied appetite for pretty white women and the world’s attention in order to pursue political rebirth back home.

The other was a shrine-through-town aristocrat from Pakpattan, known as much for his influence as for his oddities. Bushra Bibi’s effacement began with whispers that Maneka had “offered” his wife to Imran out of a sense of sacrifice and devotion to the country. In this version of the rumour, Bushra Bibi is reduced to be an object passed between two powerful men.

The optics that accompanied this story strengthened an impression that she was a silent and passive figure. It began with a myth The scandalous and the sacred persist side by side, as they do in Pakistan, a country propelled more by superstition than socioeconomic sensibilities. Another story went something like this: By early 2018, Imran, restless and on the verge of electoral triumph, turned to Bushra for spiritual counsel.

But this time the lore was that she came to him through another reference: Providence. We hear that she has a numinous vision in which Imran would become Prime Minister — but only if he married her. Indeed, he did, albeit in a staged drawing room, set against off-colour drapes and uncertainty.

The act was accomplished in haste as her mandatory post-divorce iddat period, investigations later revealed, had barely ended. What of it, some said? Bushra subsequently ascended to become the First Lady.

The prediction had come true. But it would not be long before myth would outlast propriety, as it often does in Pakistan. The slim window between her divorce and re-marriage fractured opinion.

Civil society, the State and the Deep State squabbled over whether her uterus bore evidence of her menstrual cycle or a religious crime. Since then, ‘The Pirni’, as her critics derisively refer to her, has been cast paradoxically as both maternal protector and cursed magi. She is a woman who prays, rarely smiles, and only speaks through proxies.

There were stories of amulets, potions, and nights of whispered prayers. Pakistan, ever performative in its piety, both mocks and secretly believes. A woman who commands through the unseen is dangerous because she turns superstition into strength.

We call her a witch because we dare not call her wise or strategic, like a CEO. It frightens the nation too much to assume this woman knows what she’s doing. She frightens us because she refuses to either play the demure domestic mother or the benign spiritual spell-caster.

In a place where gender is architecture — man above, woman below — to exist outside that structure is to risk collapse. Imran Khan is in jail now, supposedly doing pull-ups between sermons of resilience to his flock. Some claim that medical neglect during incerceration has led to a loss of vision in one of his eyes — a detail that feels almost hagiographic given that his supporters refer to him as a political messiah.

Bushra Bibi is also imprisoned, but no one chants her name or frets over her fate. Not Imran’s followers. Not his family.

And least of all his sisters, Aleema, Rubina, Noreen and Uzma, those veteran enforcers of the domestic order, opinionated, omnipresent, often bossy, and conveniently silent. Paying attention to Bushra Bibi would give her legitimacy and legitimacy is the one thing unofficial power is never supposed to have. We prefer to confront power that is not manufactured by ignoring it until we hope it goes away.

Fear makes us want to pretend she doesn’t exist. That fear is: she cast a spell once; could she do it again? To loudly declare a woman not worthy of attention is to precisely indicate how much space she occupies.

Bushra Bibi is anything but ordinary, and not just in ways that flatter her. Some whisper that she is in league with the Deep State itself. Others claim she defied it.

The record, at least for now, says something else: there is hard evidence that has stood its test in court that she is a thief. She and Imran have been convicted of selling state gifts such as luxury watches and jewellery that should have been deposited in the Toshakhana or repository, not flipped for personal gain. Another court sentenced Bushra Bibi to seven and Imran to 14 years over land and money worth £190 million tied