Saksham Masale

Saksham Masale is based in Ward No.9, right near the primary school in Bhingar. You can often hear the kids shouting and playing during their recess while we are working inside. It’s a small operation, really. We don’t have a big factory with assembly lines. Most of the work is done by hand or with small machines that we’ve had for years. The smell of turmeric and chili is always hanging in the air around our building. Sometimes it makes us sneeze, but we’ve mostly grown immune to it over the years. We get our ingredients from local farmers whenever possible, so the quality changes a bit with the seasons, which is only natural. We don’t use a lot of chemicals to make things look perfect. If the spice is a bit darker one month, that’s just how the crop was. We spend our days grinding, mixing, and bagging everything up into small pouches. It’s a lot of repetitive work, but there’s a certain rhythm to it that feels right. My wife helps with the accounts in the evenings after she’s done with her own work. We don't have a website or a big social media page. Word of mouth in Bhingar is usually enough to keep us busy. People know where we are, and they know we’ve been here for a long time. We just want to keep making masale that tastes like home.