Architecture, Urban Life & Design

There was a long, open field I used to cross every day on my way to school. It stretched endlessly, the kind of place where time felt slower, where grass bent with the wind, and where each season painted a new face onto the land.

I was quite young when the evening market still existed. In my memories the fluorescent light and the sound of crickets are still imprinted, along with the specific smell of vegetables and fruits. Many people would scatter and push through the crowds to get the best price from the best vendors.

The farms are filled with houses, and I can no longer see the fields.

For more than half of my life, I have only ever seen the houses among huge fields of paddy and wheat around me. Even after migrating thrice, we never escaped the little VDC unit that housed mostly the area locals and their agrarian lifestyle.

I wish I had more pictures of that corner of Kathmandu where I grew up. Proof that those moments truly existed, something that immortalizes the pristine condition as I remember from my childhood.

Because I feel a village might not always be something you’re born into or inherit from your parents. Sometimes, it can be shared, borrowed, and lived through the people around you.

Whenever I go to my old house, which is now made of concrete, I go to the roof, look at all the surroundings, and think about how much time has changed.

Perhaps we grew out of ourselves over time, or it really was the buildings, the number of visitors and playmates went down with each new building. We were gaining new neighbors, but by then, it felt too much like work to make new friends, to know new people.

It felt like us grown ups, tall and built with memories intact, but no longer as free and wild as we used to be.

A place that once was filled with many plants, flowers and trees is now just left with bricks, concrete and dusts of its own body. They may have shattered its body, but they can never touch its soul.

A place that isn’t just a village, but a memory box filled with joy and fragments of my childhood.

Perhaps it was the horizon that ran along the far extended farmlands that made the sunrises and sunsets over there more interesting than anything.

But as I watched the line slowly curve around the temple’s walls, I found myself wondering: when does a ritual become routine?

The crematorium is where I always feel drawn whenever I’m made to go to Pashupati. I reserve a step very devoid of people to sit and view the surroundings.

The Calmness That Often Goes Unnoticed

Cultural memory is not neutral. In deciding what to preserve, we’re also deciding what and who is worth remembering.

New roads, new walls. Same village, same love.

But when the bell rings, everything around me seems to pause for a moment; a quiet stillness I can’t quite explain.

There’s a shift that happens in architecture school that rewires the way you see the world.

A reflection on familiarity, fear and the buildings we no longer recognize.