The brief was to paint Boita Bandana, the Kartik Purnima ritual where Odias float little lamp-boats to honour the ancient sea-traders who once sailed from Kalinga, and to keep both the tenderness and the line. So we knelt a mother and two children at a stepped bank in profile, each lowering a boita to the water, and drew the boats as flat scallop hulls each cupping a single haritala flame. The river is built from rows of conch-white wave scrolls, the Jagannath temple skyline reduced to flat white spires with flags across the water, a rising sun and birds lifted from the classical vocabulary. The deep red ground gives the dawn its glow. We refused the photographic crowd of a real ghat; one small family and three drifting lamps carry the whole festival — memory set afloat, in the Odisha line.