Why Umama Ismail refuses to pick just one thing

A small town, a self-started co-curricular programme

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Umama Ismail as someone who has flown in from Lahore specifically for the conversation, and then listing — almost cheerfully — the number of things she does. Trainee clinical psychologist. Singer. Painter. Makeup artist. He flags the framing he wants to argue against up front: that doing many things at once is a sign of someone who cannot sit still. “A lot of people see me and say, yaar, this guy is mad, he doesn’t stick to one thing,” he says. “But I think that’s the beauty of it. The beauty of the modern day is that if you can explore all sorts of different interests, why not?”

Umama is from Sheikhupura, a small town about forty-five minutes outside Lahore. The town itself is best known, she says, for Hiran Minar. Her early schooling was at National Model School there, and the picture she paints of it is specific. The school was academic by reputation and had no real co-curricular culture. So she and three or four friends built one. They went to the principal themselves, without a teacher’s prompt, and asked for choir, drama, acting, singing. “Our whole school is still doing co-curricular activities now because of what we started,” she says.

The relationships from those years are still the ones she leans on. She is firm about it: her friends are one of her strengths. The connection, in her account, is not material. It is the kind of group that, when something breaks, drops everything and shows up at the door.

Kinnaird, the legacy that didn’t quite hold, and the mean-girl problem

After school, Umama went to Kinnaird College — the long-running legacy institution for girls in Lahore, the female counterpart, as Muzamil puts it, to Aitchison. The image and the reality, in her telling, did not match.

“It was good because of friends,” she says. “But overall the experience — they couldn’t maintain the legacy.” Her sharper complaint is that the institution did not let her step forward. She tried, several times, to enter singing competitions and was mocked by the council girls. “Who is this? What is she singing?” she remembers them saying. The result is something she still finds slightly funny: she performed at Kinnaird only after she had left it. The girls inside the gates never saw her sing.

Muzamil names it for what it is — “a big-city mean-girl situation” — and she agrees, but only partially. “A little bit. A little bit was there.”

Why psychology, and where a history actually starts

From Kinnaird she went to FCC for a four-year bachelors in clinical psychology, and is now doing her masters. She had thought she would become an architect — her father painted, the family was full of artists, and the pull toward art was there from childhood. Psychology was a second choice that became a first one. The reason she gives is not academic. It is biographical. There had been hard stretches in her own life, and in those stretches she had felt the absence of a particular kind of person — someone who was not a parent and not a friend, who would not judge, who would simply listen. “I want to be the person someone can come to with anything,” she says. “I love to know people’s problems. Tell me. Whatever it is, I won’t judge.”

When Muzamil asks about the actual mechanics of the work, Umama becomes much more technical. A history, she explains, starts at the first cry. Was the baby’s first cry normal? What was the childhood like? “Whatever a child learns in childhood, they don’t learn the same way again for the rest of their life,” she says. The window she names is roughly birth to seven, and stretching to twelve. Parents, the parents’ relationship to each other, exposure to abuse, divorce — these small inputs, she argues, shape the adult more than people are willing to admit.

Muzamil pushes on a related point. Many people who walk in for therapy do not see anything wrong with their lives, because they have been told for so long that nothing is wrong. “They’re gaslit into believing the idea that everything is fine,” he says. Her answer is to start with rapport. Trust first, then disclosure. She is also blunt about a local failure mode: she has personally seen psychologists who do not keep what they hear confidential, and the fear of judgement in Pakistan makes the trust step that much harder.

She closes the section with a line that doubles as a working principle for the profession: “If you want to be a psychologist, you have to take culture, religion, and politics out of your head and open it up to listen to the other person.”

Singing — and a school that finally said yes

Music came early. She discovered, in class five, that she could sing. The first stage performance was a recitation of a Quranic prayer at a school function, and she was so frightened that the DJ had to restart the music. From there, an obsession with Taylor Swift’s Love Story, choir, the national anthem, milli naghmay, school competitions — the whole pattern of a teenager finding a voice.

The strange shape of her story, as established earlier, is that Kinnaird shut the singing down. The two years she spent there were not silent — she performed at the LUMS music festival, at HSA’s AC fest, at competitions outside her own campus — but inside the institution there was nothing for her. FCC reversed it almost immediately. “Within three or four days I’d gone to the auditorium to audition,” she says. She won karaoke night, won BNU’s festival, performed at concerts at LAMC, Kinnaird (this time from the outside), FCC, LUMS, Central Park Medical College. The period she dates this to is 2016 through 2018.

The Instagram covers followed, in 2017 and 2018. Some of them did real numbers — eighty thousand, a hundred thousand views. And then, by 2019, the public push stopped. Muzamil asks why.

The answer is honest in a way that is hard to script. She is from a Pathan family. She is, she says, the only person in her entire extended family with a public Instagram account. Her parents support her, which is the only support she needs, but pursuing music professionally is a different ask. “If I have to do it, do it as a hobby,” is the family’s position. She also frames it as deferral rather than refusal — she will do it later in life, she says, but right now she has not figured out how she would enter the industry, and she has not made it a priority while she is studying.

A makeup studio she didn’t actually want

The makeup studio in Sheikhupura, opened in 2019, is the part of the conversation where Umama is most disarming. “I don’t like makeup at all,” she tells Muzamil. “Not on myself, not on others. Beyond blush and lipstick, no.” Muzamil notes that most people who own a makeup studio will perform a passion for it. She refuses to.

The actual story is mundane. Her father had a shop he had rented out as a beauty parlour for fifteen to twenty years. The tenant left. Her mother proposed converting it. Umama said yes, learned by watching YouTube videos, took no formal course, and shaped her skill on real brides. Today her mother runs the business. Umama is financially independent — from her content work, not the studio — and covers her own expenses. The studio’s revenue is her mother’s. Muzamil pauses on this to make sure the audience hears it: a daughter earning her own keep and a mother running her own business, both inside the same household, is not the standard Pakistani script.

Art, philosophy, and the cycle wallah

The painting section is the most ambitious turn in the conversation, and it is driven by Muzamil. He describes a visit to a museum in New York and the realisation, in front of the European masters, that “art is 90% philosophy and 10% execution.” His comparison is sharp. In Pakistan, he argues, it is the inverse. There is 0% philosophy and 100% talent. The man on the bicycle painting fruit for five hundred rupees has the same hand as the gallery-priced artist; what he does not have is the framing, the class apparatus, the room and the wall and the lighting that turns a piece into an object that signals taste.

Umama hears it and pushes back honestly, on herself. She has thought about doing a series — storytelling through paintings — but the executions have not come out the way she wanted them to. The work, when she has tried it, has not landed with the audience she would need to reach. She also reaches for the obvious counterpoint: it is partly a question of placement. The cycle wallah does not even have a wall to photograph his painting against. The gallery does.

She is not painting at the moment. The masters programme has eaten the time.

What the masters programme actually looks like

The detail Muzamil draws out about the masters programme is useful. Umama’s day starts at seven, with class at eight. From one to two she is on placement at the Shadab Institute of Special Education in Lahore, working with children who have ADHD, Down syndrome, intellectual disabilities, or autism. From two to six there are classes. After that, reports — thick ones, each on a child she has assessed.

The clinical method she describes is precise. History from the mother. Behavioural observation. Interview. Task-based testing. Watching the pencil grip. Checking colour recognition, eye contact, speech. Cross-checking against the DSM-5. Diagnosis. Then a management plan, then treatment.

She admits she gets emotionally involved with her clients. She knows she is not supposed to. She tells the story of a six- or seven-year-old boy with Down syndrome and ADHD who could not speak. Within two weeks he was greeting her by syllable — “ba, ba” — when she walked in, and recognising a cat in a picture, and then a drum. His mother came in one day and cried. “My purpose here is fulfilled,” Umama says.

Losing her grandmother while she was alone in Turkey

The hardest stretch of the conversation comes when Muzamil asks about a turning point. Umama answers without dressing it up. Her grandparents’ deaths broke her, and one of them she did not get to be present for.

Her grandfather, she says, was her closest person. He was ninety-three when he died, and the family had a month of warning, and she was still not ready. The grandmother’s death is the one she describes in clinical detail. It was during the COVID period — April 2020 — and the family had been afraid she would catch the virus. Instead, she slipped in a storeroom while reaching for clothes, hit her head on a machine, fractured her skull, and bled internally. Umama watched her stomach swell. She watched her eyes fix in place. The grandmother lived four more days.

The grandfather’s death came later, while Umama was in Turkey, alone, on a digital marketing programme. She had felt before leaving that something would happen. It did. She got the news in the morning and could not place who it was for. She called her mother and learned. The funeral happened before she could have made it back. She stayed for the remaining two days of her trip because there was no point flying home for nothing.

Muzamil asks if she has considered talking to someone professionally. She acknowledges what every clinician acknowledges about themselves — that knowing the names of the techniques is not the same as receiving them. “Psychology is a game of words,” she says. “You can change a lot with your words. But I’m a lot better now.”

Crying — and the boys especially

The grief section pivots into a broader argument she clearly cares about. As a trainee clinical psychologist, what does she think about crying? Her answer is not careful. It is emphatic.

“When my friends are going through something, the first thing I say is please cry. Cry a lot. Let it all out.” She extends the instruction explicitly to men. “Especially the boys. When boys cry I actually feel happy. They should cry. There is no weakness in it. Crying heals you.” Muzamil names what she is pushing against — a culture where a man crying is read as weakness, and where the suppression compounds into behavioural problems later. They agree on the diagnosis. She prescribes the same thing in every case. Cry, then we talk.

A first flight, alone, to Istanbul

Muzamil closes with the trip itself. Umama had never been on a plane before she boarded the flight to Turkey at 22. She had never travelled alone. Her father is, in her words, an anxious man; she negotiated the trip on the basis that she would pay her own way and his role would be limited to a reference letter. The programme was a two-week digital marketing course, three credits toward her degree, and she chose it because the skill was useful for her own content work.

The arrival is the part she tells with the most warmth. At Istanbul airport an “uncle” tried to charge her for a lounge. A Turkish staffer did not understand what she was asking when she said “baggage” or “luggage.” She kept walking, eventually pulled out a photograph of the map the host group had sent her, showed it to him, and was driven straight to Istanbul Aydin University. “And that was it,” she says. “And that was it.”

The country, thirty years out

Muzamil’s closing question is the one he asks every guest. Umama is 23. In thirty years she will be 53, and the half of Pakistan that is currently between eleven and twenty-nine will be running the country. What does she see?

Her answer is small and serious. She hopes the next generation will think outside the narrow tracks the current one runs on — religion, culture, material status. She hopes they will stop mocking other people’s faiths, other people’s customs, other people’s choices. She hopes women’s rights will be more than a slogan, that the apparatus of dowry and silencing will have loosened, that people will stop ranking each other by car and house. “We are not here to earn money,” she says. “Earn it. Earn a lot of it. But know that everything is temporary. We are here in this world to help people. There is so much filth, so much hardship — we are here to make it better.”

Muzamil ends the episode on that line. He tells Umama he is surprised by how diverse her work is, and how much he can imagine talking to her for much longer than a recording allows. He wishes her well on the PhD she has said she wants to pursue, and on whatever shape her art takes over the next ten or fifteen years.