پُرْوا Between Hawa and Wind

What happens in the hinge between languages—when I think in English but the feeling arrives in Urdu? Somewhere between “wind” and hawa, meaning loosens and breath returns. Hawa is not just moving air; it’s a guest, a blessing, an old companion. To say hawa is to feel a hand on the back of your neck guiding you home. English makes the world legible; Urdu lets it breathe.

I am writing from a garden of mulberry and apricot, where leaves reach to tap the walnut’s thicker shade—green palms brushing the knuckles of another tree. The day’s heat has been rinsed by a cooler’s breath: warm folded into cool, then cool surrendered again to warm, a cycle that rinses the face like a whispered dua. It comes as an unexpected embrace, this mixed air, a small mercy at the border of two states. I stand inside that border, noticing the fine stitch-work of the afternoon: dust lifted, light combed, the canopy murmuring. The trunks, the branches, the small knotted lives that cling to both—everything is interconnected. And in that same in-between, between English and Urdu, between science and story, I try to say what the wind is doing to us, and what we have done to the wind.

I learned to read a river the way I learned to read a textile: by tension, by grain, by what holds and what gives. In 2009, I received my first research grant from Scotland to study traditional embroidery and textiles in Hunza. I arrived with graph paper and a fine needle for deciphering pattern. Then the mountain moved. Rock sheared off above Attabad, dammed the Hunza River, and water rose into a lake that swallowed orchards, roads, and rooms where women once stitched quietly at dusk. The landscape was re-threaded. My plan changed, and I carried the research into Chitral, understanding that the material of my work had shifted from motif to watershed, from embroidery to the infrastructures that permit a life of embroidery.

For fifteen years I have walked these northern valleys—Chitral, Ghizer, Phander, Gilgit, Hunza, Skardu—carrying a camera and a sketchbook, listening to weavers and shepherds, tailors and teachers. I believed I was collecting techniques. I was, in truth, collecting evidence. After each monsoon: bridges peeled from their anchors like loose seams; terraces gone in a single gulp; classrooms filled with silt; a month of promises dissolved in one night of rain. I watched glaciers bulge and slump, ice heave like a living chest and then collapse even in winter. In spring orchards I learned the sound of absence—the wrong kind of quiet, the missing hum between blossom and blossom. Silence itself became headline, if you knew how to read it.

Water has memory. Forced out of its old agreements, it remembers the ancient channel and goes looking for it, taking whatever stands in the way. We have broken the pact. We paved floodplains, strip-mined riverbeds for stone and sand, shaved slopes and called it “development,” then turned new hotels to camera and back doors to torrent. We have said “climate change” like an incantation that absolves local sins. It does not. Not while we dynamite for gravel, choke drains with plastic, sell the green belt for parking, or build where the river keeps its right to pass.

As an artist, I cannot pretend the studio sits somewhere above these facts. Wool shrinks when wet; so does the circle of safety a family can count on when the monsoon rearranges a valley. Embroidery is a map of patience and skill; so is rebuilding a path to a village now reachable only by boat. A cloak I design from Shu—the handwoven wool of Chitral—is warm because elders guarded pastures and water channels for generations. If those commons are logged, grazed to exhaustion, or paved without thought, every stitch becomes costume. Theatre for a world that can no longer afford props.

The human index is everywhere if you look closely. A weaver in Garam Chashma washes the lanolin from fleece in a hot spring, steam mixing with the bite of mountain air; later, floodwater dulls the loom’s rhythm as roads vanish and the wool cannot travel. A teacher in Phander picks mud from the legs of a desk as if removing burrs from a lamb’s coat. A mason in Ghizer tests stone with his fingernail, searching for the old integrity in a rock thinned by too many hammers. In Hunza, a mother shakes apricot kernels into her palm and counts what survived the water’s appetite. Our abundance has always been a choreography of shared limits. When those limits fail—by negligence or desire—the dance collapses.

The lexicon of loss can be precise. You can measure runoff in cubic meters per second, plot a floodline against a contour map, draft a code that moves a building out of harm’s way. But no instrument except listening will capture the shift when “home” becomes “shelter,” when “season” becomes “event.” English gives me the instrument; Urdu gives me the register. Rawani—the flow that makes a composition feel inevitable—has been interrupted. Sabr—patience, but also the discipline of wait and repair—feels thinner than it should. Aman—safety—is now a hill you can point to, rather than a field you can roam.

What can creativity do in such weather? Beauty, I have learned, is not a surface. It is a system. Terrace, tree, channel, path—these are aesthetic choices as much as moral ones, decisions about rhythm and relation. Craft has always been an applied ecology: a way to turn landscape into shelter without bankrupting either. The future of craft here is the same as the future of climate action: make the unglamorous visible, fund the maintenance, honor the knowledge that keeps the torrent in dialogue rather than in siege.

So the work becomes both intimate and infrastructural. Draw a hard line where water keeps its right of way, and refuse the cousin’s exception. Restore floodplains with roots that stitch banks more honestly than rebar. Stop treating rivers like quarries. Pay youth to clear drains before the cloud breaks. Put women—the original water managers—at the center of watershed committees and pay them like the engineers they are. Enforce building codes without ceremony; design footbridges to fail safely and rebuild easily; keep a ledger of saplings watered through their second summer. Listen to the elders who remember how the last torrent was steered into a field to lay down silt rather than steal a house. Make these practices the new vernacular—our daily design language.

Between English and Urdu there is a third space I keep returning to, a place of translation and friction and possibility. Perhaps climate work must live there too: between data and story, between outrage and repair, between the speed of water and the slowness of roots. The winds that move across these valleys will keep naming us, in both languages, until we answer with more than elegy.

When I say wind, I mean hawa. When I say pattern, I mean a discipline tough enough to survive the wear of weather. When I say river, I mean a teacher whose lessons arrive whether we registered for the course or not. I came to these mountains to study embroidery and found myself apprenticed to hydrology, to governance, to the practical poetry of communities that refuse to be erased. If there is a prayer in all this, it is simple: may our work be worthy of the valleys that raised us. May we choose systems that hold, not just stories that soothe. May the space between languages remain large enough for breath—and for the brave agreements that will let us keep breathing together.