Apr 04, 2008  |  By: JOHN-MANUEL ANDRIOTE  | COMMENTS     

The image of the beautiful young man with cascading brown curls, the luminous brown eyes of an icon and lips made to be kissed flickers through the web-cam during a video phone interview with a surprising Pakistani celebrity.

Two or three times the image flickers out completely as our connection is lost when the electricity goes down, once again, in Karachi, Pakistan.

“You never know, I could be the first gay president of Pakistan,” says Saleem Ali, the man on the other end of the capricious line.

I learn quickly that brave and ballsy is the preferred style of this 27-year-old son of a retired Pakistani army colonel.

In fact Ali is nicknamed BB — not for brave and ballsy, though he might well be, but for his early drag act impersonating his childhood heroine, the late Pakistani former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

While he was in 11th grade, the 16-year-old Ali became a local star in Karachi by impersonating Bhutto.

“People used to call me Ali Bhutto,” he says. He quickly points out he was not mocking the real Bhutto, but expressing his admiration for her.

“Benazir Bhutto was not just a politician,” he says. “She symbolized democracy, stood for the rights and needs of the underprivileged. She stood for everything positive.” On a personal level, he says, “As a young man, Benazir Bhutto gave me confidence, gave me hope, made me believe in myself, in my country.”

He once had the opportunity to do his impersonation for Bhutto herself at the home of a pop star. He was warned in advance that people might pressure him to do the impersonation, and he should resist because she was rumored not to have a sense of humor.

“Benazir Bhutto said, ‘I hear you imitate me very well,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ I had to oblige. The minute I started, Benazir Bhutto burst out laughing. She had tears running down her face and said, ‘I haven’t laughed this much in a year.’”

Ali adds, “I think her death was a major blow to all of us in Pakistan — notwithstanding race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation. It was a major setback. I feel very sad about what has happened.”

DESPITE HIS ADMIRATION for his namesake, Ali was determined that Bhutto imitations wouldn’t define his life’s work. A doctor friend with ties to a TV network told Ali he envisioned something bigger for him, that, in fact, there was a diva within him who needed to be brought out.

Thus was born the Begum (“Lady”) Nawazish Ali who, in 2006, became the “hostess” of what-is-now Pakistan’s most popular nighttime TV talk show.

“The Begum Ali was my soul, my spirit,” says Ali. He describes her as an extension of himself, “an expression of me as a woman.”

Two nights a week in Pakistan, and now 10 days a month in India, the handsome young man’s face is transformed into the radiant glow of the well-educated, middle-age socialite Begum. The show on Aaj TV has taken Ali’s conservative Muslim homeland by storm.

The storm has recently spread to India, Pakistan’s not-always friendly neighbor to the east. “India seems to really adore and worship Begum,” says Ali, adding that he has a higher purpose in mind.

“I’d like to see my acceptance in India as a bridge between the people of India and Pakistan,” he says, sipping a very large vodka martini and puffing a cigarette on the other end of the video call nine time zones and a world away.

Ali’s one-hour show in Pakistan features Q-and-A conversations between Begum Ali and a “who’s who of the Pakistani literati, glitterati and chatterati,” as one of his admiring interviewers described the guests. Ali says, understatedly, that the show “has a strong political undertone.”

The Begum poses questions to guests that Ali says a real woman could never ask. He sees the role as making him a sort of Superman.

“It gives me the right kind of charm which helps disarm my guests,” he explains.

Ali says this charm is essential to his popularity in “extremely anxious and confused” Pakistani society.

“People have created these facades,” he explains. “There is this holier-than-thou syndrome where they have to prove they are prim and proper.” As the Begum Ali, he says, “letting myself get completely liberated helps ...