Ashapura

Johari Bazar is always such a loud and busy place, and we’ve been right in the heart of it for years. If you’ve ever walked down these lanes, you know how crowded it gets with tourists and locals all pushing past each other. Our shop, Ashapura, is just a small slice of that madness. We open up pretty early, usually before the real rush starts, because that’s the only time we can actually get the floors swept and the shelves straightened. The air here always smells like incense and street food from the vendors nearby. We don’t have any big signs or bright lights to draw people in. Most of our customers are people who have been coming to us for decades, or their children who now have their own families. It’s a lot of sitting and talking, really. We show what we have, we chat about the weather or the news, and that’s about it. There’s no pressure or sales talk. Sometimes it gets so hot in the summer that the fans barely do anything, but we’re used to it. The bricks in this building are old, and you can feel the history in the walls. We just like being a small part of this market. It’s a lot of work keeping things organized in such a tight space, but we make it work every single day without making too much of a fuss about it.