Shree Radha Govind Moortiwala

My family has been at 1996-A-1 on Khejron Ka Rasta for a long time now. If you walk through Chandpole Bazar, you know how crowded it gets with all the rickshaws and people moving about. We spend most of our days here covered in white marble dust. It gets in your hair and clothes, but that’s just how it is when you’re working with stone. We have different sizes of statues sitting around the shop floor, some finished and some just starting to look like something. Sometimes the tea guy comes by and we take a break sitting on the front step. The noise from the street never really stops until late at night. Most of our work involves heavy lifting and making sure the details on the faces look right. It’s hard on the hands. Tools get blunt and we have to sharpen them often. People come in asking for all sorts of things, and we just try to get it done. It’s not fancy here. There are chips of stone everywhere on the ground. We have been in this same spot for years, watching the market change outside our door. The lights in the shop aren’t very bright, but we know where every chisel is kept. It’s just us doing the work day after day, trying to keep up with the orders that come in from the neighborhood and sometimes further away. That is basically what happens here every single day of the week.