Bhandari Mannequin

If you walk down Gali Number 3 in Keshav Nagar, you’ll find our place near the Patwa Mandir. It’s easy to spot because sometimes we have the plastic torsos and arms sitting near the entrance. Making mannequins is a messy job, so there’s always a bit of dust and the smell of resin in the air. We’ve got a small workshop area in the back and a front space where we keep the finished pieces. It’s a family-run kind of thing, so you’ll usually see one of us moving things around or packing them into plastic wrap. The street outside is quite narrow, so when a truck comes to pick up an order, everything else has to stop. It gets loud when the temple nearby has its prayers, but we’ve gotten used to it over the years. We don’t have a big showroom with lights. It’s more of a warehouse feel where things are stacked up. Some days are very slow, and we just sit and clean the molds, while other days we are working late into the evening to get an order ready for a shop in the city. The floors are concrete and usually covered in scraps, but that’s just the nature of the work. We use simple tools and do a lot of the finishing by hand. It’s honest work, and we’ve been at this same spot for quite a long time now.