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Moving targets: the female dancers of the Swat Valley
Ghazala Javed had the dreams of any young woman her age - lifelong security, happiness and a husband to love.
Sweet-faced and with girlish innocence, she listed all the qualities she was looking for in a husband - he had to be kind and understanding, but most of all he had to let her sing after they wed.
Javed was one of the rare few who had "made it" - one of the infamous community of singers and dancers carrying on a legacy of Pashtun culture in Pakistan's notorious Swat Valley. They have survived despite concerted efforts by religious extremists to drive them out and in the face of opprobrium from academics, who see their art as a "vulgar" reinvention of classical music and dance.
Javed was put to work as a teenage dancer at 14 and married in her 20s to a man twice her age to secure the family's future. He banned her from singing and they divorced two years later when she discovered he already had two other wives.
But it was the discovery of that golden voice in 2008 that catapulted her to fame and promised a different life from the fate which met most of the performing community, forced to dance and sing from necessity rather than desire and living on the fringes of society.
She was a rare breed - she loved singing and earned respectability, status and wealth, becoming as adept at performing old folk tunes as the Pashto pop songs for which she earned worldwide fame, drawing crowds of thousands in Dubai, Malaysia, Qatar and across Europe.
Earlier this year I had the privilege of a private audience with the 26-year-old performer, lounging on cushions in her parents' majlis - one of six homes her fortune had built - as her father poured milky tea and Javed sang.
Seven weeks later she was dead, gunned down with her father in a hail of bullets as she left a beauty salon.
In the immediate aftermath, police said her ex-husband Jahangir Khan was a chief suspect, his motive thought to be the shame heaped on him after she left him and resumed her singing career.
Whatever the truth, she is unquestionably the latest victim in an industry where choosing to perform can literally mean life or death.
A pretty, chubby-faced teenager plumps down on a tattered armchair, full of excited banter about her day at school.
There were the lessons in maths and English, friendships forged in the playground and the journey back to the cramped home she shares with 17 relatives. But Waheeda's education does not end when she gets home from school.
At the urging of the five grown men squeezed into a tiny sitting room-cum-bedroom, the 13-year-old shrugs off her hijab and abaya, slicks on some maroon lipstick, puts a Pashto pop CD on play and begins to shimmy to the music.
The lime green walls of the claustrophobic room, stuffed with worn furniture and vases of artificial flowers, begin to close in. This is a scene of excruciating discomfort.
Waheeda is one of the famed dancing girls of Banr, a neighbourhood in the town of Mingora, in the heart of the Swat Valley.
She comes from a long line of dancers, whose folkloric moves and knowledge of poetry and classical music historically drew rapturous crowds during week-long melas at Eid, weddings and festivals.
Those days, though, are long gone. While the girls are still trained from a young age, they now tend to perform to groups of male customers. And rather than being accompanied by skilled musicians, they are more likely to perform to pop music.
Caught between two diametrically opposed camps, they have been driven behind closed doors to keep a tradition going - albeit in a limp imitation of the art th....
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