L & T

Our spot is right in the Loha Bazar in Deeg, which is part of Bharatpur district. The name on the paper is L & T, but locally we’re known as Himanshu’s place. Being in the iron market means it’s always noisy and there’s a lot of heavy lifting. We deal with metal and hardware stuff all day. It’s not the kind of place where you’d want to wear nice clothes because of the grease and the dust. We have stacks of pipes and rods and different bits of iron sitting around. It’s a family-run thing, passed down from Harishankar to his sons. We don’t have a website or a fancy office; we just have a desk and a couple of ledgers where we write everything down. Customers come in looking for specific parts or materials for their building projects. Sometimes we have to wait for the trucks to bring in new loads from the bigger cities. The sun gets really hot in Bharatpur, so we spend a lot of the afternoon in the shade of the shop. It’s hard work, and your hands get dirty within the first ten minutes of starting. We don’t use any big words to describe what we do. We just sell what people need for their construction work and try to keep things moving along. That’s how the day goes at the bazar.