Ambaji Saree Wala

Ring Road is the heart of the textile world here, and Manish Market is always a chaotic place to be. We are at No. 229, and honestly, if you don't know the way, you might get lost in the rows of shops. Ambaji Saree Wala is basically piles and piles of fabric. We have sarees stacked from the floor almost to the ceiling. It’s a lot of folding and unfolding all day. When a customer wants to see a specific color, we have to pull it out from the bottom of the stack, and then the whole pile needs fixing again. The fans are always on full speed, but with so many people moving around, it stays warm. We talk a lot. You have to shout a bit sometimes to be heard over the noise of the other traders and the trolleys rattling past the door. My back usually aches by the afternoon from standing on the hard floor, but you don't really think about it when things are busy. We eat our lunch quickly behind the counter, trying not to get any crumbs on the silk. It’s a fast environment. We see thousands of patterns every week, and after a while, they all start to blur together. But we know exactly where every single piece is kept. It’s a messy system that only we understand, and it works for us every day in the market.