The brief was an open-air village school, the kind held under a big tree, fitted to the shrine-cloth idiom without losing its dignity. So the tree takes the large central position a tree of life would hold, and the teacher and her little blackboard sit beneath it as the focal pair, with the children drawn in tidy cross-legged rows — slates and open books as plain flat rectangles — arranged like a row of devotees before the lesson. A hut and a potted plant ground the scene. Learning is treated here with the same reverence the tradition gives the Goddess, because a village that teaches its children is doing sacred work; and the Vaghri cloth has always ringed its centre with the doings of community life. Panels of teaching, the midday meal and household chores frame the class. Madder red, iron-black, cream, nothing more.