The brief was to paint the courtyard kitchen the way an Odia household actually runs it on a feast day — two women working a single hearth in rhythm — without turning it into a busy genre scene. Twin-mirror symmetry solved that: one cook rolls pitha, the other stirs the pot, and the eye reads them as a pair rather than a crowd. We let the smoke do the centring, one confident sankha-white curl climbing to the hanging bell instead of naturalistic vapour, because patta wants a shape, not a haze. The child sneaking a sweet at the bottom is the human aside that keeps the whole thing warm.