Jitendra Textile

We've been sitting here in Gandhi Nagar at Tagore Gali No. 1 for quite a few years now. If you know the area near the police station, you probably know how busy it gets every single morning. We open the shutters early, usually while the tea stall next door is just getting his first batch of milk. My father started this under the name Jitendra Textile because that’s his name, and we just kept it going. It is a small place, packed with rolls of different fabrics from top to bottom. Sometimes the dust from the street gets in, but that’s just part of being in Ram Nagar. People come in looking for specific shades of cotton or synthetic blends, and we spend most of our day climbing ladders to pull things down. It is not a fancy showroom with air conditioning or anything like that. We have a couple of ceiling fans that make a lot of noise but they help in the summer heat. The lane is narrow, so when a rickshaw comes through, everyone has to squeeze against the walls. We know most of the other shopkeepers around here. We talk about the prices going up or how the rains might affect the transport. It is just a regular life of selling cloth and making sure the inventory is right. We don't do much advertising; people just find us because we’ve been at X/91 for so long. It’s a lot of manual work, lifting heavy bundles and checking for snags.