Reflections on the Ease of Joy
Like so many of my fellow brown women, I grew up on a false belief that needing nothing will make me feel safe. If I could just be invisible, do what was required of me well enough, and stick to the path of least resistance, I wouldn’t attract any attention. No harm would come to me. I carried that into my adult life for the longest time.
I remember a female journalist’s piece about how the Lahore she grew up and lived in felt entirely different from the version two male journalists described in a podcast: late-night mehfils in old Lahore that stretched into the early hours of the morning. One of my friends, too, is a storyteller, and many of his stories include mehfils in his hometown, bhang being passed around, and anecdotes shared. I like the stories, I do, but I’ve never been able to relate. A part of me also resents men, resents this ease of being that they so effortlessly inhabit. My mind tries to dismiss their experiences. It tells me it’s not that great for them anyway; they don’t experience life and interactions with the same depth as we do. Leisure is so easy for them, and anything that comes that easily can’t be fulfilling, perhaps.
In that sense, Nepal was a dream come true. I first went to the country by chance, on a Tech Camp, and decided to stay for three weeks because they were paying for the flights. The freebie-loving Pakistani in me thought, why not? It’s imperative to mention here that Nepalis love Pakistanis. We, the Pakistanis, have been through so much since and before the inception of this country that we’ve learned to see the humor in the chaos. We’re barely ever looking for a solution to anything, just trying to get through each day in this high-stimulus place as best as we can. There, I could be this jaded yet funny version of myself. The dialogue, too, felt chill. They’re okay to take life as it comes, just like us. Sometimes I wonder if it’s partly because both our countries are such pawns in the great, big game of geopolitics.
They extended curiosity and warmth toward me. And, most importantly, they enjoyed my company – happy to meet depth with depth, humor with humor. The last part felt validating as a brown woman who is used to curating what and how she will say it. For the first time, existing as I was did not seem like a struggle. I could sit anywhere and sip my chai – it did not have to be a radical thing. I walked back home from ghazal nights where I could speak to uncles about the form of ghazal, sway to it, and walk around without thinking that I was an anomaly on a street or a road. I also just blended in because I could easily pass off as a Nepali, and that lent so much normalcy to mobility and movement.
I was living in Kathmandu during Tihar of 2024. The festival was everything I had heard it was. The best part of living in Kathmandu is that no matter where you are, there’s always a rooftop that offers a view of the whole valley. From above, it looks tiny, self-contained, but once you step out, it feels endless. For all five days of Tihar, I would go out onto the rooftop of the building I was living in and just watch the lights across the city. Marigold garlands outside every house, every shop, on every dog; the image is now one of my fondest memories of the valley.
I remember one of those nights, I couldn’t sleep and decided to take a walk down the road. I saw, and briefly followed, a group of young girls with one of those wireless speakers on wheels, all dressed alike. They were stopping outside houses, shops, and restaurants, putting on little performances. People were cheering them on, giving them money, which I understood to be their Eidi. It was past 11:30 at night, and everyone just seemed truly joyous to see them.
My first thought: how cute.
Second thought: how does it feel in your body when your joy is a sight for others, not something to be made invisible or put away?
Up until my third month in Nepal, I regularly thought of and missed my life in Islamabad and Lahore. When I had moved to Islamabad for work after returning from my master’s, my fate was such that some of my friends also moved to the city with me. We all lived in the same neighborhood, and life was easy, communal, and joyful for the most part. Nothing novel happened most days, but my body adjusted to the quiet after having lived in New York the previous two years. I had done my undergraduate and master’s. I had gotten a good-enough job after coming back, and a part of me just craved some stability and steadiness. Islamabad was like that for a while. When, in 2021 my sister had a baby, my steady life in Lahore revolved around my nephew, whose presence taught me about unconditional love and the fragility of childhood. In Nepal, I missed all of that. I also weighed the ease of being in Nepal – an almost socially identical and interesting country – against the familiarity of Pakistan and of being around people who understood the full extent of me. I was so sure I’d return after three months because that’s how long my visa was for.
Sometime during that third month, I had started looking for flights back home. I was on a bike heading to where I was staying in Patan. Knowing I was about to leave, I found my heart and mind unusually receptive, absorbing everything around me as if to take it all in one last time. Here is what I saw: life in full swing outside Patan Dhoka, people and bikes coming in and out of the centuries-old gate, the fruit and vegetables being sold fresh and in abundance, and women less aware of their bodies. I witnessed all of this from the back seat of my bike. That day, I went home and quietly decided to extend my visa for another two months.
After I eventually came back in the winter of 2024-2025, I picked up Sara Suleri for the first time. For days, I couldn’t get past this line on the very first page: “Once in a while, we naturally thought of ourselves as women, but only in some perfunctory biological way that we happened on perchance. Or else it was a hugely practical joke, we thought, hidden somewhere among our clothes.” My best friend often tells me that I’m too cautious, and that it can be annoying. She says I process and share post-trip thoughts during the trip, mid-moment, in real time, that my caution can pull people out of the moment. I’ve been frustrated by it, too, over the years, but recently, I’ve realized it’s almost involuntary. Maybe it’s my neurodivergence partly, but it’s also from being a brown girl moving through the world with no real room for error. I don’t like qualifying myself now, but self-protection is never out of the equation. My mind scans situations, picks up undercurrents and subtexts, and runs simulations. It keeps me ready, just in case. That preparedness is what allows me to be in the moment. It’s how I’ve always lived. It’s how most of us non-men live in Pakistan.
That’s what I thought those Nepali girls must have felt on that night during Tihar: ease of being and joy, at least in that moment.
I’m also fully aware now, in retrospect, that I was projecting my idea of freedom onto a group of girls in a society that is also very patriarchal, sometimes far more than Pakistan, especially in terms of its laws. I am also aware that a lot of their laws or familial structures do not impact me, and that, of course, plays into the freedom of being a brown girl in a brown country that’s not mine.
I stopped following the girls when they went inside a restaurant because I didn’t want to seem like someone chasing a spectacle, even though it would have been so perfectly okay to do that, given the context. My family sometimes tells me that I am far more critical of them than my friends and the outside world. I think maybe that’s what I also do when I speak of Pakistan vs. another country. Growing up, I hated our national habit of chasing spectacles, but lately, I have realized that there are such few outlets for entertainment or distraction for us that this is sometimes just boredom or, at most, curiosity at play and not necessarily awe or a sense of wonder. It’s just poverty of possibility.
Maybe that’s why Nepal caught me off guard. Not because of anything grand, but because of how ordinary possibility suddenly felt. While I was there, my body started internalizing safety without my mind registering. It was happening until one day, it occurred to me that the chronic shoulder pain in my right shoulder had quietly gone away. It wasn’t just the unclenching of the shoulder muscles; I realized no one had spoken to me or asked me about getting married in months, or in a way that felt consequential. I was free to envision any and every possibility of an alternate lifestyle for me. In fact, I was living one, while also being held and cared for, communally. This was a bit of a revelation. This only meant it could happen. You could live a fulfilling life outside of a traditional set-up. I could prolong it, build upon it, but the baseline existed.
Here, I would like to bring in this pattern I have seen with brown girls, myself included, of course. We don’t know how to swim, we are notorious for being slow on hikes, and our knees giving up on us. We are told it’s a stamina issue, it’s because we haven’t built enough muscle.
I say it’s a case of learned immobility. It’s preemptive fatigue, it’s a fucking cognitive drag, it’s inherited.
Just taking a walk around the street requires so many calculations, you stop imagining ease as something that can just accompany you in public spaces. I know so many brown women who, after they started earning or moved out of the country, took up trekking and walking. They learn swimming in their 30s, and I see so much internalized laziness or ‘lack of stamina’ dissipate. I also built rituals around evening walks; sometimes walking from one end of the valley to the other, chasing the Everest range on clear days, and public life felt as much mine as a man’s. Art was accessible, so was theatre; everyone either sang or played an instrument, and you were always invited.
I have been back for nine months, and every week I have thought about going back and living there for longer. That is still the plan, but I have also felt so wishful these past few months, hoping to see if I can find this ease of being here, where, and under what circumstances. I like to think of it as a field experiment: solo traveling, for the first time in my own country, heading toward the mountains. After a rather lonely two weeks in Skardu, Deosai really was “another world up there,” just as Ahmed Bhai – the caretaker of the house I was staying in – had told me. Wildflowers were in bloom, clouds were putting on a show at all times, and marmots stood upright like brown uncles, hands folded on their bellies, keeping watch while others darted around.
On the morning of my 32nd birthday, I stepped out of my camp determined to make the day count. At breakfast, one of the campsite employees suggested I climb a nearby hill, from where I could see most of the plains. He said maybe, if I was lucky, I’d spot a brown bear. He promised to follow up and asked me to go ahead. But halfway up, almost forty-five minutes in, I realized he wasn’t coming. Then I heard a sound that made me think a bear could actually be around. I had no way of knowing; it could’ve been anything. But Deosai is eerily quiet, and I’m no expert, so I decided it was safer to turn back.
As I made my way down I spotted someone climbing up. My first thought was: okay, finally, he’s coming. I signaled for him to stop and wait for me. But as I crossed over to his side of the hill and he became clearer, I realized it wasn’t him at all. I told the stranger I had mistaken him for someone else, and he offered to guide me up anyway. He said he was headed to collect some herbs for asthma for his family. I soon learned that he also worked at the campsite, doing bear lookout duty at night.
We started climbing together. Instinctively, I lied that I had a husband. Historically, it makes conversations with men easier. They treat you more like a person than a woman, and it becomes easier to simply talk about life and its structures.
It took us another hour to reach the top. Along the way, we spoke about how the Shia–Sunni divide in the country feels orchestrated, about how kids should be allowed to explore their interests. He told me he had married at seventeen and now had grown kids. He was curious about Nepal, about its social fabric and how its economy is tied to India. He said he’d always been told that Bengalis didn’t like us, but when he met one recently, that didn’t seem true at all. We talked about power structures and how they shape and curate narratives.
By the end, a part of me wanted to admit I had lied about my husband, especially when he asked how I had met him. But I was already too far into it. On the way back down, he collected wildflowers for my salgirah. The whole conversation felt as unlikely as it was organic. And joyful.
I made it to Hunza a few weeks later, and by then I’d learned how the public transportation system worked, and moving through the region felt easier. There, I met other solo women travelers, Pakistanis, also searching for ease. Three of us, in particular, fell into a quiet rhythm together. Most of our days were spent being still. It felt natural to ask for, and to slip into, conversation. We talked, ate, wandered out for walnut brownie runs, or simply sat side by side, sometimes in silence, looking out over the valley or at Rakaposhi.
In those moments, I found myself brushing up against an old and almost obvious realization: two things can be true at the same time. My country, which so often ruptures me, ruptures all of us, could also be a place of repair and ease. I have recently learned, relationally, that love doesn’t run out after a rupture and that repair is always an option. Maybe that’s just what it means to live here. Ease isn’t waiting in the background; it’s made. Over and over. Sometimes it’s in a quiet valley, and sometimes it’s in laughter and leisure with women who feel like sisters, comrades, and the best of companions. It barely ever feels permanent or consistent, but when it shows up, it’s so real, so fully mine and ours, and feels enough to keep trying again.
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– Momina Mindeel is a writer, journalist, and media viability practitioner. Her work explores culture, digital life, and the subcultures that emerge within them, often taking the shape of personal essays, which guides much of her journalism too. She supports and advises hyperlocal and community newsrooms on editorial innovation and audience engagement.
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