The brief was to bring the Rann salt pans — the gridded flats of the Agariya salt-makers — into a tradition that refuses perspective. The answer was to let the cloth do the work: the pans become a flat grid of iron-black-edged rectangles across the lower field, and the salt mounds are simply the undyed cream of the cotton left bare, so the whiteness of the salt is the ground showing through rather than a painted colour. Above the labour I seated the four-armed Mother on her crocodile — the vahana of Khodiyar, the Goddess of water and rivers — because she is the fitting protector of people who work the water and the salt-edge of the land. The Agariya families spend the season camped on the flats raking and harvesting; the Vaghri shrine cloth has always honoured exactly such labour. Panels of musicians and salt-carriers ring it. Madder red, iron-black, cream — and here the cream is literally the salt.