Vijay Ras Bhandar

Our shop, Vijay Ras Bhandar, is right at Jaljog Chauraha in Sardarpura. If you know the 12-C Road, we are right by the Vedas Restaurant. It’s a very busy intersection, so there is always the sound of horns and people shouting. We spend most of our time making fresh ras, and we go through a lot of fruit every single day. The work is messy and my hands are usually sticky by noon. We don’t have any air conditioning, just a few fans that try their best to move the air around. It gets very hot near the machines. We have a few benches outside where people can sit while they wait, but mostly they just stand around the counter. Being near a popular restaurant like Vedas means we get some of their overflow too. My son helps me with the peeling and the cleaning. We start very early, around five in the morning, to get the first batches ready. There’s no big secret to what we do, we just use what we have and keep the machines running. We’ve been at this spot for years and the traffic just keeps getting heavier. Sometimes it’s hard to even cross the road to get to the shop. We don’t have any marketing plans, we just rely on the smell of the fresh fruit and the location to bring people in. It's a lot of manual labor but we are used to it by now. We just focus on the fruit and the machines.