Fashion Textiles

Fashion Textiles is located at Shop No A 815 in Katra Chatri, which is part of the Nai Sarak area. If you know Old Delhi, you know how packed these lanes can be. Our shop is quite small and filled from floor to ceiling with different types of textiles. We have to use a ladder to reach the stuff on the top shelves. It’s a very old building and the walls are thick, but it still gets warm when the market is full of people. We spend our days unrolling cloth for customers and measuring out meters of silk or cotton. The floor is usually covered in little bits of thread and fabric scraps by the end of the day. There’s no air conditioning, just a couple of wall fans that move the air around. We get a lot of people looking for wedding fabrics or material for school uniforms. It’s a busy, hectic environment but we are used to it by now. My father started this and now we just keep it going. We don’t have a fancy computer system; everything is written down in the ledgers by hand. Sometimes the monkeys from the rooftops come down and we have to shoo them away with a stick. It’s just a normal day for us here in the heart of the textile market. We close up when the sun goes down and start again tomorrow.