Om Ganesh Yatra

If you go down Shiv Murti Gali near the Haridwar Railway Station, you will find where we spend our days at Om Ganesh Yatra. It is a very tight street, always filled with people carrying bags and looking for their next stop. The noise from the station is constant, with the whistles and the announcements, so you get used to talking a bit louder over here. Our office is right in the thick of it. Most of the time, I am just sitting here checking the registers or talking to the drivers who park nearby. The zip code is 249401, but most people just find us by walking from the platform. It gets really crowded during the morning hours when the big trains come in from Delhi or Dehradun. We usually have the door open to catch whatever breeze there is, though mostly it’s just the smell of street food and the sound of rickshaw horns. We have a few old chairs for guests and a calendar on the wall that we forget to flip sometimes. It’s a simple life running a travel place in this part of town. People come in asking about buses or how to get to the Ganga, and we just tell them what we know. My brother helps out in the afternoons so I can go home for lunch. It’s just a normal shop in a very busy alleyway, nothing more than that.