Two annas, and the loop has to close

Sit. Not there — you're in my light. Right, there. You've paid your two annas like everybody so you get one scoop out of the tin and as much ground as you can sweep, and the judging is at four whether your line comes back or not.

Sweep it first. Then flick water on it with your fingers and give it a minute to go tacky. Bone-dry earth and the flour skates off in the first hot draught out of the field; wet earth and you're laying paste, and paste is not a line.

Then the pulli. Not with a rule — pinch, press, pinch, press, thumb to forefinger, and that pinch is your spacing for the whole figure. The dots are not the drawing. They are the frame the drawing is measured off, and it's your hand that sets it, so keep the same hand and the same pinch or the far corner comes out crooked and everybody sees it from the gate.

Now the line. It goes between them and around them. Every gap. Flour on a pulli and the line has collapsed onto the frame — the dot goes grey, the figure reads broken, and it is broken. One stroke, no lifting, no going back along what you've already laid, and it finishes where it started. That's all a sikku kolam is. Anybody can check it from the doorway in three seconds: eye on the line, follow it round, come back where you began. Three seconds.

You are going too slow. Look at your own line, don't look at me — it's fat at every corner, every place you stopped to work out where you were going. That's a puddle, that's flour standing where your wrist stopped. Thickness is nothing but wrist speed. A fast confident arc lays thin and even and a bit grey; a hesitant one blobs at every pause and every blob is there forever, because you cannot lift a blob off packed earth without dragging half a foot of line up with it. There is no correcting. There is only sweeping and starting again, and the tin doesn't refill.

Some grids come back on themselves in one stroke and some don't, and it has nothing to do with how clever you are or how much you want it. It's in the count. Look at the count before you pay your two annas. I've entered three shapes for eleven years and I know which ones close; Kanaka knows; Thangam's mother knew and never said a word about it to anybody, she just entered the odd ones.

That one up in the corner, the fifteen — that's Ponni's, entry seven. She drew it at seven this morning while the ground was still cool, and went off somewhere, and she hasn't come back. Don't draw on it. Don't lean over it either.

The schoolmaster's wife has copied hers straight out of a magazine, dot count and all, and she'll get it down — she's got a good enough wrist. She just can't do the next one, or the one after, because she isn't drawing, she's remembering. Ask her to take one dot off her grid and watch what happens.

And don't draw at noon and expect the same size at four. Your own shadow falls across the work and you lean out of it without knowing you've done it. Alamelu's noon entries come out two fingers narrow down the left, every single time, and she has never once believed me.

Two kilos in the tin this morning. Eleven of us. The three-five-seven takes near enough a hundred and ninety grams if you lay it thin, more like two-forty the way you're laying it. Do that arithmetic yourself — I'm drawing. Judging at four.