Fresh Spices

You can find Fresh Spices on the ground floor of the building in Wazirabad. We are at Shop Number 1, so we are the first place you see when you walk up. Being near the Post Office is helpful because everyone in the neighborhood knows exactly where that is. The street outside is usually full of people mailing things or paying their bills. We sit here and watch all the people go by throughout the day. The shop is not very big, but we manage to pack a lot of stuff onto the shelves. It has a very specific smell that tends to stick to your clothes, which is just part of the job. We spend a good amount of time cleaning out the jars and making sure everything is in its right place. There is a small blue fan in the corner that hums all day long to keep the air moving around. It gets quite hot during the summer months here in Wazirabad. We don't have any air conditioning, just that fan and the open door. People stop in while they are doing their other chores. We usually talk about the weather or how the local traffic is doing that day. We don't have a website or anything like that. We just do things the old-fashioned way. We write everything down in a big ledger book and use a simple calculator. It is a quiet kind of busy. We open the shutters at nine and close up when the sun sets.