The brief was to let the footprints carry the whole story and keep everything else in service to them: one mirrored pair of soles stepping toward the viewer, a crowning lotus above and a kalash below to mark the path, and side columns that repeat rather than crowd. We held the fill to roughly half so the geru ground reads as a freshly smeared floor, the way a Kumaoni woman leaves breathing space around the charan she draws at Diwali dawn. In Kumaon these footprints are Lakshmi's own, walked in from the threshold toward the household shrine to bring prosperity across the doorstep — so the toes face inward on purpose, never out. The little lotus tucked into each sole is the old shorthand for the goddess's tread. White biswar on geru, no third colour, the discipline that separates this from multicolour Mithila work.