New Fruit Land

The fruit shipments always show up really early here on Fort Road. I have to be at the shop before the sun has even come up to help unload the heavy crates from the trucks. Our spot at 421/G is right in the thick of things in the Indira Nagar area. It involves a lot of lifting and shifting boxes around all morning. My hands usually end up getting all sticky from the juice of oranges and pineapples. I spend a lot of my time carefully arranging the fruit so it looks half-decent on the wooden racks. If you try to pile them up too high, they just end up rolling off and getting bruised on the ground. That is basically money being thrown away, so I try to be careful. We get all kinds of different people walking past our doors. Some are in a huge rush and just want to grab a quick apple on their way to work. Others want to stand there and argue about the price of every single item for ten minutes. I try my best to be patient with everyone. The air around the shop is always thick with the smell of ripening fruit mixed with the exhaust fumes from the cars on the road. It gets really hot and stuffy in the afternoons. I have a small battery radio that I play to keep me some company. It is a long, tiring day standing on this hard floor. By the time I finally close up, I am usually completely worn out.