Madras Hardtools Pvt Ltd

You can find Madras Hardtools down on Jews Street, near Shanmughom Road. Our address is XL/3845. It’s an old part of the city, and the streets are quite narrow. We’ve been here a long time, and the building shows its age. We sell hardtools—wrenches, hammers, heavy-duty stuff. The shelves are wooden and they groan under the weight of all the metal. There’s a specific smell to this place, a mix of old paper and iron. It’s a bit dark inside, even during the day, so we have lights on all the time. People walking down Shanmughom Road often turn into our street just to avoid the main crowd. We have a lot of regular customers who have been coming to us for decades. I sit at a heavy wooden counter near the entrance. We write out all our receipts by hand in those big ledgers. It’s a slow way of doing things, but it works for us. Sometimes it gets really hot in the summer, and we just have one small fan blowing. We don’t have much room for a break area, so we usually just stand around and talk. The neighborhood has changed, but our shop stays mostly the same. We just keep stocking what people need for their manual work. It’s a quiet life, mostly, except for the sound of tools being moved around. I usually lock up the heavy metal gate myself every single evening before walking home.