01
Stop one
Tsuklakhang Royal Chapel
Yonex Ezone 115 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Kings first, briefly, since somebody always asks. The Namgyal line ruled Sikkim from 1642, Gangtok became the capital in 1894, coronations and weddings happened in this room in the grounds of the Chogyals' former palace, and in 1975 Sikkim merged into India and the monarchy ceased. Fine. Now the actual building. Look at the eaves — that overhang is not decoration, it is rainfall management, and in the eastern Himalaya rainfall management is the entire brief. Timber frame, deep roof, the loads walked down through posts rather than through the walls, which is exactly why the walls are free to carry paint instead of weight. That is a good trade. The murals in here are exquisite and criminally under-visited, and they survive because the roof does its job. Every painting you have ever loved was saved by a gutter.
02
Stop two
Namgyal Institute of Tibetology
Yonex Ezone 115 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Opened in 1958 by Nehru, and it holds one of the world's great collections of Tibetan manuscripts, thangkas and ritual objects outside Tibet itself. But consider what a manuscript store actually is, as a machine: it is a humidity problem in a monsoon climate. Thick masonry, small openings, deep painted eaves again, and a wooded compound below the Ridge giving shade and steady air — those trees are part of the specification whether anyone ever wrote them down or not. This is a building whose entire function is to keep the inside boring. Same temperature, same moisture, decade after decade. Unexciting is the highest achievement available to architecture. I am genuinely moved, and I have managed it without mentioning a single lama.
03
Stop three
Rumtek Monastery
Yonex Ezone 115 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Twenty-four kilometres, on roads I would very much like to discuss with somebody's highway department. The original foundation on this ridge is eighteenth century; the great gilded-roofed complex you are looking at was raised in the 1960s by the sixteenth Karmapa after he left Tibet in 1959, and it was built deliberately to echo his seat at Tsurphu, which he had been obliged to leave behind. Now that is a construction problem I respect enormously: reproduce a building from memory, at a different altitude, on different geology, with different timber and different masons, and have it read as the same building. Proportion carried across a mountain range inside somebody's head. The golden stupa in the upper chamber is not shown to everyone, and the upper chamber is also where the load concentrates. Both true; only one of them is my department.
04
Stop four
M.G. Marg
Yonex Ezone 115 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: No motor vehicles. None. Closed to them entirely, and I want you to appreciate this as a structural decision rather than a moral one. Take traffic off a street and you have removed the dominant dynamic load, the vibration, the exhaust that eats render off a facade, and the whole width previously surrendered to turning circles. What you get back is surface: benches, paving, people walking down the middle of the carriageway in the evening. No litter either, and no spitting, and both of those are enforced. A street is a horizontal structure with a specified use, and this is the only one I have ever walked down where somebody actually wrote the specification. Faultless. I could stand here all afternoon and look at the drainage.
I cut the block, I ink it, and then I hand the whole thing to the wind. That is the arrangement. I am 115 square inches of head, 250 grams unstrung, a 16×18 pattern, 27.5 inches long, balance out at 360 millimetres, stiffness around 66. Enormous face, almost no weight, and everything pushed toward the tip so that the frame carries itself through the ball while you merely aim it.
That is a gift rather than a compromise. It carries everywhere from a tired shoulder to a doubles partner who wants one more season, and by the way, it suits a hill town: the courts in Gangtok are not level, the air is thin and clear, and a light head arrives without your having to plant properly first.
Gangtok is a printer's kind of place. A small Himalayan capital that decided rather earlier than most that a library is a form of insurance, banned cars from its main street, and keeps enforcing it. Prayer flags are printed knowing they will fade; the point is the sending, not the keeping. Gangtok understood that centuries ago and simply carried on. A racquet built at 250 grams is the same faith in motion over mass.
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