Lakshmi Devi

I picked up my first needle at the age of six, sitting beside my grandmother on a cracked mud floor in our village. There was no electricity most evenings. We worked by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp. She never called it art — she called it memory. Every motif had a meaning: the fish for fertility, the lotus for resilience, the running stag for the freedom she never quite had herself. I didn't understand then. I was just a child chasing patterns.

When I married at eighteen, embroidery became survival. My husband fell ill the year our second child was born, and for three years I sold kantha quilts door to door in the weekly market. Buyers would offer a tenth of what the work was worth. I remember crying over a piece that took me forty hours — it sold for eighty rupees. There were many months we ate only rice and dal. I almost stopped. But the needle felt like the only thing that was entirely mine.

Kantha is a running stitch — deceptively simple on the surface. But the density, the layering of old saris, the way colour bleeds into colour across recycled fabric — that is where forty years live. I do not sketch before I stitch. The design comes from here. My hands move from memory, muscle, and something older that I cannot name. Each piece takes between sixty and two hundred hours. The irony is that the more invisible my labour, the more beautiful the result.

My daughter has learned the craft. My granddaughter watches. Karuvya found me through a self-help group three years ago, and for the first time in my life I am being paid what the work deserves. I have a phone now — I send videos to buyers in Mumbai who want to see the making. That still feels strange and wonderful. I want people who buy my work to understand: you are not buying a product. You are holding thirty-eight years of a woman's life in your hands.