Akash & Mamta Chikan Co.

Our little setup is right beneath the Dharamshala Munnulal Khun Khun, which makes it pretty easy to find if you're wandering around the J.I. Road area. Being in the Chowk means there is never a quiet moment. We deal with chikan work, mostly fabrics and kurtas that we pile up on the wooden counters. The air in here always smells a bit like starch and old wood. My name is Akash and I run this with the family. We spend most of the day unfolding cloth for people to look at and then folding it back up again when they move on to the next pile. It’s a lot of manual work. The building itself is old, so the walls have some cracks and the floor is a bit uneven, but it has character. We have a few regular workers who do the fine stitching, and they usually sit near the front where the light is better. Sometimes the electricity goes out in the middle of the day, and we just have to sit there in the dark waiting for it to come back on. We don't have a website or anything like that, just the shop sign and people telling their friends about us. It gets really hot in the summer months, but we have a cooler that we keep filled with water. We just keep doing what we know, day in and day out, down here under the dharamshala.