In the back lanes of Firozabad’s Imam Bara bangle mandi (market) in western Uttar Pradesh, a dozen clay bhattis (furnaces) burn inside the Nadar Bux & Co. glass factory. Built by Aijaz Azeem’s grandfather in 1948, it has a capacity to hold 80 kg of recyclable waste glass piled in glistening mounds — golden-brown, yellow, red — along with a concoction of sand, soda, chemicals, and colouring agents. The bhattis burn round the clock at 1,200 degrees Celsius. Azeem, who is in his sixties, says, “People of my generation just took on what our parents had started. My children don’t want to work here. There just isn’t enough money anymore.”
In the rudimentary factory, open from all four sides, men called gulliwalas carry red hot gobs of glass on long metallic pipes. They walk them across the mud-and-brick floor of the karkhana casually, either taking the glass to the fire or carrying it away to dump onto the small glass hills. Amid the din, rhythmic bustle and heat, some pull out the molten glass from inside the furnace and hand it over to the karigars, who wrap it like a thick wire around a muttha (iron rod) and skilfully rotate it on a motor to form glass coils. Each muttha will yield 368 bangles. Every day, Azeem’s factory churns out 38,000 to 64,000 bangles, going over 1.5 lakh bangles during festivals.
A man warms a roti on the hot coils that will later become red bangles at a bride’s wedding or a Karva Chauth celebration. Bangles are everywhere: they hang from wires on dusty windows, they are placed as weights over matkas, or lie on the ground in shards. A lone woman worker, Bijrani, swiftly clears the floor of the broken pieces to be put back in the furnace for recycling.
