Uttara Karnataka Food Stores

If you walk down the 54th Cross in Rajajinagar, you’ll find us at 496. Uttara Karnataka Food Stores is mostly just shelves filled with stuff from back home. We have all the different powders, the dry chutneys, and those hard rotis that people around here really miss. It’s a quiet shop most of the time, except for the weekends when families come in to stock up for the week. My uncle started this place because he couldn't find the right spices when he first moved to this part of the city. Now, it’s mostly just me and one other guy helping out. We spend a lot of time weighing out grains into smaller bags. The air in here is thick with the smell of roasted gram and dried chilies. It’s a bit dusty, honestly, no matter how much we sweep. The wooden counter has a big scratch on it where a crate slipped once. We don’t have any big signs or bright lights. Most people know we’re here just by word of mouth. Sometimes a customer will stay for twenty minutes just to talk about their village or ask where we get our jaggery from. It’s a simple way to spend the day. We don’t have everything, but we have the things that matter to people from the north part of the state. It feels like a little piece of home in the middle of Rajajinagar. We just keep the bags tied tight and the jars full.