Gopal Singh & Painting Contractors

Our setup is over at 72 Sirsi Road in the Shiv Vihar Colony. Gopal Singh started this because he knew his way around a brush and a bucket of lime better than anyone else. We are painting contractors, which basically means we spend our lives on ladders or covered in white dust. It isn't just about slapping some color on a wall. We have to scrape off the old stuff and fix the cracks first, which is the part most people don't like doing. Sirsi Road is always dusty, so we have to be careful about how we time the exterior jobs. We work mostly on houses around Shiv Vihar, but we go wherever the work takes us. Our storage space is packed with rollers, drop cloths, and half-empty tins of primer. It’s not a tidy business. Usually, we are out at a site from early morning until it gets too dark to see the edges. We don't have a secretary or anything fancy like that. If the phone rings, one of us picks it up with paint-stained fingers. We just tell people how long it will take and what the cost of the materials is these days. Prices for paint keep going up, so that is always a conversation we have to have. We just try to do a solid job so the paint doesn't peel off after the first monsoon rain. We've been at it for years.