Geethanjali Tailors

I’ve been sitting at this sewing machine here at house 16-18 in Nijampally for a good while now. My shop is just a simple room where we keep the fabric rolls and the threads. People from all over Regonda come by when they have a wedding or a festival coming up. We spend most of our mornings cutting cloth on the big wooden table and the afternoons are for the actual stitching. You can hear the hum of the machine all day long. Sometimes the electricity goes out and we have to use the old pedal-powered one, which is a bit slower on the legs but it works. We don't have any fancy catalogs, just some pictures pinned to the wall that customers like to point at. There is always a pile of scrap fabric on the floor and a jar of buttons on the shelf. My eyes get a bit tired by evening, especially when working on the fine embroidery or fixing a small tear in a sari. We use a lot of chalk to mark the measurements and there’s always a tape measure hanging around my neck. It gets crowded in here during the holidays with people wanting their new clothes ready in a hurry. We just do the work as it comes in, one stitch at a time. It’s a quiet life here in Warangal, just keeping busy with the needles and making sure the fit is right for whoever walks through the door.