She pressed the colored quartz powder between her fingers and gently, lovingly moved her hands in a practiced motion — releasing it grain by grain onto the canvas, making a design that seemed to arrive from somewhere older than thought. There was a genuine smile on her face. A song in her heart. A contentment you could feel as much in the stillness of the room as in the piece slowly taking shape before her.
This is Preeti in her element. And for a woman who carries as much as she does, these moments are stolen ones.
Preeti is a woman overflowing with creative life — an accomplished Indian classical dancer rooted in that art since childhood, a visual artist, a mother, a professional, a woman who keeps everything moving for everyone around her. Like so many women who hold that much, she has made a quiet peace with a particular bargain: the creative pulse inside her can wait its turn. The children, the career, the endless demands — those come first. She will return to herself when the world briefly asks less. She waits. And she loves the people she waits for.
But every once in a while, something reaches through and calls her back early.
"Rangoli to me," she says, "is a form of self-expression and self-evolution without words. It steps me out of my comfort zone each time and helps me practice my love for the art in its most honest form."
She learned this art the way most of us learn the things that matter most — not from lessons, but from watching. Her grandmother and her mother made rangoli* on the veranda floor at every festive occasion, every morning, in the unhurried silence that real devotion produces. Her mother, an artist herself while tending a full family life, quietly taught Preeti to layer colors, to build depth and dimension from powder alone. That knowledge settled into her hands long before she understood what she was carrying.
When I shared the Lana print with her, something shifted.
Lana is named for Svetlana — a woman who moved through considerable shadow before she fully claimed her own light. Her story doesn't announce itself loudly, but it lands somewhere deep. The print carries that same quality: lush florals in teal and blush, generous and unhurried, the kind of pattern that opens rather than demands. Preeti felt it immediately — not just the beauty of the print, but the woman beneath it. The resilience. The long, patient journey toward color. And she asked if she could translate it. Translate it, into the language she knows most honestly.
What came back was a sketchbook full of quiet thinking first — an enlarged motif here, a note about fabric and color there, a small sketched figure of a woman mid-movement wrapped in cloth. And then the piece itself, worked layer by layer in rust and deep green and a pink that arrived last like a long-held breath finally released.
She called it Becoming.
"As the quartz powder flows across my canvas," she says, "highlighting some layers and hiding others — it enables me to tell stories that wish to live fearlessly in the light."
When I saw it for the first time, I was stopped.
Not just by the beauty of it — though it was more beautiful than I had imagined rangoli could be, more dimensional, more alive. What stopped me was something else. Something about knowing Preeti. I have seen her dance, and she is extraordinary — her whole body becomes the feeling she is trying to express. And now this. As if there is something inside her that simply cannot stop finding ways to come forward, to speak, to make itself known. A creative force that flows through every form available to it and asks only to be let out.
And standing there looking at her work, I felt something tighten in my chest.
Because how much of this beauty — in her, in women like her — stays locked away? How much gets folded up quietly, told to wait, told it can come later, after the children are settled and the career is managed and everyone else has what they need? Women carry so much creative energy by nature. It runs through them like a current. And so often, the current gets dammed — not from lack of love for what's waiting downstream, but simply from the weight of everything that needs tending first.
It felt like a small injustice. And it felt like a reminder.
This collaboration, at its heart, is a story told by three women.
Svetlana, whose journey from shadow into her own light became the seed of this print. Me, who felt her story so completely that I had to give it color and cotton and a name. And Preeti, who received that story, recognized something of herself in it, and gave it yet another form — powder pressed by practiced hands onto a canvas, layer by layer, until it became something whole.
Three women. Three mediums. One arc.
And underneath all of it, the same quiet truth: most of what matters gets made in the in-between moments, by women who love fiercely and also refuse, in some necessary part of themselves, to stop creating. Two minutes at a canvas between everything the day asks of you. An outline slowly filling with color. A self, quietly insisting on being expressed.
This is what Paisley Affair is about. Not garments. Not even craft. But the women who carry beauty inside them — and the reminder, as often as it takes, that the current doesn't have to wait forever.
The Lana collection is at the link here. And beside it, quietly and with full conviction — Becoming.
* Rangoli is one of India's oldest art forms — colored powder arranged onto a surface in patterns that carry centuries of storytelling, tradition, and meaning. Traditionally created on the floor at the entrance of homes and temples, each piece is impermanent by design: made to be seen, then swept away. Preeti works in colored quartz powder on canvas, so her stories can hold their light a little longer.
Artwork by Preeti · @vatsala_arts_rangoli