I have crossed paths with Mrs Puri in New York and later at parties in Delhi. We never became close or spoke at length, but I have always admired her grace and elegance, draped in a sari. My earliest foray into art, colour and India in all its plurality was through the sari. In the pleats, folds and chunnat of my mother’s sari, I found a safe cocoon, a small haven. I would hide and think: if I cannot see the world, perhaps the world cannot see me.

Yet I knew what it saw—the beauty and majesty of the sari. Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri’s The Sari Eternal brought that child back to me. Her book, too, begins with a mother’s sari: refuge, memory, inheritance.

Puri’s mother, Malati, presses the edge of a red-and-white Kanjivaram against her little daughter’s wounded forehead. The cloth staunches the blood; its stain becomes a keepsake. It is a tender scene, never sugary, and the book’s first abiding image.…