To all our moms, with love: When Chai Met Toast dive into how they are taking their mothers on tour

For the band, the best way to portray their homes were carrying their mothers on their hearts and sleeves, representing their culture along the road

As indie band When Chai Met Toast prepares to take its music across borders on an international tour, it is also carrying something far more intimate along for the journey. Pieces of home stitched into what they wear.

For guitarist and banjo player Achyuth Jaigopal, the idea began not as a fashion statement, but as an emotional extension of the band's upcoming album, Small Town, Big Love, Little Homes. "Home is an underlying concept throughout the album," he explains. "It exists as people, feelings, places - a multitude of things across different songs."

The four-member band, also comprising vocalist Ashwin Gopakumar, keyboardist Palee Francis, and drummer Pai Sailesh has always drawn from personal experiences while composing. But this time, something shifted. The idea of "home" became visual, tactile, and deeply personal. "When we wanted to portray the album visually, we asked ourselves, ‘what is the best representation of home for us?'" Jaigopal says. "And it was our mothers. What better way than carrying a piece of them with us on the road?"

For their upcoming album Small Town, Big Love, Little Homes, When Chai Met Toast draw visual inspiration from their mother's sarees woven into shirts

That thought gave birth to Draped in Home, a concept where the band transformed their mothers' traditional Kerala pattu sarees into custom-made shirts. Each piece is unique, rich with memory, and resistant to the disposability of fast fashion. "These sarees have such exquisite patterns. They carry years of memories and legacy," he says. "Each shirt is one of a kind. It's unlike anything else anyone is wearing."

The process, however, wasn't without hesitation, especially from the mothers themselves. "Some of them were uncertain," Jaigopal admits. "Once a saree is cut, it's unusable, right? So they didn't give us their most precious ones like wedding sarees." Instead, the band worked with sarees their mothers were willing to part with, focusing on an aesthetic inspired by Panchavarnam - the five colours central to Kathakali: black, red, yellow, white, and green.
Interestingly, the album itself wasn't conceptualised around "home" from the outset. Like most of their music, the songs were often born out of travel and distance.

"A lot of our songs originate when we're touring," Jaigopal says. "One of the core tracks, I'm Coming Home, was written in the US when we were really missing home, cooking Indian food, and just feeling that pull." That sense of longing became a thread that tied the album together. Tracks like Dreamland reflect a surreal connection between Kerala and faraway places, while Baaton explores finding home in another person. "We realised this was a larger emotion shaping the album," he adds.

For a band that has spent years on the road, the idea of home has inevitably evolved. "It's no longer just a place," Jaigopal says. "It's something we carry with us." While the saree-shirts embody this idea visually, his personal definition remains rooted in quiet, familiar moments. "It's the comfort of being with my parents, eating home food, having that one corner where I can just sit and read." Yet, the emotional weight of the project often surfaced in unexpected ways. Jaigopal recalls one saree in particular, which is a vibrant blend of green and blue that he fondly calls his mother's "peacock saree."

"She wears it on important occasions, and I think she looks extremely beautiful in it," he says, laughing. "I mean, she looks beautiful otherwise too."
When Chai Met Toast continues to blur the lines between music, memory, and identity. Their documentary, out today on Mother's Day, Draped in Home stands out as a powerful statement beautifying the idea of what home means in a life constantly in motion. And sometimes, it means carrying it on your back, thread by thread.