There was a small room. Images of Ma on every wall. A man I came to call uncle- Jaswant Ji Meenakar, bent over his work with the kind of quiet certainty that only comes from a lifetime of devotion to a craft.
And then the fire; before the flame was lit, before a single piece of Meenakari enamel took shape, he paused. He spoke words I have since had translated. 'Jai Mata Di.' (Victory to the mother.) Be present in this process with us, bless this process and piece.
I felt something move through me when I understood what he'd said. Not surprise, exactly. More like recognition.
Like something I already knew, remembered in my body before my mind had a chance to catch up.
I had followed a calling to India that I'd felt for a long time, something deep and insistent, connected to Shakti, to the divine feminine, to a golden thread I could feel but hadn't yet fully named. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for when I went. I don't think I was supposed to know.
What I found..felt.. embodied, in that small room, was this: that for thousands of years, across religions, across craft traditions, across continents, makers have called on something larger than themselves before they begin, as ritual, a genuine invitation. As an acknowledgement that what passes through the hands of a maker, when made with intention, carries that energy all the way through. Into the piece. Into the woman who eventually wears it.
Jaswant Ji, explained to me how different colours in the Meenakari process invoke different planets. How the colours chosen, applied with intention, create a cooling effect for the woman who wears the piece. How the making is inseparable from the meaning. How the jeweller and the wearer are connected through the work, across time.
And then he reenforced something I had known for years but fully understood in that small rool: the Meenakari work happens on the back of the piece. The side that faces inward, toward the body. The side the outside world rarely sees.
When I came home, I kept turning that over. And I started to notice something I hadn't quite let myself see before.
I have a small shrine in my studio. I watch the laser move through wood with a kind of attention that has always felt like more than just checking the machine is working. The ebbs and flows of my practice have always moved with my inner life, I've said that for years, but I said it as though it were a quirk, an apology almost for the inconsistency of a one-woman studio.
I didn't say it as what it actually is: my spiritual practice. Where what I have been making has always been inseparable from something larger than the making itself and how I see and understand myself.
I've been doing it all along. I just didn't have the name for it.
It made me think about the gold bangles placed on the wrists of Indian children. Not just as gift. As protection. As a way of saying: you are held. You are armoured. You carry something with you that the world cannot take. I think about my grandmothers' pieces that I wear on my body every day, the weight of them, the warmth of them, the sense of not being alone that comes with them. I have spoken about gold as archive, as security, as the jewellery of migrant women who carried their wealth and their stories on their bodies across borders.
But I think what I'm understanding now, more fully, is that it was never just about the gold. It was always about the intention inside it. The protection called into it before it was given. The love that travelled with it. The maker, the giver, the wearer, all held inside one small object, across time.
Craft collapses time. That is one of the truest things I know now. To sit in a lineage of making, to put your hands into a process that has been passed from father to son, from grandmother to granddaughter, for hundreds of years, is to truly move backwards and forwards at once.
I was in that room in Jaipur and I was also in my Baa's village, and I was also in my own studio, and I was also somewhere further forward than I've been yet. All at once.
I am still sitting with a lot of what India stirred in me. The collection that is forming in response to it is still becoming, I can feel its shape, its texture, its intention, even where I can't yet fully see it. And I think that's right. I think some things need to be held before they can be revealed.
What I can say is this: I will be calling on her when I make now. Consciously. Deliberately. Asking the divine feminine, whatever name you might call her, to be present in the process, to move through the material, to be carried in the piece, to land softly on the woman who one day wears it.
