I Didn’t Know What I Was Doing, Until I Was Doing It

I had been working on the crab lace piece for months. I reached a point where I no longer knew whether it was finished, and when that happens, I put the piece away.

I turned to something else I’d been meaning to start — perhaps another piece for the co-creation series, which now has four. While looking for fabrics, I came across some digitally printed cotton panels of shell photographs I’d taken years ago — enlarged fragments in which the shells’ patterns become almost abstract.

I don’t know why they caught my eye, or what I meant to do with them. There was just an internal nudge, and I followed it.

What has always interested me about shells is that their pattern isn’t decoration applied to a finished surface. The shell is built incrementally, by the mollusc’s mantle, which secretes new material and pigment at the growing edge. Research suggests this growth is under neurosecretory control — neural activity shaping the secretory cells as each increment is laid down. The pattern accumulates over the animal’s life, recording a history in the shell itself, and it can keep changing as the animal grows or as conditions around it shift. Pigmentation is inherited, but its expression is shaped by environment.

This is what first made the shell compelling to me as an analogue for psychological patterning: something built over time through an interaction of what is inherited and what is lived, leaving a visible record. In a person, that record isn’t visible on the body. The shell gave me a way to imagine what it might look like if it were.

When I have fabric printed, I usually order two or three copies, so I can layer and play with them. I began by placing two identical prints together over two layers of cotton markeen, the fabric usually used for lining furnishings. I stitched through all four layers with running stitch, pulling the thread so the surface puckered and became tactile, following the ridges of the shell to deepen their indentation.

When I stopped to look at what I’d done, I thought: what am I doing? What is the stitch adding to what the shell is already saying? It didn’t sit right. The pattern felt too bold, too blunt, too exposed.

This became one of those pieces where I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t illustrating an idea — I was working intuitively, letting something pull me along and following it anyway.

I took a piece of silk organza — not plain, but woven with self-checks, which let me pull out warp and weft threads. I began disturbing the fabric, pulling threads loose, tearing it, and laid it over the shell. I liked the effect, but now the organza was eclipsing the shell entirely. Again: what am I doing? I went with it anyway.

I cut away parts of the organza so some areas of the shell were fully exposed and others stayed veiled. Then I took thicker threads — crochet cotton, wool, whatever I had in the right gauge, in colours drawn from the shell — and couched them along the ridges still visible.

This was layered over the running stitch I had already spent a day doing. For a while I wondered whether that work had simply disappeared beneath the organza. But the quilted texture underneath remained perceptible. Something I could no longer fully see was still affecting the surface, giving it a depth no flat print could have.

I began working over the exposed areas with a crazy cross-stitch — straight stitches placed in an ad hoc way, the thread used almost like paint, building colour in layers. A black area, looked at closely, is never simply black: there’s maroon in it, violet, dark brown, rust, a daub of grey. It took me back to my college days in Delhi, learning watercolour, learning to see the many hues folded into a single colour — a blue inside a green, a pink inside a green. That way of seeing has stayed with me.

But working the cross-stitch over what was already exposed felt redundant — why stitch what I could already see?

So I moved to the areas where the shell was only partly visible through the organza, drawing out fragments of colour and pattern I could barely make out beneath it. I wasn’t reproducing the shell. I was choosing: intensifying some areas, leaving others alone, letting the stitches start large and taper down to something close to seed stitch.

I photographed the piece as it changed. At one point I looked at it and thought: this is like a frame grab from a video. I had somehow grabbed a state of mind.

I had begun with the shell’s pattern already in mind as an analogue for our own psychological patterning — the inherited and learned responses that shape how we react to others, mostly invisible to us until we look. But something else was happening now. The pattern was still there, but no longer whole. A veil had fallen over it, and the veil itself had been torn — some parts of what lay beneath fully visible, some partly, some almost entirely hidden.

I began to see the piece differently: less an illustration of psychological pattern, more a rendering of what it feels like to look at oneself.

The usual explanation — that we repeat our early family dynamics in later relationships — never fully convinced me. It felt too tidy, a category. Life and living are more complex than that —— with many more shades of grey than that suggested framework allows for.

What emerged instead, through the stitching rather than through thinking it out in advance, was something more specific: less about who I was drawn to, more about how I behaved once a relationship had taken hold — the adapting, the allowances, the doubting of my own read on things. That recognition arrived through the making, not before it.

This matters to me because of what it says about how I work. I don’t always begin with an idea and give it form. Sometimes the making does the thinking — shifting the question, showing me a distinction I hadn’t had words for, or revealing that the pattern I’d been taught to look for wasn’t the one actually operating.

We excavate our patterns through experience, often through pain, and come to recognise certain tendencies and where they might have come from. But that awareness doesn’t hand us a complete picture. The veils don’t lift and vanish — they stay, shattered, along with the sense of self we carried before we saw them at all. There is a loss in that seeing too: perhaps of innocence, perhaps that sense of self we were accustomed to. A knowing that was challenged.

Some things become clear. Some we only glimpse. Some we choose to look at directly; others we leave alone.

What I’d made, perhaps, was an image of that: the pattern underneath, the shattered and provisional self, what pain and experience bring into view, and what stays concealed — all present at once, none of it resolved — if it ever can be!

Understanding a pattern doesn’t free you from it. Awareness doesn’t guarantee you’ll recognise it in the moment, or choose differently the next time. We live with what we’ve discovered about ourselves, and with what stays hidden, and with the shattered veils through which we see both.

The piece is still evolving. So, probably, is my understanding of it.

Because I’d started thinking of it as a frame grab, a captured moment, it seemed to need an edge — something to hold it. I began a cross-stitch border on 14 count Aida matte that I’d attached to the original fabric. I haven’t decided how it will end up — even on all four sides or not. But as I worked it, the idea of a border opened out further than simply extending the colours of the shell into the border area.

Borders have been part of my visual vocabulary for years, particularly through designing sarees, where a border is never an afterthought — it has a fundamental relationship with the field it contains.

 I’ve also been drawn to the hashiya in Mughal painting, the margin surrounding the central image, which could carry its own imagery, ornament, calligraphy, or poetry. It didn’t just frame the painting. It ran alongside it, sometimes echoing the centre, or opening a separate layer of meaning entirely — a parallel dialogue. This in particular appealed to me for this piece.

I thought that if the central field holds the visible and obscured pattern, the torn veil, the excavation and the partial seeing, then perhaps the border could carry something else.

I began thinking about words.  They may not describe the image directly, but would  belong  to the same psychological terrain. Repeated around the edge, I visualised them as a pattern with their own meanings. I envisaged them almost disguised and hidden within colours — the pigmentation of the shell fragment that I was extending into the border. 

A border that would no longer simply contain the work. It would carry a parallel dialogue with what the work had revealed to me.

 

 

Mind Replays While Tacking

It's almost four in the afternoon. It's been a strange kind of day. Rain, no rain.

As I awoke to the day, looking out of the window, I noticed how serene it looked. So innocent—as if the cloud and the fronds of the palm leaf were cradled in a baby blue crib.

Then, as the day progressed I had to dress my wound. I'd burnt my hand three days ago while cooking. I wasn't exactly careless, but I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that the lip of the new saucepan is a little tricky— doesn't pour neatly—spills and splashes—most annoying.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I pouring hot soup into the mixie, I burnt the top of  my left hand. A very, very severe burn. After seeing the skin wither and peel off with pus beginning to rise,  I had to go to  a nearby primary healthcare center. They gave  me an injection for the pain, some antibiotics and painkillers. I was yelping in pain. It was really bad—terrible!

I couldn’t stitch for a few days because any movement of the left hand, disturbed the dressing, which in turn aggravated the wound.

It was uncomfortable and I couldn’t help but think how people can inflict this on anybody else, but more than that, how do people self-immolate? I remembered the protests against the Mandal Commission and those students in Delhi setting themselves on fire. I didn’t witness it myself, but newspaper images of young men flailing—their bodies aflame—aren’t easy to forget. I don’t know why my mind went there, but it did. We read about bride burning and such things and it’s awful, but burning my own hand this way made these images come alive as never before.

I'm now working on this piece—tentatively called Crab Lace. I've been doing it for a long time and it's taking forever because a lot of tacking work has to be done between the five layers of fabric before I can begin any embroidery. Tacking isn’t something that makes me think too much about what I’m doing. My mind starts replaying all that I have read/heard etc. 

There’s the war in Iran—neither war nor peace, a supposed ceasefire that's not. Glancing at the NYT headlines, disturbed the serenity of the day and what I’d been observing about the weather. Making me think that,  I have the luxury of these gentle moments, even the observations I make about my stitching. Those in war strife zones are striving for basic survival. It seems unfair.

The stitching piece  is inspired by the way the crabs feed off the debris on the beach and in effect clean it for us. Perhaps that’s something we could do for ourselves. Chew on those moments of grief, of pain, of discomfort—digest them.

Now, I have  a knot.  Most uncomfortable. I'm inserting the tip of my needle into the core of the knot, but it is so tight I can't get needle-point into it. If I could, I'd be able to wrestle with it and open it out. It's so tight and so small, I probably need a magnifying glass.

Recently I got news that two of my friends have been diagnosed with cancer. It’s troubling me. My father had cancer and I know what it did to him—to all of us. I know it was decades ago and medicine has made significant advances—but those memories don’t just go away.

I'm holding the thread in my left hand—the burnt hand—it still stings a bit. Between thumb. and index finger, assisted by the second finger, I’ve pulled it taut so that I can try and find the space to inset the needle point to loosen the knot. I'm doing a lot of guesswork because I can’t really see the gap in the threads that have knotted. I have a really fine needle, but maybe I can get a finer one.

Okay, so I've got the finer needle into it. The knot is moving. Now the question is whether I can open it all the way through—unravel the threads to resume stitching.

And I have.
It is so satisfying when you can open a knot.

To me, this  likens  to the wound sitting inside us— things that are knotting in our stomach—the acidity and tension. If you can just release it, it is does indeed lend a sense of satisfaction, doesn’t it?

I like the parallel of the crab digesting its food with us digesting our emotions and cleaning up the environment so that subconscious actions don’t create a stench. Rolling bits of sand in its mouth—then rolling it out into minute balls of sand —moving out of its burrow radially and depositing the feeding residue like sand-lace. It’s a  beautiful image that allows me to think there can be, that there is beauty in dealing with our feelings and emotions. The healer in me wants to believe that we can lessen our body suffering if we pay more attention to what's going on in the mind.

Perhaps I've cultivated that kind of sensitivity. Perhaps that's the kind of person I am. It’s certainly the direction my life has taken. It’s arduous, it tedious—much like the labour of the minuscule sand bubbler crab—especially given its size—its  persistence and ardour are memorable. 

I see a lot—both a blessing and a curse. Noticing minute details of life around me. Getting easily stimulated. I can be sitting in my room just drinking water and I will notice the sky. Noting changes in the colour, clouds,  how the shadow travels among the leaves and how delectable that vision is—between filling glasses, between sips. 

And then the mind goes to those who live in war-strife zone. These countries, people living in that region  don't have that luxury. But doesn't that make my capacity  all the more pertinent?

Art is made in all sorts of spaces—in many ways that range from being guttural and spontaneous—responsive in a direct way to subtler visuals. The kind of art that I make is slow and can get quite tedious. The immediacy of expression isn’t possible. Even though the impetus to start something is. But Crab lace—the piece I’m presently working on—it’s more about what the crabs do that inspires me than something I’m feeling aggrieved about.

I’ve been  stitching the layers for months. I’m trying to re-create my own version of the patterns I find on the beach. Evoking the kind of residue that emerges once I’ve been through the emotional vortex—what remains. Sometimes I don't want to come and stitch. It's so tedious. It's not giving me a moment of discovery. It's not challenging me technically. It's not challenging me emotionally. It’s just about tacking and more tacking.

And then I talk myself through it, as I am doing now. I've got the audio on my phone on.  And I'm just talking through the stitching so that the moment is as real as it is.

I am processing like the crabs do.

The zigzag stitches from underneath, which I'm not trying to cover, are a subtle expression of the way the mind does work. So many thoughts, so much that comes up when there is a little space from insta, news, fb and the rest of it. 

I've come to the end of my thread, so I'm cutting the tail after I’ve done  two or three repeated stitches in the same place, and then through those two or three threads, I take the needle and and thread out—hopefully it will not come undone. And quite frankly, the kind of piece I am stitching, if it does come undone, it might very well be more evocative than perfect stitching.

I think of my mother who suffered such a great deal with severe osteoarthritis and Parkinson's. For the last two years of her life, she was fed by a tube. She’d beg us for taste of aam papad, coke, chocolate or tea and mangoes. A lick was all she was allowed. I often wonder if she’d paid greater attention to her emotional wounds that her body wouldn’t have had to take on so much suffering. There’s no scientific proof for this, but I think about it all the time. 

I wake each morning wanting to know what I'm feeling. I journal to understand that feeling. Sometimes I have weird dreams and then I write them out, wondering what my subconscious mind is telling me.  Then I’m distracted by a dark-skinned man climbing up my neighbours coconut tree and I lose the thread. Mind screams overload. Is it because I’ve sensitised myself to the subtler dimensions of being, or is this the way it is with all of us—perhaps not consciously?

The world gets uncomfortable with pain. It wants people to move on. But grief doesn't work like that.

As I sip some elaichi chai, the mug I'm drinking from was painted by my school friend Punchie. She paints these mugs with Hopi style, North American—Indian inspired black-and-white designs. As I savour my tea, I think of her:
She recently lost her mother.

Even though I lost my own mother ten months ago, and we didn't have a particularly close relationship, all kinds of wounds continue to surface. Grieving is something you cannot put a timeline on.

Sometimes the thinking and feelings that come up while stitching gets  so intense that I have to get up after half an hour, or even after ten minutes of stitching. I just need a break from it. From the emotional vortex, from focus on both this and the stitching at hand.

I may put on some TV, but honestly that doesn’t really stop the undertow of thoughts—just helps me keep going. And then later at night, I lie awake with what’s bothering me . 

Material Memory

The work on my third co-creation piece continues. I have been doing a great deal of couching with 6ply gold thread or Zari. As I was couching around a particularly unregulated space, the process became uncomfortable. Moving along the uneven threads of a knitted piece that I had cut and placed into the work— threads I had earlier couched, or tacked— the surface was uneven. The lines moved up and down, curved inward, then rose again, at one point I was couching a strand of 6ply zari around a single strand of 2/30’s cotton. Needless to say, it was a taxing stitching experience

The intense presence required of me to focus so completely on the thread I was couching with and the six-ply Zari itself—brought several thoughts to mind.

One was how much we take for granted the work we see around us. Zardozi work does not refer to couching at all. It is simply called sui ka kaam. The work is intricate, often impossibly complex, and yet one cannot truly understand what it entails unless engaged in doing it oneself. Even when I am couching the 6ply gold thread in straight lines, a seemingly simple task, I find that my couching stitches are not at regular intervals.

Part of the difficulty is visual. I work with a lot of electric light focussed on the work. The gold of the sari shines back at me. The couching thread itself is dyed yellow. Between the two, visibility is compromised. I am also not bent over an adda like the craftsmen are. I sit back on my sofa, sometimes working at a table, and at this point with the fabric resting on my lap, supported by a cutting mat underneath for stability.

I am acutely aware that I do not work the way traditional craftsmen do. They sit on the floor, cross-legged, bent forward over an adda, the body trained into a posture that brings eye, hand, and cloth into a fixed and intimate relationship. I cannot sit like that. My body does not allow it. I work seated on a couch or a chair, adapting the surface to my lap or a table, stabilising the fabric as best I can. This difference in posture is not incidental. It affects visibility, control, rhythm, and endurance. What the craftsman achieves through a lifelong bodily discipline, I mediate through adjustment and compensation.

What is at work here is physical negotiation. The hand is constantly adjusting to uneven tension, to the glare of gold against yellow thread, to limited visibility. It compensates for posture, and it stabilises the work with whatever is at hand. These are not conceptual decisions. They are moment-to-moment bodily responses. The intelligence involved is motor, accumulated through doing, refined through repetition and resistance.

Much of what happens in this work is decided before it can be named. The hand adjusts, compensates, responds. Thought follows action, not the other way around. The hand carries its own intelligence, shaped by repetition, resistance, and material encounter.

All of this made me acutely aware of the importance of skill, and of how skill is acquired across generations. The level of perfection achieved by traditional craftsmen comes from beginning very young, often at the age of fourteen or even earlier, with nimble fingers trained through repetition. This led me to think about the histories that precede and influence us. How did this gold thread come into being? Who invented it? Who first thought of turning metal into thread?

Historically, gold thread is believed to have originated in China, where thin sheets of gold were beaten into leaf, cut into fine strips, and wrapped around a core of silk. In Chinese practice, paper too was transformed into textile material. What was known as zhi bu—literally paper cloth—referred to paper that was strengthened, coated, sometimes laminated with metal leaf, and then cut into narrow strips to function like thread.

I remember visiting the artisanal district of Nishijin in Kyoto, where I saw this process continued in Japan as Shifu, which uses the same characters and means the same thing: paper cloth. Gold leaf was meticulously laid onto paper, then hung vertically beneath the boards of the atelier to dry so that no dust could settle on it. Once dry, it was cut into extremely fine strips. By the 1980’s, Japan had computerized looms producing elaborate designs for obis and kimonos, yet the gold thread itself—the Shifu—was still inserted by hand. As techniques travelled from China to Japan, pronunciation may have shifted, but the material logic endured: paper becoming textile, metal becoming thread.

Although gold thread is used extensively in India today, it did not originate here. The word Zari itself is Persian, derived from zar, meaning gold. From China, this material knowledge travelled westward along trade routes into Central Asia and Persia, carried not only as finished textiles but as technique. In these regions, where metalworking traditions were already highly developed, gold thread gained technical refinement and symbolic importance, becoming integral to court dress, ceremonial garments, and religious textiles. 

India has always worn gold—often heavily, abundantly, and with deep ritual meaning. Gold jewellery has been central to bodily adornment, temple wealth, marriage, fertility, and lineage. Necklaces, bangles, anklets, waist belts, nose rings—gold sits directly on the body in Indian culture, in intimate contact with skin. In ancient times, there was no cultural hesitation about wearing gold as metal.

What did not emerge in India, however, was the widespread transformation of gold into thread as a dominant textile material. This distinction has less to do with aesthetic preference and more to do with climate, clothing structure, and where status was displayed.

In the Indian subcontinent, the hot and humid climate favoured minimal, draped, breathable garments—saris, dhotis, and uncut lengths of cloth. The body remained the primary site of ornamentation. Gold worn as metal remained visible and effective. Heavy surface embroidery with metal thread would have weighed cloth down and interfered with fluidity and drape. Decoration therefore emerged through weaving, borders, pallavs, dye, and pattern rather than through dense metal-thread embroidery. Today, these factors are overridden by things like air-conditioning and heating of our lived spaces. 

In contrast, in West and Central Asia and the Middle East, layered garments evolved out of environmental and social necessity. Desert regions are marked by extremes of heat and cold, abrasive winds, and dust, and many societies were nomadic or semi-nomadic, constantly moving across terrain. Clothing functioned as protection and portable shelter. Over time, layered robes, coats, and structured garments also became associated with dignity, authority, and public modesty. As the body became increasingly covered, jewellery worn directly on the skin lost its visibility and practical relevance. Status therefore migrated onto the garment itself. For wealth and power to remain legible, gold had to enter cloth. It is in this context that gold thread gained both technical importance and symbolic force, becoming integral to courtly, ceremonial, and religious textiles.

These regions also possessed long-standing metalworking traditions—wire drawing, filigree, armour making—which made the transition from metal to wire to wrapped thread technically continuous. Through trade, migration, and court patronage, this material intelligence travelled into the Indian subcontinent, where gold thread was absorbed, adapted, and eventually refined within local practices, gaining extraordinary prominence in ceremonial embroidery.

What is interesting is that contemporary Zari behaves very differently from older forms. Today, Zari can pierce fabric, allowing it to be used for stitches such as stem stitch or satin stitch, not only for couching. This is not a very recent development. I have seen ecclesiastical embroideries in the Museum of Christian Art in Goa where Zari is used in satin stitch rather than laid on the surface.

We also have Dabka, the purled gold wire, which is a different material altogether. Today, Dabka is made from copper or aluminium wire coated with a gold-coloured finish. Modern Zari itself is produced through a fascinating industrial process, where a microscopically thin layer of metal is vacuum-deposited onto a polyester film called Mylar. This metallised film is then cut into fine strips and wrapped around a core thread, creating the illusion of metal while remaining light enough to pass through fabric—an extraordinary convergence of ancient visual language and modern material science.

The other moment that struck me came when I turned the fabric over to secure the thread at the back. Looking at the reverse—the unregulated, overlapping stitches in dyed yellow thread that allows me to couch the zari onto the surface without being overtly visible,  something shifted. What surfaced in that moment was the memory of my wedding lehenga—the weight of it, the labour embedded in it, the unseen back of the work. I cannot fathom why the back and not the zari itself brought to mind the peach-saffron lehenga—perhaps the underside was evocative of traditional Zardozi work more than my contemporary rendition. 

It made me think about how history and memory move together, how they converge into what we are doing today, who we are today. And it brought me back, very clearly, to the essence of this piece—what I call co-creation.

Nothing arises in us without history, conditioning, precedent and our own sense of being human.

The Hand, the Stitch, the History

The Hand Remembers

Thursday 18th December 2025

Today was quite a busy day after about 10 days  have actually managed to do yoga. The viral infection really took the wind out of my sails. Anyway, it's good to be getting back into form slowly. Then there was cooking to be done and I had to drive to Mapusa to get some stuff, bought veggies on the way back. So, by the time it came down to do any stitching it was past 6:00pm. I continued to work a with the split stitch.  I noticed a funny thing today. While I was driving back, planning my stitching sting for the evening.  I thought of how strained my eyes were yesterday. Maybe my eyesight is getting weaker  or the rough texture of torn and shredded white organza was creating problem. It’s hard to tell.

So I thought that I'd do the cheat way you know—of doing split stitch. Make the stitch and then pierce the two twists of the single floss from above. It’s much easier. Only difference is that you get a stem stitch texture at the back. 

I kept trying to do this but my hand was habituated to bringing the needle in the other way and then take it out through the thread make the stitch and then go back halfway and then take it out through the thread and it just insisted on doing that so finally I gave in. And have finished the area I had been trying to complete over the past few days.

Nobody can really identify how the stitch was done but I thought it was uncanny that the hand has such a strong sense of memory of how things should be done

What I was encountering is something the craft theorists call procedural memory — the kind of knowing that lives in the body rather than the mind. Where years of repetition have trained the hand to move in a particular way, and therefore it resisted the shortcut. The hand remembered and insisted on doing the split stitch the right way —no shortcuts!

 

Split Stitch

28th December 2025

I’ve been thinking about how split stitch came into my stitch vocabulary. It isn’t something I was taught, it is something I was curious to learn and taught myself. The split stitch (a form of back stitch) is one of the basic embroidery stitches, visually resembling a small compact chain stitch, but with a narrower and flatter appearance. It's an easy stitch to work and is especially useful when stitching around tight curves. It is this factor that attracted me and once I had learnt it, I also loved the flat surface it gave. Far cleaner than either satin stitch or stem stitch. It was also more forgiving — I hate using the hoop, and when the fabric is layered like the current piece, it does the job without puckers etc.  The split stitch is also known as the Kensington outline, split back, and opus anglicanum.

 

Coptic linen panels (belonging to the ancient Christian Church of Egypt) from the 7th and 8th centuries were embroidered in straight, satin and split stitches. The split stitch was extensively used by English embroiderers in opus anglicanum needlework (opus anglicanum - Latin for

‘English work’ refers to English medieval ecclesiastical embroidery, coined in the 13th century to describe the highly-prized and luxurious

embroideries made in England of silk and gold and silver thread, teeming with elaborate imagery.

 

In some of these embroideries, the entire surface of the cloth is

embroidered with images of saints and prophets worked in stem and split stitches, with the remaining fabric surface covered with couched gold thread.

 

Opus Anglicanum was done mainly for the purpose of the rich and powerful churches of the medieval ages with expensive materials such as fine silk and gold threads and was labor-intensive as well, making the garments very expensive. So much so, that it went on to become a status symbol for the religious leaders and royalties.

 

Curiously, when I spent some time at the Museum of Christian Art in Goa, looking at church vestments, I found no trace of split stitch in any of the ecclesiastical garments in their collection. Instead there was greater usage of Persian techniques and Zari with some bold satin stitch.

I’m still researching the influences that led the Franciscan churches in Goa, away from European traditions, to embrace a whole new way of embellishing church vestments.