Shahu Gajak Bhandar

We are located at 40/41 in the Swami Sarvanand Market in Jawahar Nagar. This place gets really busy when the weather starts to turn cold. That’s when everyone wants gajak. We spend months preparing for the winter season. We get the sesame seeds and the jaggery in big sacks that we pile up in the corner. The work is very physical. You have to beat the mixture with heavy hammers to get it thin and crispy. You can hear the thumping sound coming from our shop all day long. My hands usually have a few callouses from holding the tools. We don't have a big showroom or anything like that. It’s just the workshop and a small area where we sell what we just made. The air inside is always sweet and smells like toasted seeds. Sometimes the kids from the neighborhood come by just to watch us work. We sell it by the kilo and people usually buy several boxes to send to their relatives in other cities. During the summer, things are much slower and we mostly just do maintenance on the shop and wait for the cold to come back. It’s a seasonal kind of life. We’ve been in this same spot for years and the market people are like family to us. We just keep our heads down and keep the hammers moving until the season is over.