Every festive season, long before the guests arrive, the Indian home begins to change. Marigolds climb the doorframe, brass is polished to a glow, and lamps find their way into every quiet corner. This is a portrait of a home being loved out loud.

The flowers inlaid into that marble would remain in perpetual bloom, a small, exact description of what the technique actually achieves: a living, seasonal image, fixed by the hardest material available into a permanence no real flower could survive.

What makes the tribute land as more than sentiment, though, is the legacy Malhotra brings to it, because he has spent a meaningful part of his career already doing, structurally, what Maa now does symbolically.