The Roaming Architects

The inherent behavior of most mortal beings is that of sieving the best out of life. Why is it then that in such a routine of evolution, you will still find a people bound with utmost devotion to lifestyles as primitive as man himself? Travelling down the Pirs, you often get a chance to trespass the occlusion built by this question.

Travelling down these very Pirs, her envy poured in through slim puncture in the windshield. Stemming from a vivid image, of a nomad girl, amidst her flocks and some other tidbits of bliss.

A few months earlier the girls long journey had begun at the brink of the Babusar Sierra. Standing on an edge of the 10000 metre high margin, she took a last glance at the amaranthine vastness below. Her long walk in the clouds was to begin from here, and as the Himalayas swayed below, she was to see the several metres above the sea, never knowing though, how many there were to be above herself.

The monsoon sated summer spurred her stallions down these heights. And when such a ride did her in, all she had to do was to collapse onto the flow of saffron cascades, wait for her herds to graze their tang and get drenched in sunrays for hours without a care of what her shadows defined.

Piercing the Deodars, her stroll ceaselessly paved way for the Indus. And within their alliance, only the gorge paused at intervals, taking just a dip in the rapids before splashing up to its crest.

The wandering ended at the crease of the Pir Panjals. When her envy poured through a slim puncture in the Chirs. Stemming from a vivid image of a girl driving down the Pirs, within her Willy and some other tidbits of bliss.

Whereabouts: Driving down the Babusar Pass (a mountain pass 13,691ft above see level) towards the base of Nanga Parbat in Astore.

Season: Autumn 2011

Story: The “Bakarwals” Nomads of the North of India and Pakistan still lead a life as close to nature that of primitive man’s might have been. A life where time is measured not in hours or days but in sunrays and seasons. Yet have all that a human needs to lead a content life. Or so it seems.

Tidings for an Architect: A spatial experience is not complete until it is visible from more than one perspective. Without multiple vistas a space is just a sketch not yet a sculpture.

So what is sacred architecture? How is it possible that such an extension of human reason is describable in such an extension of matter. Moreover, what is that elixir which smoothens the transition from the corporeal back to the celestial.

The answer for most lies in the images of ancient monuments and majestic shrines. But what if for a moment we try to reverse our binoculars, try and search for more mundane answers.

One such precedent may be traced back from within our very own heritage:

Imagine a narrow elevated platform between adjacent tenements in a remote village. A small tanoor burns in one corner, red flickers of smoke twirling in the air. Tall warm earth walls huddle you within them on both sides and a canopy of screens lets in freckles of warm light, that dance an enchanting chiaroscuro with the scaly geometric floor pattern below. These scales converge to the nucleus in the centre and burst open into a quiet pool.

Swift streams of wind contract in from balconies drooping over the only two open sides. One facing the icy silhouettes of the mighty Pir Panjals and the other, the lazy warm waters of the Jhelum that collapse into a lake at the end.

Oftentimes you would find an old lady repeating an oral tradition to a pack of children at the other end. There distance apart, spanned merely by raw timber beams.

The only materials used are native earth, breathtaking Himalayan views, light filtered through snow pure enough to cover peaks, air channeled through the wild splashes of the Jhelum and the rustle of everyday Kashmiri life. The only technique used, the bare hands of masons whose touch brings about an instinctive metamorphosis of one shape and form onto another. The solemn design philosophy employed, space inspired by as well as sustaining the surrounding environment by merely addressing a simple combination of bare necessities.

Centuries old eastern customs and rituals have been given life in this one agglomeration of form and space which has originated from fundamental human needs of congregation and of privacy, festivity and tranquility. Of daily mundane chores to ceremonial feasts, all has been invited with frank honesty, into this one scope. Thereby, the solace that traditional courtyards afford comes as no surprise as we are engulfed into them.

Man has tried to create a myriad of spaces that can help expose the deepest of its feelings. That of salvation, or the "sacred experience". Towering cathedrals, grand mosques and classical temples. Is there really a need for such an expense to have that experience. Is it not true that many of our most intimate spiritual experiences are those related to space as a manifestation of our personal feelings, not space as an example of what universal grandeur would be.

Whereabouts: Courtyard on a hilltop platform between grandparents home, Azad Kashmir

Season: Spring 2000

Story: Magla Lake lies at the foothill of the mighty Pir Panjal Range from where the Jhelum river flows in to collapse into this large lake. My grandparents house was at a hill top on the banks of this lake.

Tidings for an Architect: Dancing Light has an eerie quality to it. A quality that is so strong that it can pierce open a portal for us from the physical world into the spiritual. It can make us feel materiality even in the intangible. 

What is it that is so enchanting about passing through a forest? I want to try and understand what enchantment is, why flocks of people migrate to the Galiyat in the summers just to cut through foliage. Why is it that, this is all it takes, to be reborn for the next working season.

Maybe it’s the monsoon that creeps into the alpine canopy, like spirits wanting to breath out more, into all the fresh air cascading down this tree line. I don’t understand what it is but it borrows my breath away for a bit.

Or maybe it’s how it grants you access into extreme depths of darkness before showering upon you glimmers of sunshine all in one ambush. Maybe it’s a raindrops twisted idea to work in sync with these glimmers and make us hallucinate. I can’t see what it is, it just deceives me into believing, that my visual spectrum after all, might not be as broad as I imagined it to be.

Then again maybe it’s how the bark grips your fingers to pull you up the slope. How the dew slips across the grass to tickle your bare feet, so you smooth along too. Or when the cedar bristles brush past your skin. I don’t know what it is, but as it introduces you to the wonders of hapticity, it discreetly makes you a stranger to your own skin.

Maybe it’s how its ignites you curiosity, whispering a waterfall of creative ideas into your head. But before you can salvage even a bit of these ideas, it hisses away, robbing you of all these echoes along the way.

At times when you can taste the moistness in the soil yards away, just because its tang escaped the little slit in your window. And that craving, a craving you didn’t even know existed before, is so great that you start wondering when you began to lose your sophisticated palette to such raw flavors.

As you pass through a forest you don’t just pass through it, you keep getting devoured in, without even knowing how your being stripped away bit by bit. Devoured by the wilderness, where none of your well bred senses are of use. So you get stripped off of your senses. Your breathing gets stripped off of its well bred air, your vision gets stripped off of its well chiseled frame, your skin gets stripped of its polished surface, your palette forgets to recognize refined blends from the many different cuisines it has tasted, and finally your head is stripped bare of the brainstorm of voices it had picked up over its years of experience.

Everything sucked out except vacuum. Everything taken away except hunger. Everything gone except a craving for a filling. Everything except a craving to sense whatever comes up. To breather deeper, to catch every glimpse that lands upon your sight, to feel all textures independent of each other, to decipher all that the whispers were trying to tell you, and to savor every bit of this new found enlightenment. Flocks of people don’t visit this wilderness to give away their senses, they only come here to empty the reservoir of sensations that restricted the passage, for new found feelings.

Whereabouts: Alpine Forests of the Galiyat,  KPK Pakistan

Season: Monsoon 2015

Story: The Galiyat are a hill tract to the North East of Islamabad. It has been a summer attraction since the times of British India.

Every summer when the water rises up to drown history from this town on the banks of the Mangla Lake, this is the place to be for anyone who needs a dose of mesmerization. Inch by Inch, melted glaciers clamber up the ancient stones that safely held deities in their trabeated embrace for centuries. Bit by bit Jhelum flows over the tired branches of the old willow that held the green cover over exhausted farmers for centuries. A trickle at a time water hushes even the towering minarets that once called whole towns to congregate and enliven the Jhelum basin.

Our seasonal lake trips had already introduced me to the rise and fall of water levels, visible on vibrant range in the hues of green on the rocks that held the water behind their embankment, but it was a great grandmother of ours that introduced me to the unfathomable depths of this lake.

This ancient woman once lived with her children in the old river basin, when the dam had not yet been constructed. When the tide dropped in the winters we would accompany her on her annual trips to her son's grave near an ancient temple’s ruins, that she somehow always managed to spot at once even on the marshes that once held this town. Our seasonal trips had already acquainted us with the structures that drowned, but she introduced us to the many sentiments that drowned with the stones and the branches and the minarets to every season.

I had allready been introduced to the fact that one of waters greatest powers was to gradually erode history. But never before had I been struck with the power of a mothers heart that can travel even over a space-time continuum to keep revisiting memories, no matter how many times water tries to drown them.

Whereabouts: Driving along the Dyke to Kharak Island on Mangla Lake, and then a boat trip on the lake.

Season: Summer 2013

History: When the Mangla Lake the 2nd largest earth filled lake in the world at its time was built in 1960s, whole villages on the Jhelum Basin drowned.