Saramsha

No. 007  ·  23 September 2026

Knots at the Doorstep

A sikku kolam is one line of rice flour looping around a grid of dots, never crossing a dot and never leaving a loose end. Tap any crossing to twist it — two lines become one, or one becomes two.

Tap or drag across the pattern

About this piece

One line, no loose ends

Before sunrise, across Tamil Nadu and much of south India, women sweep the ground in front of the door, sprinkle a grid of dots — pulli — and run rice flour between thumb and forefinger in a single continuous line that loops around every dot and closes back on itself. The whole thing is walked over by lunchtime and drawn again the next morning. Rice flour feeds ants and birds, which is part of the point: the threshold is an offering, not a decoration.

The kind drawn here is sikku kolam — sikku means tangle or knot. Its rule is severe: the line may never touch a dot, never stop, and never leave an end hanging. Everything you can draw on this page obeys that rule automatically, because of how it is built.

Look closely and the pattern is made of quarter-circles, four to a square cell, and each cell has only two possible states: the pair of arcs curls around one diagonal of the cell, or the other. Every arc ends at the middle of a cell edge, exactly where its neighbour's arc begins, and always at right angles to that edge — so the joins are invisible and the curve is smooth. Since every edge-midpoint has exactly two arcs meeting it, the drawing can only ever be a set of closed loops. There is nowhere for an end to go.

That is why twisting a crossing is interesting. Flipping one cell re-plumbs four arc-ends. If the two strands passing through it belong to different loops, those loops fuse; if they belong to the same loop, it either splits in two or simply re-routes itself through the cell and the count holds. So the traditional goal — a kolam that is one single unbroken line — becomes a small game of knot surgery, and the number in the corner is your score. Tie it up plays that game greedily for you; under eight-fold symmetry it usually cannot reach one, and it says where it stopped.

The symmetry buttons repeat each twist around the grid: two-fold across the vertical axis, four-fold across both axes, eight-fold adding the diagonals. This matches how kolams are actually composed — a motif invented once and turned around the centre. Note that mirroring a cell swaps its two states, because a reflection turns a clockwise curl anticlockwise; the app handles that for you, which is why an eight-fold twist sometimes changes the loop count by more than one.

Kolam has had a second life in mathematics. Gift Siromoney and colleagues at Madras Christian College described families of kolam with picture grammars in the 1970s, giving formal generative rules to a folk art; the loops themselves are objects of knot theory, and the rounded-corner drawings here are close cousins of the tiles Sébastien Truchet catalogued for a French printer in 1704.

Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded. Tab to the pattern, then arrow keys to move and Enter to twist. Save image writes a PNG straight from the canvas.