Dulhan Matching Centre

You can find us at Shop No B 9 15 in the Ginni Apartme building in Malad East. It’s a tight squeeze in here, especially when we have more than three or four people trying to look at the same time. The shelves are packed floor to ceiling with rolls of fabric and threads of every color you can think of. We call it Dulhan Matching Centre because that’s what we do. People bring in their sarees or dress materials and we spend ages trying to find the exact right shade of lining or a dupatta that goes with it. It’s a lot of squinting under the lights to make sure the dye matches properly. The lights in the shop are a bit too bright, but you need that to see the colors. Malad East is always bustling, and there’s always noise coming from the street. We keep the door open most of the time to get some air, though it mostly just lets in the dust. My cousin helps out on the weekends when the wedding season really picks up. It gets crazy then. We have bags of scraps all over the floor sometimes. We don't have a computer system or anything; we just know where everything is by memory. If you ask for a specific silk, I can usually point to the right shelf without looking. It’s a simple shop, nothing fancy, just a lot of color and a lot of talking to customers about their clothes.