The night wind guides mellow music from a certain six strings and an unintelligible singing up one and a half flights of stairs, climbing edges and turning corners and knocking on my open door. Behind the impromptu live acoustic stairwell session is Naz, playing a song he wrote almost a decade back, and he tells me: he doesn’t do this very often.

Instead, he is armed daily with various paraphernalia: a row of pencils lined up with random heights being evidence of their use, markers, a ruler, an ink-black SDE notebook, and various other stationery framed in angular sets. On the odd evening, perhaps you might find him (much like how I did on one of the very first instances I’d seen Naz) standing in a back corner of the lift, architectural model in hand and eyes half closed, waiting for the doors to open to the eleventh floor. Naz is one of Tembusu’s few Year 2 Architecture students, and while it may have taken him a slight detour to get to NUS at first, there’s an enduring, somewhat perennial drive in him that keeps him going in his course – it is a belief in and an aspiration towards the polymath mindset. A polymath is one who is well versed in many different fields of study, tracing back to the Renaissance men who were tapped into opposing and varied branches of knowledge. The polymathic concept as well as Naz’s love and flair for art and design then fall together nicely in Architecture, a discipline that spans disciplines.

Over lunch, Naz recites a personal mantra I can only imagine lies etched in thought and present in action: “no one is original, but rather you are a combined effort of everyone and everything that you came across”. I find out that Chuck Palahniuk is Naz’s favourite author, and it is unsurprising when I later discovered that this mantra can be traced to the pages of Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters. It is one of those statements that bears a paradoxical likeness, being both straightforward and complex simultaneously. It is no wonder then that questions of specifics don’t work with an identity so broad. However, Naz can be found best in his own works, like a house he calls the Cheesecake and portrait sketches of people in the MRT. Four sketches of his favourite pieces of architecture also sit with me: Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light, The Sail @ Marina Bay, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, and Toyo Ito’s Tama Art University Library. They are each admired for their clever craft and aesthetic, and I am told that the works hold values that have shaped Naz to be the student he is today and maybe also the architect he will be in the future.

Left to right: ‘Pete ‘The Who’ Townsed’, ‘Gojira’, ‘Old Lady in Train’

The conversation takes random turns and we reach an interesting quirk of Naz’s – colour-graphemic synaesthesia that relates the alphabet to colours. To him, the letter A is always red in colour, B is brown, C is blue, and the next twenty-three letters follow a fixed association to specific colours. He carries on to say that his name, Naz, takes on a dirty, blood red shade and tells me about other forms of synesthesia that exist. We also touch on travel, and Naz goes on to share about a recent architecture OCIP trip of his to Pulau Sumba in eastern Indonesia and relates some of the things that went on during that trip – the betel nut-chewing mentor they had, the woodworking skills they were taught, and the landscape of the island itself. Between now and his exchange to Munich next semester, Naz mentions that he’d like to make a trip back to visit the place and of course, the people if it were possible. Strikingly, he also seems to eye the stunning little island as the perfect retirement spot – perhaps it is fitting that after what will be a lifetime of structures and cities, the lack of it and presence of vastness and space would draw him in. I mean, where else can you find wild horses in the middle of nowhere, am I right?

I think back to the night I heard Naz on the guitar, and I hear again the impish Pink Panther theme come on, pairing itself well with Naz’s distinctive half-smirk and the odd bounce in his steps. I tell him that I know this piece of writing ends with that melody and he laughs, because that was only to check if the guitar was in tune. It’s a theme part scherzando, part con spirito and packed dense with anticipation – a mirror to Naz himself and his upcoming plans for Tembusu as marketing director.