The brief was to let the lion do the heavy lifting: draw the beast big enough to anchor the whole middle field so the eight-armed Mother reads as commanding the instant you look up. She sits side-saddle, weapons fanned in a clean arc around the haloed crown, while the lion strides left with its mane built from flame-like black-and-red locks — the lion is the vahana of Amba and the warrior Mother-forms of Gujarat, so the mount itself names her. Around the centre I kept a calm grid of about ten panels — musicians, pot-carriers, lamp-bearers, a small shrine — rather than a dense crowd, because the Vaghri (Devipujak) painters of Ahmedabad, long kept out of temple sanctums, built these cloths as portable shrines where the eye should be able to rest and pray. The floral-vine woodblock border closes the field like the edge of that travelling sanctuary, and the whole thing holds to madder red and iron-black on cream, because the three-tone natural-dye limit is the discipline that makes it shrine cloth and not décor.