Tie first. Dye second. Look last.

On Sumba the pattern goes into the thread before there is any cloth to look at. The warp is stretched, the weaver counts it into bundles, and she binds the bundles with a fibre that will not let colour through. Only then does anything go into the dye. Indigo for the blue. Morinda root, which they call kombu, for the red that takes months of patient repeat dips to arrive at. The bindings come off, the loom is dressed, and the picture that has existed only in her head finally appears one weft pass at a time.

Which means the weaver has to see the finished thing before she starts, and she has to work backwards from it to the thread. There is no sketching on the cloth. There is no undo.

Paramita spent years doing exactly that in another material. She wrote banking applications, which are the sort of system you have to hold whole in your head before you type the first line, and which do not forgive being unpicked politely once they are live. Then she followed both of her parents into the civil service, and the state moved her about as far from Solo as the country reaches, to Nusa Tenggara Timur. These are the sandalwood islands, the ones Java and half of Asia came for centuries to buy cendana from, and they are also where the cloth is still tied before it is dyed.

The sprite and the thread

Here is the thing nobody tells you about ikat: it is a grid. The bundle is the column, the weft pass is the row, and every cell is a yes or a no decided long before anybody sees a picture. A sprite is the same object. So is a bitmap, so is a screen, so is the little pixel horse in whatever game she is playing on her day off.

A programmer, a gamer and a Sumba weaver are all doing the same job, which is deciding a picture cell by cell and trusting that it will resolve when it is finally rendered. The difference is only the renderer. One prints hard squares. One bleeds at the edges, because the dye creeps a little past the binding, and that soft feathered edge is the signature of the whole craft, the thing collectors look for, the proof that it was tied and not printed.

Two houses, one nose

"My connection to the world of perfume began when I was in elementary school, since my mother liked collecting perfumes. Because of that, I started to explore the perfume that was sold at the supermarket. In my opinion, apart from being an identity, perfume is a way to express yourself."

Note where that starts. Not at a counter, not at a launch, but at her mother's shelf and then at the supermarket, which is where most real noses actually begin and which almost nobody admits to later. She has never dressed it up.

"Coming from a Javanese family that still has ties to the Keraton Solo, the scent of incense and tea is a scent that is very close to me. And since living in NTT, I have grown fond of the aroma of alcoholic beverages, since NTT is a region where sopi and moke are produced."

Two sentences, two islands, about fourteen hundred kilometres between them. The first is inherited and the second was acquired, and they are both hers now, which is the part worth sitting with. Most people describe one home. She is carrying two, and they do not smell remotely alike.

What comes off the still

Sopi and moke both begin in the crown of a palm. A tapper climbs the lontar or the aren, cuts the flower stalk, and hangs a vessel under it so the sap runs all night. Fresh, that sap is sweet and faintly grassy and it is called nira. Left alone in the warmth it turns on its own within hours, going sour and bready and alive, and that is moke. Put through a still it becomes sopi, which is the one that carries in a room. The names move around from island to island and from village to village, so nobody in NTT will thank you for being rigid about them.

She did not grow up with any of this. She arrived, and the air had a new thing in it, and after a while she started liking the thing. That is a rarer skill than people think. Most of us defend the smells we were issued as children and refuse the rest for life.

She wears the same idea on skin. Rum and boozy, incense, woody, musk, which is a warm and slightly smoky wardrobe and not at all the wardrobe you would guess from a hot island. The heat only wins for part of the year.

Before the day has a to-do list

"Usually I will wear something that contains rum or boozy, incense, woody and musk notes. However, since the weather is currently at the hot season, the ones I use now are HoM Haute Freedom and Kindness 2.0, or something that smells fresh but not citrusy and has a little bit of woody and musk notes."

Fresh but not citrusy is a precise request and a hard one. It rules out the easy answer. What she is asking for is air without sugar, and a little wood underneath so the thing still has a floor.

"Cold shower and one glass of cold tea before starting the day, also applied four to five sprays of favourite fragrance to boost the mood before going to work."

Both sides, then your guts

"In my opinion, when you use something, whether it is clothing, music, or fragrance, it reinforces the image of who you are, because good taste is a matter of perception."

It is a generous definition and a slightly dangerous one, because it hands the verdict to whoever is looking. She does not seem worried about that. If taste is perception then the work is not acquiring the correct objects, it is being legible, and a person who wears rum and incense into a government office on a hot island is being extremely legible.

"Always listen to both sides before making a decision and trust your guts."

It depends on the mood

Two playlists, and she is clear about which is for which. One for chilling out. One for the gloomy days, which runs to more than a thousand songs, so the gloom is well provisioned.