The photographer who moved to Hunza to actually live

From Quetta to Karachi: the first shock

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that he had been trying to get Feroza Gulzar on the show for a long time, and that when he finally reached out she was already traveling. That detail, he says, felt fitting. Feroza is a photographer and content creator who lives in Hunza — and the first question Muzamil puts to her is the one that frames everything else: at what point, and why, did she decide to move there?

Feroza’s answer is immediate: there was no single point. She grew up in Quetta, surrounded by mountains, and did not fully register what that environment meant until she left it. When she moved to Karachi for college — to DA Degree College in Phase 7, and later to Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture — the contrast was jarring. “Concrete ज़्यादा था,” she says, “and I think my creativity was slowly dying.” Karachi was the biggest city she had ever encountered. It did not end. And the crowd at college, many of whom had come through O-levels and carried a particular kind of confidence, made her feel out of place in ways she had not anticipated.

She is careful not to frame this as a failure. “I think it was a good step that I took,” she says. Every move in her life, she explains, has been a small step rather than a jump. Quetta to Karachi was one such step. It was hard, but it was necessary.

Why fine arts, not architecture

Muzamil presses on the choice of fine arts — a choice that, in most Pakistani families, is not the first option. Feroza was the youngest of her siblings. One had become a doctor, another a dentist, another had done an MBA. By the time it was her turn, her father — a civil engineer — simply said: do what you want.

She had applied to both Indus Valley and NCA, but did not want to go to Lahore. She initially enrolled in interior design, where her drafting skills were strong enough that her teachers suggested she move to architecture. She walked into the office and said no. “Fine arts,” she decided, because what she saw in the creative environment around her made her realize she was more on the creative side than the technical one.

The distinction she draws is precise. Architecture, she says, is creative — but your creativity is dependent on the client, on how much money they bring and how open they are. Fine arts is you. At Indus Valley, the fine arts program let her try everything in the second year — ceramics, printmaking, photography, video — before choosing two specializations. She chose photography and painting. Her father, she recalls with affection, was puzzled that she had no textbooks. He was a civil engineer. He could not quite understand what kind of education produced no books. But he was supportive.

The art school question

Muzamil raises something that many people in Pakistan quietly wonder about: art schools are liberal spaces, and conservative families tend not to send their children there. Feroza came from a conservative background. Was there a cultural shock?

Her answer is one of the more interesting moments in the conversation. Art school, she says, gave her something she had not expected: exposure to every kind of person, from every kind of background. Her father’s concern was that the environment would be harmful. Her response to him was direct. “It depends on the person,” she told him. “It doesn’t depend on what environment I’m going into.” The school, she says, changed her in ways she is genuinely grateful for. Her two closest friends from that time — one an architect, one a graphic designer — are still her best friends today.

A mother lost, a father who held everything together

The conversation takes a quieter turn when Muzamil asks about her family. Feroza’s mother died when she was thirteen, from kidney failure after years of dialysis and a transplant that did not hold. Feroza says she cannot remember a time when her mother was fully healthy. “I am glad,” she says, “that she is not in pain anymore.”

What follows is a moment of genuine admiration from Muzamil. Her father raised all the children alone — a civil engineer who managed to put each of them through education, support their individual choices, and eventually retire in Islamabad where he now lives with one of Feroza’s brothers. “He has been a mother and a father,” Feroza says simply.

Chipursan and Nepal: the two experiences that decided everything

After graduating in 2016 and moving to Islamabad with her family in 2017, Feroza did something that most people her age were not doing. She applied for a teaching volunteer program in Chipursan Valley — a remote valley in Hunza, close to the Wakhan border, run by an organization called IEI. She went alone. There was no internet. Signals came only occasionally, enough to make a phone call. She taught art to children in the mornings, running projects where they collected junk from the valley — old steel, scraps of paper — and built sculptures and structures from them.

“It was very life-changing,” she says. What struck her most was not the landscape but the simplicity of the problems. People there had figured out how to heat their homes, manage water, generate electricity from rivers using micro-hydel plants. They had no shop to call if something broke. So they learned to fix things themselves. “I have never seen it in a city,” she says.

She came back for about a week. Then she went to Nepal for two months.

The Nepal program was an art residency in Marpha — a tiny town near the Annapurna range, 8,000 metres above sea level. The residency was called Marpha Artist Residency and was partially funded. Her total cost, including the flight, was around 120,000 rupees for two months. She shared the residency with a printmaker from the UK. The two of them talked. And it was in those conversations, Feroza says, that she finally decided: “Eventually, this is what I want. I want to live in the mountains.”

What she observed in Marpha stayed with her. The villages had preserved their aesthetic identity — brown and white, wood and stone, no concrete intrusions. “They have created a theme,” she says. Nepal, she notes, is far more developed than Pakistan when it comes to mountain tourism infrastructure, precisely because it has protected the experience that draws people there in the first place.

Marriage to a man who also wanted to leave

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about marriage — because for a woman in Pakistani society who had built this kind of free, mobile life, the question of how marriage fits into it is not a small one.

In 2019, Feroza applied for a program called Tabeeat Nau. Mushahid, who would become her husband, was a travel company operator and her partner on the program. He was, she says, a city boy — but one who had spent years trying to find ways to spend as much time in the mountains as possible. He had started a transport project, then a hotel, then his own travel company. He had frozen his architecture degree to pursue tourism. “He cannot survive without tourism,” Feroza says.

Both of them were, by their own admission, very much against the idea of marriage. “We were afraid someone would cage us,” she says. What changed it was time spent together — tracks, travel, shared projects. They became close friends first. When they finally had the difficult conversations about what marriage would actually look like for two people like them, they had them honestly and in advance. “We discussed the hard things first,” she says.

Their parents had their own concerns. Feroza’s father worried about what kind of life his daughter would have with a man who was always traveling. Mushahid’s parents wondered what kind of woman would agree to live that way. When they met the two of them together, Feroza says, the reaction was essentially: just get them married quickly before something goes wrong.

They moved to Hunza about a week after the wedding.

What daily life in Hunza actually looks like

Muzamil asks Feroza to describe an average day. She starts with the five cats, who wake them up in the morning demanding food. Then: breakfast, orders for her online shop (called From Feroza, where she sells journals, stickers, and postcards), laptop work, and whatever projects are running. Mushahid runs tours — not many, two or three a month, sometimes one — with a focus on quality over volume. In winter, temperatures drop to minus 20 or minus 25. They heat the house with a steel wood-burning stove called a bukhari, and sleep under an electric blanket.

Feroza is clear-eyed about what this life requires. “It’s not for everyone,” she says. “If you can teach your stomach, you can do anything.” The first year was difficult. The comforts of city life are simply not there. But she is equally clear that this was a considered choice, not a romantic impulse. Both she and Mushahid were earning before they moved. Finances were sorted in advance. “We didn’t go there saying we’ll figure something out,” she says.

Pakistan in 2050: hopeful, but honest

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Feroza — having grown up in Quetta, studied in Karachi, lived in Islamabad, and now settled in Hunza — how she sees Pakistan in 2050.

Her answer is measured. She sees problems clearly. She gives the example of an architect’s starting salary — fifteen thousand rupees after five years of expensive education. “That’s an insult,” she says. But she refuses to give up on hope. “I don’t want to believe that nothing good will happen,” she says. “But at the same time, things are difficult. And wanting them to be good is not enough on its own.”

On tourism specifically, she is cautiously optimistic about Hunza but worried about the pace and nature of development. Karimabad, she notes, is already becoming a concrete jungle. What Nepal got right — and what Pakistan has largely not — is preserving the aesthetic and experiential identity of its mountain villages while building the infrastructure that makes them accessible. “If you’re going somewhere, you want to experience that place,” she says. “Not see what you could see anywhere.”

Muzamil closes by telling Feroza that what strikes him most about her story is not that it sounds easy — it doesn’t — but that at every point where she could have stopped, she didn’t. “Every single time you had that mentality: if it has to be done, it has to be done.” He says he would like to meet her father. He says he would like to have Mushahid on the show someday. Feroza agrees that his story is worth telling.