Agarwal Oils

Nehru Bazar is always full of people walking around. Our place, Agarwal Oils, is right in the middle of all that movement. You can usually smell the oil when you get close to the shop. It is a smell we have grown used to over the years, though visitors always mention it. The shop is small and we have to stack the tins and bottles carefully to make room for everyone to stand. It gets cramped when three or four people come in at once. Much of our time is spent filling containers and talking to the customers who have been coming to us for a long time. They know us by name and we know what they usually want. There is no air conditioning, just the breeze that comes through the door if we are lucky. A ledger on the wooden counter is how we track everything. It’s an old-fashioned way of doing things, but it works for us. We don’t have a website or anything like that. If someone wants to find us, they just walk into Nehru Bazar and ask around. Mostly we are just busy with the basic stuff, like cleaning up spills or checking the inventory. It is honest work and it keeps us busy from the moment we open. The energy of the market and the way people interact here every day is something we like.