DESIGN BRIEF: Kachni Madhubani earns its name from the line — if the spiral reads as flat clipart vines, the panel loses the Kayastha discipline that made Ranti village panels famous for hatch-over-fill restraint. Radial-mandala symmetry solves the layout problem: clockwise tendril rings share a single bindu nucleus so every leaf segment mirrors the last in parallel hatch grammar, the way a Kachni border repeats around a Kohbar wedding wall without breaking rhythm. I chose spiral over straight vertical bamboo because the catalog brief asked for growth and continuity — a vine that returns to its own centre reads as lifecycle, not decoration. Corner birds and fish are not filler; they are the four-direction guardians standard in Mithila folk panels — messengers above, abundance below, all facing inward so the protective ring does not float empty. The outer lotus border band anchors the piece in classical ritual frame vocabulary without importing full Kohbar narrative. Indigo accent stays disciplined — three pigments plus cream — because authentic Kachni often built depth from line density alone before colour blocks arrived.