Variety Veena

Down in Adyar, on the 1st Main Road of Gandhi Nagar, you can find Variety Veena at 15/19. It’s a quiet enough street compared to the main junctions, but there’s still a lot of movement. The shop itself smells like old wood and maybe a bit of polish. We have instruments leaning against the walls and sitting on shelves, some of them waiting to be repaired and others just sitting there for a long time. We aren't very fast about things here; we like to take our time checking the strings or listening to the sound a board makes when you tap it. The floor is old tile that’s seen a lot of footsteps over the years. We get people from the neighborhood coming in, some who have lived in Adyar their whole lives and remember when the shop first opened. We usually have the radio playing softly in the back or someone is practicing a few notes in the corner. It’s not a polished showroom with bright lights. It’s more like a workshop where things get a bit dusty and the tools are scattered across the workbench. We spend our afternoons sitting on the stools, talking about the weather or how the road outside is being dug up again. There’s no rush to be the biggest or the best, we just want to make sure the instruments we handle are treated okay. It’s a simple life on Gandhi Nagar, just keeping the music going in our own small way.