Crackers World

Our place, Crackers World, is in Vijayanagar North, specifically at Allalasandra 40/11. For most of the year, it is a bit quiet, but when the festival season approaches, everything changes. We start getting big crates delivered and the whole shop gets filled with the smell of sulfur and cardboard. It's a lot of lifting and moving boxes around. We have to be very careful with where we put things because of safety. The floor is concrete and we spend hours sweeping it to keep it clean. Families come in with kids who get very excited looking at the bright pictures on the boxes. We spend a lot of time showing them what each item does, even if we’ve said it a hundred times that day. It gets very crowded and we usually have to bring in extra help from the family. We stay open late into the night during October and November. Sometimes my back hurts from bending over to reach the lower shelves. We have a small fan in the corner that doesn't do much when the shop is full of people. We keep a ledger for all the sales, and by the end of the day, our fingers are usually grey from the packaging. It’s a seasonal life, but we like the energy of the crowd. Outside, the street is always busy with people heading home, and we just keep the lights on until the work is finally done for the night.