Some of the better decisions in life are made before you have had the time to think them through. London was one of them. There was a great deal of mayhem in the days before, an alarming number of things to do, and the quiet suspicion that we had perhaps been a little ambitious. There we were, painting enormous red khadi canvases with silhouettes of horses, measuring furniture, calculating heights. We had plans, lists, inventory, things to collect and things that hadn't quite come together. I have a weakness for stone arches, as it turns out.

And then, there we were, unravelling it all again. Deliveries arrived, furniture being assembled, things had to be moved three inches to the left and then, naturally, three inches back to the right. Eventually, it began to look like we had meant it to. Not perfectly, but what really ever is?

A gathering of South Asian brands, brought together in London, each with its own relationship to the place we called home. We shared a point of origin, though not always the same references, our memories are arranged differently. The India we carried was not a single country so much as a collection of private geographies a grandmother's recipe, a familiar smell, a language passed down and altered, rituals that found their way across continents and into everyday life. I kept thinking about how much of ourselves we spend trying to explain. Where we come from. What we make. Which parts of us are inherited and which we have chosen.

Culture is less something we inherit whole than something we keep making from what survives. That is what we were doing there, with all our differences and similarities, taking what had been handed down to us and finding out what it might become in our own hands.

Marigolds hung in bright strings, Bollywood played in the background, and colour seemed to spill from one corner to the next. There were conversations everywhere, people leaning in to listen, laughter rising above the music, greetings that turned into long embraces. The room felt less like a collection of brands and more like being enveloped by a very warm and big family.

By the afternoon, there was a queue outside. An actual queue. I stood there watching people arrive, greet one another, discover familiar faces and make new friends, and wondered when I had last seen a room fill up quite like this. People came for the brands, for the work, for the chance to see familiar faces; they stayed, it seemed, for one another. Some of that, I think, belonged to the woman who had brought everyone together, the extraordinary affection people had for her, and about what it takes to bring so many people into the same room and have them feel, almost immediately, that they belong there.

There is a particular strangeness in taking something made in India to London. The history between the two places is not something that disappears simply because the occasion is joyful, or because the work is beautiful. It sits somewhere in the room, even when nobody names it. In the old routes along which objects, ideas and wealth travelled. In the question of whose work was once collected, whose stories were recorded, whose aesthetic was considered worthy of preservation, and whose had to wait for permission to be seen.

A city can be beautiful and complicated at once.

The days that followed were a different sort of affair. Post office drop-offs, enormous pieces of furniture to be moved, taxis so thoroughly occupied by boxes that there was barely room for the people paying for the ride. We moved through London in fragments, catching the city between appointments, looking out of cab windows, stealing an hour here and a conversation there. There were wonderful people to meet, places I wanted to spend more time in, streets I promised myself I would return to. A missed flight, delayed plans, a little panic, a couple of tears. The sort of things that feel entirely disproportionate while they are happening and become almost funny once enough time has passed. The city seemed to move at two speeds at once: everything happening too quickly, and yet somehow taking its own time.

Somewhere between the rain and the running about, a small kind of magic had been arranged: a meeting with Whistlejacket, George Stubbs's magnificent horse, rising against a sky emptied of everything but itself. I had been certain the day would swallow the plan whole. Instead, there I was, not simply standing before a painting but also inside the tenderness of being remembered in this particular way, someone knowing what might move me, and finding a way to place it in my day.