The mezzanine years.
The first Jaydurga showroom was eighteen feet wide, on the first floor of a row of shops off Lakdikapul. There was a single Singer, a small fan, and three bolts of curtain cotton in greys.
Krishna Murthy was twenty-six. He had moved from Vijayawada the year before with a wife, a bicycle and a written promise from his uncle that he could stay on the terrace till things settled. They settled, in their own time. The shop opened on the third of October, 1984; the first customer came on the fifth.
He sold curtains because curtains were what he knew. He stitched them himself, on order. If a measurement came wrong, he went and re-measured the window. No one had told him that this was unusual, so he kept doing it, and ten years later it was part of what the shop was for.
The Ameerpet floor.
In 1996, the family took the lease of the ground-floor unit on Ameerpet Main Road — bigger by half, busier by ten. Carpets came in that year, because Mrs. Reddy, who lived on Road No. 7, had asked for one. Bedding came the year after, because she asked for that too.
The first in-house tailor was Mohammed Bhai, who is still with us. He stitches a hem in eleven minutes flat, by hand, and refuses to be timed.
Three floors, a tailoring room.
By 2008, the building above us came up for rent, then the floor above that. We took both. The first floor became carpets and mattresses. The second became a design studio, then wallpapers, then blinds. The tailoring room moved to the back. Tea moved to the front.
We did not become a department store. We became a four-thousand- square-foot version of the same eighteen-foot shop, with the same idea about going to your house if your measurement is in doubt. We still do.
The second generation.
Anjali joined the floor in 2024, after twelve years at a design studio in Bangalore that she will not let us name. She has opinions about colour temperature, which is good, and about wood stain finishes, which is also good. She has begun a small collection of jacquards woven for us in Erode by a co-operative of weavers her father met in 1991.
Her father still comes in at ten thirty most mornings. He goes home at eight. He says he is retired. He is not retired.