Shree Ganesh Dairy Sweets

The shop is on the first floor here at Church Street 4, right off Varachha Road. Being upstairs is a bit different because people have to know we are here to find us. We handle a lot of dairy and traditional sweets every day. The morning starts early, around five or six, when the milk arrives in the big cans. You can smell the sugar and the ghee from the stairwell before you even walk in. It gets very warm in the kitchen area in the back. We have large metal vats for boiling the milk down. It takes a long time and someone has to stand there and stir it so it doesn't burn on the bottom. If it burns, the whole batch is ruined. My brother handles most of the heavy lifting. The display cases are glass and we have to polish them constantly because of the fingerprints. People like to point at what they want through the glass. We don't use fancy packaging, just the standard boxes and some string to tie them up. Sometimes the delivery truck is late and we have to wait around on the street level for it to show up. It’s a lot of manual work. We don’t have an elevator, so everything goes up the stairs by hand. It keeps us moving, I guess. We stay open until the last tray is empty or it gets too late.