Dayal Follows Strong Work Ethic of Great Grandparents
The way they struggled back then has helped us start up our business and it also gave us this strong sense of work ethic.
Adarsh Bhavish Dayal has attributed a passion to help the family’s sweets business grow to his great-grandparents Sampat and Ram Raj. Along with his father Ajen Kumar they now run the Bhavish Sweets business.
The cooking of sweets is done in batches by six staff members at Mr Dayal’s home in Tavarau, Ba across the road from the caravan located along the King’s Highway where sweets are sold.
“My great grandparents hailed from fishing and farming backgrounds, I am not sure the exact year they arrived, but they settled at Tavarau, Ba where our home is now and later on the generation after that stayed here but my great-grandparents had around 14 children,” Mr Dayal said. “They owned a sugarcane farm and planted cash crops. As for fishing they would go to the Ba River using their own boats”
His great-grandparents were among the first families who settled in Tavarau, Ba.
“The way they struggled back then has helped us start up our business and it also gave us this strong sense of work ethic. This house was built 50 years ago so with whatever they earned, they built this house,” Mr Dayal said. “My father said they had a big family surviving on what they planted because there was no other source of income for them. Because of them we are benefiting.” He said his grandparents Bissun Dayal and Taramatti went on to have four children. “One of them was my father who started this sweets business under my middle name in 2002, we do not distribute our sweets everywhere, it’s just to our small caravan on the main road, but we get a lot of customers, mainly motorists who stop and buy our sweets,” he said
“We sell a range of sweets, but mainly bean, jalebi, Ladoo, Peda, Gulab jamun and we continue this every day.”
He is confident this week will be a busy one for most sweets businesses.
“We make $200 to $300 a week and I believe it’s going to be a busy week in the lead-up to Girmit Day because sweets will be an essential part of celebrations,” he said.
“It is important for Indo-Fijians to know their roots or make an effort to do so by inquiring with their elderly family members. “We must always acknowledge our ancestors and Girmityas because if they had not come here, we would have never settled here peacefully,” he said.