The brief was to paint the Gahirmatha arribada — one of the planet's great turtle gatherings — without losing the calm that patta does best. Register-bands gave the turtles room to march upward in loose rows, each one a flat profile shell-motif rather than a photographic animal, so the eye reads the multitude as pattern. We set the sea as a single indigo band of scalloped waves under a conch-white moon, and put just three forest officials behind a rail at the corner, because the truer story now is the watching and the protecting. One large turtle at the lower centre anchors the scale; the egg-clutches in their pits tell you why they came.