“Stepping out of Zeb and Haniya was probably one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made but at the end of the day, it was too hard on my mental health,” says Haniya Aslam over the phone from her studio in Islamabad. “[It was] that lifestyle. You need a specific kind of temperament to be a touring musician.”

The 42-year-old singer-songwriter and producer has released her solo track Ayi Re. It’s a beautiful earthy number that incorporates a folksy sound with more contemporary instruments — a style and a sound Haniya seems to have developed as her own. But coming to this point took quite a journey — from relative anonymity to instant stardom sometime in 2007, and then leaving all of it behind and moving to another continent in 2014, when her eponymously titled band with her cousin, Zeb and Haniya, was at its musical peak. She returned towards the end of 2017 and set up her own musical space, Citrus Studio in Islamabad.

I remember sitting with her up in the gallery when the second season of Coke Studio was being recorded just over a decade ago. We were in the shadows, watching other artists set up and record below. While some members of the house band around us could be seen entertaining others on and off the stage, Haniya appeared quieter in comparison and almost content with letting others enjoy the attention they were soliciting. She seemed very laid back, like someone who enjoyed her space but was also friendly. You just had to go to her than wait for her to come to you.

At this point, her band had enjoyed a lot of play on radio, they had a couple of videos out, were becoming popular in the entertainment industry and had recorded their debut album with Mekaal Hasan. It was the beginning of the big push into the blinding spotlight that this recording of CS was about to push them into.

That day, sitting quietly up in the gallery looking down at the ‘real’ stars, we (or rather she, to me they had already ‘made it’) had no idea how her life was about to change. Most importantly, how fast that change would be.

Haniya Aslam bid adieu to the spotlight at the height of Zeb and Haniya’s popularity. Now she’s back with her first solo track Ayi Re. She explains why she left and why it’s taken her so long to come back

“We never thought that we would become so successful. We had both assumed that we’ll put this out and music is something we’ll do on the side. And we’ll get on with our lives,” she chuckles. “So, it was a bit of a surprise. Whenever we’re attempting something big, we always prepare ourselves emotionally for failure, but we never prepare ourselves for success. We never even think ke agar yeh ho jaye [what if this happens] so what will that mean?”

Her song, Ayi Re, is her attempt to process all that happened during, what she terms, the Zeb and Haniya years. “I’m a very quiet, introverted person,” she explains. “Maybe something would happen to me once every six months or so. But when we started with the band, we were travelling, we were meeting an exponentially higher number of people every day. These insane things were happening.”

Not the success itself, but how fast it came to them, is what they weren’t prepared for. “I don’t know if there’s an element of classism in this,” she says. “But we had just started out and we went straight into the top studio, recorded with the top musicians, we didn’t have to go through the grind of being a band that performed for a few years… Suddenly it was almost like there was a vacuum and it sucked us right up to the top.”

You don’t have to be an introvert to feel like the fast-moving lifestyle of a successful, touring artist can, at times, be very overwhelming. But while extroverts are able to figure out their feelings and get them out of the way quickly, Haniya’s way of dealing with her’s was to shut them down and move on. She would deal with them later.

“I don’t process things in real time,” she laughs. “Even a few years into my move to Canada, I’d be sitting somewhere and be like, ‘Oh my god! Woh bhi hua tha! Uss se bhi milay thay?’[This also happened! We met that person too?] Things would come back almost as though I’d dreamt them in the night.”

At some point, at the peak of their success, Haniya was done. “Being on tour it makes it very, very hard for me to be in a creative space. I need stillness and quiet to even enter that space. And primarily, I’m a composer, a songwriter. It just wasn’t working in a lot of ways.”

The move to Canada was about taking a big break. Haniya went back to the basics and did a course in audio engineering, helped out on gigs and did some free work while she honed her skills. She learned a lot of music, met other musicians and attended a variety of performances. It was the musical nourishment her soul needed, but this time, at her pace.

“Ayi Re is understanding my identity and purpose, and just sort of what I’d understood about the world. What I had understood about life. The larger, larger pictures. And attempting to process that.

In Ayi Re, Haniya sings in a pitch louder than she normally has in her previous releases with her band. “In Zeb and Haniya, Zeb was the lead vocalist,” she says. So, we always recorded the songs in her key. I would sing whatever parts I could but I could never sing the higher parts because they were meant for her voice and not mine. Now that I’m composing for my own voice, I’m getting to sing in my key, in my comfortable range.”

It took her a while to figure out what that was. “In Toronto, I took some years off of performing,” she reveals. “I set up my amplifier, my guitar and the mic in the living room and I just sang my heart out for a couple of years. I think that also helps in developing my own style. I’m on my way.”

Is Ayi Re a part of a larger body of work? An EP or an album, perhaps? While there are more songs in the works, Haniya didn’t disclose whether they would form part of one collection. “There is one more song that’s very close to completion,” she reveals. “That will probably come out next.” By that she means in a few months, possibly end of the year.

Why take so long? “I just signed up two new dramas which are going to keep me very, very busy,” she responds. “I’m in no hurry.”

“I don’t like to hurry songs. Because songs have their own journeys. You’ve gotta let them breathe and live. If you leave the right decision to happen at the right time, that’s when the magic occurs. And these songs are very close to my heart. They’ve come from a very sacred space. I want to do them justice.”

The next song will be fun, she promises. “There’s a vocal ensemble that started in Islamabad called Gin Tara,” says Haniya. “It’s these seven vocalists and they do multipart harmonies. They’re led by Natasha Ejaz. They’re really cool, man. They just did two or three shows before this whole thing happened. They’re amazing, they blew my mind.”

Will she and Zeb ever work again? “There’s nothing planned,” says Haniya. “I’m a bit of a fatalist. Agar hona hoga, jis cheez mein behtari ho gi, wohi ho ga [If it is destined to happen, whatever’s for the best, will happen].”

Now that she’s back and, on occasion, releasing music that seems to resonate with audiences, if things blow up, is she ready to go on tour and be in the limelight? “Uh… no,” comes the definitive response. “Even when I was on stage I’d be looking at the dude behind the mixing board [usually situated far away from the stage] and I’d be like, ‘I wish I was there’,” she laughs.

“On stage, all of the creativity has happened before that moment,” she adds. “It’s during the rehearsals when you get to try out new ideas. But on stage, at least the kind of music that we were doing, you stuck to the format. You knew what you had to do and you had to it together, properly.

“I love the studio because that’s where anything is possible. That’s the creative space. That’s where you can innovate. I’m so happy just being in the studio and I have everything set up exactly as I need it,” she finishes, sounding very happy and content. After almost 13 years in the music industry, having experienced its highs and lows, Haniya Aslam is exactly where she wants to be.

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 16th, 2020