It started in my mother’s cupboard—with sarees whose beginnings I could never quite trace and colours that felt more like stories than anything real. My grandmothers kept their eri silk shawls carefully folded in drawers, saved for the one moment worthy of wearing them.

Growing up in Northeast India, none of it felt entirely mine. I did not always feel connected to my Indian identity. I simply noticed clothes before anything else about a person—their colour, their texture, and the quiet stories they seemed to carry.

Then I stood before the Lotus Gate in Jaipur, and something shifted. Every carved petal had been created with complete conviction—beauty as a necessity, not merely decoration. It reminded me of my mother’s sarees and my grandmothers’ shawls. From there, I found myself drawn into temple carvings, Mughal miniatures, museums across Bombay, and the vastness of Indian art and design. In discovering all of it, I began discovering my Indian self too.

East Kala was born from that journey. Most of our embroidered pieces begin as my paintings, then become hand-drawn embroidery maps before travelling to skilled craftspeople across India. Weeks, and sometimes a month, of someone’s life go into transforming each idea into something you can wear.

That is the story behind East Kala—a full wardrobe for women rediscovering their Indian self. A wardrobe stitched from the stories we grew up in.