Hina Husain

How magic mushrooms helped me come to terms with my abusive childhood.

Each orgasm shook a new memory from the depths. The soft, feathery texture of a Persian carpet against my cheeks. The shape and colors of a vase with elephants painted on it. The smell of monsoon rainfall in Lahore.

"To be human is to be complex. You can't avoid a little ugliness -- from within -- and from without."

In Star Trek, Dad could imagine a life free of shame and heartache.

Canada allowed me to become the person I always wanted to be.

The most revelatory journeys not only transport us for a moment, but also leave us forever change. Here, three travel writers detail their most transformative trips. Hina Husain reflects on an intrepid daughter-mother journey to northern Pakistan.

A lover of "real chai," Hina Husain is a freelance writer who was born in Pakistan and later immigrated to Canada when she was seventeen. As a teenager, retaining roots to the "homeland" and trying to understand her cultural identity were not topics that interested Hina, but these sentiments started to shift following the passing of her father. Listen to Hina tell her story about the role that Kashmiri chai plays in connecting with her family and her Pakistani heritage.

Michael Brook has seen world music evolve a lot over the years. In the early '90s, a time in which the expansion of the genre was "a notable innovation," Brook, a Canadian musician, teamed up with Pakistani legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to record two iconic albums: 1990's Mustt Mustt, and the 1996 Grammy-nominated Night Song.

Meet Hina Husain, 32 year old living in Canada, here to tell us her life story, especially a major part of her life that involves marriage. Hina had a very nontraditional marriage, because she did not get married to a Pakistani man, or a Muslim man, as most Pakistani girls do. She married an Indian Hindu man, named Sai, who she met nearly 10 years ago.

A virtual walk through the Walled City of Old Lahore, exploring bazaars, markets, food and iconic landmarks. Part of Delhi Food Walks' presentation series.

Lahore, known as the Heart of Pakistan, is an ancient city, home to spice markets, mosques, bazaars and an incredible local cuisine.

In April 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation launched the Heart of Knowledge contest to invite creative submissions from artists and writers around the world on the theme of “what does open access to knowledge mean to you?” Hina Husain's entry 'Pakistan, Love, and Jane Eyre' was the grand prize winner in the creative non-fiction category.

My grandmother was half Kashmiri, which means my father was a quarter Kashmiri, which means that I’m an eighth Kashmiri. But if you were to ask me about my Kashmiri heritage, all I’d have to offer up is Kashmiri chai.

How to beat the social media addiction 15 years in the making

I’m so excited to feature Pakistan Eats first guest post! Hina is a writer and amateur photographer from Toronto, Ontario. Her work has appeared in VICE Canada, HuffPost, the CBC, and Matador Network. Hina’s writing is charming and provocative, and she has recently begun to write about food. Here she shares the recipe of Frontier style fried fish (specifically freshwater trout) that she enjoyed during her travels.

In the pantheon of all time classic Bollywood films, Dil Se.. has rightfully earned itself a spot as one of the most thought-provoking, cinematically beautiful, flawlessly acted, and affecting movies ever put to film.

Food was love, and that was something both my parents taught me through their shared joy and appreciation for our country’s cuisine.Through food, we stayed connected to our culture, our heritage, and what we later came to describe as memories of our “past lives.”