Every old sari becomes a square, and every square must sing.

Three weeks in a Mirpur Khas courtyard, watching seven women, one charpoy, and four thousand years of color discipline pull a single quilt across the floor.

Bibi Hameeda will not call her quilt art. She calls it bistar — bedding — and she means it. We sit on the charpoy at dusk in her brother-in-law's courtyard near Mirpur Khas, six women in the half-circle around her, and she lays a finished ralli across the four of us like a tablecloth at a banquet. Vermilion, golden-yellow, leaf-green, indigo, fuchsia: five colors, locked in concentric squares, edged in cotton-white piping that catches the last of the desert light.

She has been stitching since she was nine. Her mother taught her, and her mother's mother before that, and somewhere upstream of seven generations the Indus Valley archaeologists at Mohenjo-daro found a fragment exactly like this one. The geometry has not blinked in four millennia. The saris change — last winter's blue floral, the green wedding shalwar she finally tore up in March — but the grammar holds.

A color discipline that refuses the pastel

What outsiders mistake for exuberance is, up close, almost mathematical restraint. A ralli is never one color loud. It is five to seven saturated jewel-tones in conversation, separated by piping so each can sing at full voice without bleeding into the next. Pastels would be a kind of cowardice here — a refusal of the sun, of the dowry-chest, of the daughter you are sewing this for.