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.

A 12th century mason at Hangal had a chisel, a soft stone, and evidently no shortage of patience, and used all three to make rock look like it might, at any moment, exhale. A 21st century embroiderer had needle, metallic thread, and a comparable reserve of patience, and used them to make silk look like it had already turned back to stone.