Madhubani, 5 AM

The first sound is always the hand pump. Before the temple bell, before the milkman's cycle, before anyone in the lane has decided what kind of day it will be, someone is working the iron handle of the chapakal — up, down, up, down — and the whole neighbourhood wakes to that creak like a slow, rusted heartbeat.

I grew up thinking every town sounded like that. I grew up thinking every town painted its walls.

In Madhubani, a wedding doesn't begin with invitations. It begins with a wall. Somebody's aunt mixes lampblack and cow-dung paste, somebody's cousin grinds turmeric for the yellows, and for three days the courtyard becomes a studio. Fish for fertility. Bamboo for the family line. A sun with a face, because why wouldn't the sun have a face. Nobody calls it art. It's just what you do before something important happens.

We never framed anything. The rain took most of it by August, and nobody minded, because there would be another wedding.

When I left for engineering college, I packed the things you're supposed to pack. I did not pack the walls. You don't know a sound is part of you until you're lying awake in a hostel room at 5 AM, waiting for a creak that never comes.

I think about that often now, writing code in a city with no hand pumps. The work is precise and unforgiving in a way I've come to love. But the reason I build things — websites for small places, a shop for the painters back home — is closer to that courtyard than to any architecture diagram.

Everything important starts with someone deciding a plain wall deserves better.

Everything I make is an attempt to get back to 5 AM.