Hira, 26

I design homes for a living — and I'm still sketching the one where love lives.

Islamabad Architect 5'5" Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch)

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Laiba, 24 Multan → Rabia, 27 Lahore → Mahnoor, 23 Karachi → Fiza, 23 Faisalabad →

Every morning in Islamabad begins the same way for me: the soft grey-blue of the Margalla Hills outside my window, the faint call of the Fajr azaan rolling down from the mosque near our street in F-10, and the smell of my ammi’s doodh patti drifting up the stairs before my alarm has even finished its first song. My sketchbook sits on my side table like an old friend, usually open to whatever I was dreaming about at 2 a.m. — last night it was a courtyard house with a neem tree in the middle, because apparently even my subconscious is an architect now.

I have been drawing houses since before I could spell the word properly. In school, my notebooks were famous for all the wrong reasons: every margin bloomed with floor plans, little staircases climbing the edges of my maths homework, tiny arched windows framing the spelling words I was supposed to be memorising. My abbu, who is a civil engineer and therefore only slightly less obsessed with buildings than I am, would study my sketches over dinner and say, Hira beta, this wall cannot stand, and then spend the next hour teaching me why, using salt shakers and dinner plates as columns and beams. Those dinners were my first studio, and I did not even know it.

Architecture school nearly broke me in the most beautiful way. Five years of all-nighters in a studio that smelled of glue sticks and thermocol, my hands permanently nicked from craft knives, my best friend Mahnoor and I surviving on dhaba chai at 3 a.m. while our models dried. There is a particular exhaustion that only architecture students know — the kind where you fall asleep with a scale ruler in your hand and dream in plan, section, and elevation. But there is also a particular joy: the morning your professor walks past your half-finished model, stops, and just says, Haan. Yeh theek hai. That one sentence can fuel you for a month.

Now I work at a small firm in Blue Area, and my days are split between the office and construction sites, which means I am either arguing lovingly with contractors about why a wall must move exactly four inches to the left, or sitting in a half-built drawing room watching the evening light pour through a window opening I drew six months ago. That moment never gets old. You draw a rectangle on paper in January, and by October the October sun is sitting inside it like it was always meant to be there. Buildings are just slow drawings, I tell my juniors. We sketch, and then the city colours them in.

People think architects only care about concrete, but honestly, half my job is noticing. I notice how the light falls through the jharoka-style screens at Saidpur Village at golden hour. I notice the old havelis tucked behind the markets, their wooden balconies sagging with a hundred years of stories. Islamabad is a planned city, all grids and sectors, but the old soul of the Potohar region keeps peeking through — in the stone, in the courtyards, in the way every aunty in every sector insists on a proper sehan even in a five-marla house. I am trying to design modern homes that still remember how to be desi, homes where a grandmother can sit in the winter sun and a child can play where she can be seen from the kitchen.

Weekends belong to the Margallas. There is a trail — Trail 3, if you know, you know — that I have hiked so many times my shoes have memorised the stones. At the top, the whole city spreads out below like one of my models: the Faisal Mosque gleaming white, the sectors laid out in their neat grids, the hills rolling away into a blue haze. My cousin Zara and I go up with a thermos of chai and sit there solving all the world’s problems, which mostly means deciding what we will eat when we come down. The answer is always Savour Foods pulao. The question is only how many plates.

Family is the centre of everything, as it is for most of us. Sunday dawats at my dadi’s house in F-8 are non-negotiable — twenty-odd people, three kinds of salan, and my dadi holding court from her armchair, telling the same stories about old Rawalpindi that we all pretend we have not memorised word for word. Lately the aunties have started the gentle, loving, completely relentless campaign about my shaadi. Hira beta, you design such beautiful homes, my khala said last Eid, when will you design one with a dulha in it? I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my sheer khurma. But honestly? She is not wrong to ask.

Because here is the thing I do not say out loud very often: I have designed houses for young couples, for growing families, for retired parents who want one perfect sunny room. I know exactly how wide a doorway should be so two people can walk through it side by side without squeezing. I know where the morning light should land so someone’s chai tastes better. I have spent six years learning how to make space for love — and somewhere along the way I realised I have been sketching around an empty chair. I want the person who sits in it. Someone who laughs at my terrible site jokes, who will hike the Margallas with me and not complain too much about the uphill, who understands that when I go quiet at a dawat it is because I am redesigning the host’s drawing room in my head.

If you are reading this, here is my offer: come walk with me. We will take the long way through Shakarparian at sunset, when the whole city turns gold and the hills go purple behind it. I will point out every building I love and tell you exactly why, and you can tell me about your world, whatever it is. Then we will find a dhaba, order two cutting chais, and argue — playfully, obviously — about whether the best view in Islamabad is from Daman-e-Koh or from my dadi’s rooftop. It is my dadi’s rooftop. I will win this argument. I am an architect; I know about vantage points. And if the evening goes well, maybe I will show you the sketchbook. The one with the courtyard house and the neem tree. There is an empty chair in that drawing too — but I have a feeling it will not stay empty forever.