Ashish Kirana & General Stores

Ashish Kirana & General Stores sits on Jhansi Road in the Dabra area of Gwalior. It’s one of those shops that has a bit of everything squeezed into a small space. We have sacks of grain sitting on the floor and rows of plastic bottles on the upper shelves. The lighting inside isn't the best, but we know where everything is kept after all these years. Usually, the day starts with checking what we ran out of the day before and making a list. The road outside is a main one, so there’s always the sound of trucks and cars going by. We’ve got a small wooden desk where we keep the accounts and a stool that’s seen better days. It gets really hot in the afternoons, and the sun hits the front of the store directly for a few hours. We have a lot of regular people from the Dabra neighborhood who come in for their daily milk or bread. The shop doesn't have any modern decorations, just the products themselves stacked up. Sometimes we have to move the heavy sacks around to reach something in the back, which is a bit of a workout for us. We don’t really change things much; the layout has been the same for a long time now. It’s just a regular kirana store where we spend our days waiting for the next person to walk in from Jhansi Road. It's a living, anyway.