CHENNAI: Covered in silver soot, every year the firecracker makers of Sivakasi work twice as hard to make our Deepavali festivities a memorable one. Men and women, young and old, get to the factory in the wee hours to sort out rockets, sparklers, flower pots, wrap the ladis, Lakshmi bombs and atom bombs safely. But before that, they also have a mini celebration while testing these crackers — the fruit of their painstaking labour.