Baiju Painter

I’m based out of Andheri East, near Ijamata Chowk in Balaji Nagar. The area is also called The Great Indira Nagar, near Marol. My name is Baiju and I spend my days with paint and brushes. I mostly work around this part of Mumbai. It’s a lot of climbing ladders and moving furniture out of the way. I usually have a couple of guys helping me because painting a whole house alone takes too long. We carry our buckets and rollers from one place to another. The traffic in Marol is always a headache when we are trying to get to a job. We get a lot of work during the festive times when everyone wants their walls to look fresh. I spend a lot of time mixing colors to get them just right, or sometimes just scraping off old flaky paint. My clothes always have some spots of white or yellow on them. It’s messy work but I’ve been doing it for a long time now. We stop for lunch at the local stalls around Ijamata Chowk. People know me in the neighborhood so I don't have to look too far for work. It’s mostly word of mouth. Sometimes the weather is too humid and the paint doesn't dry fast enough, which slows us down. We just wait it out. It’s a simple life, just putting color on walls and making things look a bit cleaner for the families living there.