Vatsavitri (Savitri's Devotion)

This narrative tableau gathers its drama around the banyan’s immense canopy, where layered greens become both shelter and stage, compressing human desire into the branching geometry of fate. A pale, serpentine ribbon of cloth/rope spirals through the trunk like a visual pulse, binding the figures above and below and turning the tree into a living conduit between secrecy, pursuit, and consequence. The women’s saturated reds and golds anchor the earthly realm of ritual and witness, while the cooler blues aloft heighten the sense of transgression and flight, culminating in the fallen body at the roots—an unsettling moral epilogue written in stillness. In this way, the work reads as a parable of passion and power: the same sacred space that receives offerings also absorbs the weight of betrayal.