Why Raania Durrani walked away from urban applause and chose a slower, quieter life running her candlelit kitchen in Hunza.
For years, Raania Durrani was a quiet force in Pakistan’s live music revival. As the co-founder of Salt Arts, she curated and produced intimate ticketed concerts at a time when audiences were unaccustomed to paying for live performance. She was not simply organising shows, she was helping rebuild a concert going culture, nurturing audiences, and contributing to the fragile economics of independent music.
Karachi was movement. It was logistics and late nights, artist negotiations and audience cultivation. It was the work of making culture visible and boy was it gratifying (yet very exhausting).
But even at the height of that momentum, something in her was shifting.
“Salt Arts taught me that audiences are sensitive ecosystems,” Raania says. “Attention is fragile and must be earned through sincerity and consistency. Economically, culture survives when care is placed before growth, and when intimacy is valued over reach.”
That lesson would later shape everything she built in the mountains.
When Speed Became The Default Measure Of Relevance
Urban cultural life rewards velocity. Bigger shows, larger venues, more content, faster cycles. For Raania, there came a moment when that rhythm began to feel misaligned with the life she wanted to live and the work she wanted to make.
“When speed became the default measure of relevance. When output mattered more than presence. I realized the scene rewarded scale and popular content, production money was only available to large spectacles, more and faster. At the time I was craving investigation, depth, slowness, and space to listen and create outside of the accepted industry norms and success metrics. Music continues to align my life – in this new avatar. I want to give more of me to fewer people in more meaningful ways, rather than less of me to more people in emptier exchanges.”
The sentence reads like a manifesto.
Long before Zahira Cottage Kitchen existed, the idea of leaving Karachi had already begun forming quietly inside her.
“I wanted to witness life in this quickly dissolving natural world. Zahira Cottage is my home, but also my pottery studio, kitchen and a creative gathering space for those I wish to collaborate with,” she states. “I felt a pull towards a life where my nervous system could be free to create at my own pace, first as a mother, homemaker and an independent creative. I also wanted to ensure, especially during Covid, that I gave myself a chance to do something just for myself and my son which had nature and working with our hands at its helm, without having to adhere to what was conventionally acceptable and comfortable for everyone else.”
The Aha! Moment In Aliabad
Her move to Hunza was not an impulsive escape. She had spent years working there, building friendships, understanding the rhythms of the valley. But the decision to root herself in Aliabad was decisive.
“It wasn’t a completely new place for me, it was a place where I had worked and made friends for several years prior to the shift. Yes, it was a dramatic aha moment, where everything seemed clear because I knew that the visibility, access and networks I would benefit from – would only be beneficial to me, if I was pushing boundaries and being close to myself by encouraging and harnessing my own freedom.”
In Gilgit-Baltistan, ambition feels different. It is less about expansion and more about alignment.
“Time in Hunza is circular rather than linear. Productivity is seasonal, in line with nature’s cyclical ways – a time to bloom, a season to rest and then to renew again. Success looks like the continuity of health, friendships, discovery, mobility, happiness and not always as speed, quantity or the expansion of the material kind.”
It is a redefinition that many urban professionals flirt with but rarely commit to. But Raania did.
A Kitchen Without A Menu
Zahira Cottage Kitchen sits in upper Aliabad. It is part home, part studio, part gathering space. There are no fixed menus. Diners book in advance, share their dietary restrictions, and arrive to whatever the day and the land have offered.
“I don’t think it was built around a pre-conceived idea. It was translated into its current form from how life was unfolding, from ease mostly and it is a reflection of how taking pride in using less looks like. We serve home-cooked, musical meals at small garden tables. I am the cook on most days, but for me the best days are when my brother, my parents, my cousins and friends come in and cook with me. There is no set menu, food is prepared from the ingredients we find closest to us on the day, ultimately reducing food-miles. The menu is also derived from how I am feeling on that day, food really is an extension of emotion and memory,” Raania explains.
“A lot of my cooking is a reflection of the recipes of my elders and also the tastes I enjoy myself. I often like to blur the line between sweet and savoury, cakes might not be sweet and curries may be more fragrant, treading a fine line between sour, seasoned and sweet.”
Meals are often lit by candles or fading daylight. Artists visit, collaborate, stay, exchange. Culture is not programmed, it unfolds organically.
“I believe strongly in inter-disciplinary practice, music was never the centerpiece, my own artistic expression was and is. I now live and work in Aliabad, Hunza, where I founded 7788 and Zahira Cottage Kitchen. My interest lies in bringing culture, food, craft and technology into a shared space through digital storytelling, and personalized immersive moments. Each medium is enriched by another. For me experiential memory making via food, music and craft is at the heart of what I do.”
Even silence plays a role.
“The silence of the night makes the music deeply audible, embedding itself in the hearts of people who are making memories in the naturescape with meals drawn closely from it.”
Naming The Kitchen After A Woman Who Kept Migrating
The kitchen carries Raania’s grandmother’s name.
“Zahira Pandit was my Kashmiri grandmother. She was born on Christmas day and passed away on an Easter Sunday at the age of 92, in 2016. She had migrated many times in her life, from Simla to Delhi, from Delhi to Karachi, then Dacca and then Karachi again – making homes and kitchens where she found herself, again and again, in places far from her place of birth,” Raania reveals.
“When she left us, I thought of adding her name to mine – but when I migrated, her name naturally became my own. Now most people who know me from my current life call me Zahira, and I could not be more pleased. I value that now we say her name over and over again, many times in a day – we write it, we represent it, others speak it when thinking of us. Her immense legacy blesses us daily – my name is Zahira.”
Migration, for her grandmother, was survival. For Raania, it is choice. Yet both acts revolve around making home through kitchen, through gathering, through care.
The Etiquette Of Encountering A Landscape
Tourism in Gilgit-Baltistan is often framed in numbers. Visitor counts, hotel openings and social media reach. Raania speaks instead of etiquette.
“While I am no authority at any of this and there are people and organizations who have committed their lives to the industry – from my perspective I think the etiquette of specific consumption is missing. In Urdu there is a term ‘Addab-e-Mehfil’ loosely translated as the behavioral code of experiencing something, may it be a musical event, a family gathering, or in this case an encounter with the world’s most unique mountainscape, the third pole, the final frontier, the magical Shangrila – home to the kindest and most generous community of an ancient people who live by the rules of mother earth. We certainly cannot consume and experience something this rare and fragile with an uninformed set of expectations and body language.”
For her, cultural work in such a place carries responsibility.
“To protect intimacy. To work at a human scale, not to unnecessarily expand, not to document mindlessly. To take pride in using less, to push back on urban metrics, to embrace sustainable production values and overall kindness.”
Even loneliness is reframed.
“In cities we may mask our unique solitude, outside the city one is given a chance to fully embrace it and thrive with it.”
And the urban affirmation she once knew so well?
“I am not sure I fully subscribe to the affirmation of the urban culturescape. We have a very unique artistic eco-system in Pakistan, outside of the three major cities. Mostly in the urban centres creative production and its success is marked by metrics which do not apply to other parts.”
What Home Means Now
In the end, the move to Aliabad is not about retreat. It is about recalibration.
“Home is where I can be alone and still full. It’s a place where I don’t have to reach outward to feel complete, where the quiet is companionable. I’ve learnt that fullness doesn’t always come from people, noise, or movement. Sometimes it comes from familiarity, from light entering a room at the same hour each day, from the weight of landscape outside the window. To be alone and still feel held, still feel nourished, is a kind of abundance. Mashallah.”
She once built stages where spotlights defined presence, now Raania sets tables where candlelight does…the applause has softened. The audience is smaller and most important of all, the work is slower.
And in that quiet, Raania has found a different kind of scale.