Gita Murti Bhandar / Shilpkala Gruh

Our shop is at 1947/1, right near the Khadia Char Rasta. It’s a very old area with narrow streets and lots of history. We are right across from the municipal school, so it gets very noisy when the kids are let out in the afternoon. We go by Gita Murti Bhandar and also Shilpkala Gruh. It’s basically the same place and the same people. We spend our days carving stones and making statues of all sizes. There is marble dust everywhere. It gets in your hair and on your clothes, no matter how careful you try to be. We’ve been doing this for a few generations now. It’s not the kind of work you can learn in a school; you just have to do it every day. We have half-finished murtis standing around the workshop. Some are for temples and some are for people’s private houses. We don’t have a professional salesperson. If you want to see what we do, you just walk into the shop and look around. We use hammers and chisels mostly. It’s slow work. Sometimes a single piece takes weeks to finish properly. We don’t have a website or anything like that. People just know us because we’ve been in Khadia forever. The stone is heavy and the work is hard on the hands, but it’s what we know. We just sit here and carve while the city goes by outside. It is a quiet life despite the traffic.