India Misthan Bhandar

India Misthan Bhandar is located at Surajpole, right where all the traffic and noise is. We make sweets and snacks every day starting very early in the morning, around four. If you come by at dawn, you can see the big vats of milk boiling and the sugar being mixed. It’s a very hot kitchen, especially in the summer months when the sun hits the building. We do the traditional stuff like ladoos and barfis. We don’t use machines for everything because some things just taste better when you do them by hand. The shop front gets very busy during the festivals. People are always pushing and shouting to get their boxes of sweets. Sometimes we run out of the most popular items by afternoon, and people get a bit annoyed with us, but we can only make so much in a day. We don't use fancy packaging with gold foil or ribbons, just the standard cardboard boxes we have used for years. The floors are usually a bit sticky despite how much we mop them during the day. That is just the nature of a sweet shop, I suppose. We’ve been at Surajpole for quite some time now. We know most of the other shopkeepers around here. It’s a hard life, standing on your feet all day near the hot stoves, but we like seeing the kids get excited when they get a fresh piece of candy.