Bal Kishans/ Shri Prakash Ram

The traffic on Rakasipet Road can get pretty loud during the day, which makes it hard to hear customers sometimes. We’ve been at 1-1-174/1 for a long time now, so we’ve seen the buildings around us change quite a bit. Inside the shop, things stay mostly the same. We have the heavy wooden shelves filled with whatever came in on the last delivery. It might look a bit disorganized to someone visiting for the first time, but I know exactly where every item is tucked away. My son helps me out in the afternoons when the school crowd passes by, though mostly it’s just me and the ledger. Nizamabad gets very hot in the summer, and the stone floor here stays nice and cool, which is a relief. We don't use a computer for our records; everything goes into the big brown notebooks. It’s slower that way, but it feels right to me. People come in for specific items, and if we don’t have it, I usually tell them to come back on Tuesday after the truck arrives. There’s no rush to be anything other than a neighborhood spot. We spend a lot of time just restocking and cleaning the glass jars. It’s hard work on the feet, standing here all day, but the routine keeps me going. We just try to keep enough stock so that no one leaves empty-handed when they walk through that front door on Rakasipet Road.