Deepa Shikha Card & Gift

Our shop, Deepa Shikha Card & Gift, is located at 94/01 Vijay Path in Mansarovar. It’s a residential area mostly, so we get a lot of locals who live just a few streets away. We’ve got a big collection of greeting cards, which seems to be a bit of a dying art, but people here still like them. We have them organized by occasion, though they often get mixed up when people browse through. Besides the cards, we have the usual gift items like photo albums and small showpieces. The shop is quite bright because of the big front window, but that also means the sun fades the covers of the cards if we aren't careful. We use a lot of old cardboard boxes for storage under the display tables. It’s a quiet, steady kind of business. We know when the school holidays are because we see more kids looking for birthday presents for their friends. Vijay Path is a nice place to be, and we’ve gotten to know the rhythms of the street over the years. We open around ten and stay until the evening when the streetlights come on. It’s just a simple shop where we try to keep things orderly, even if we don't always succeed. It feels like home to us after all these years of being here in Mansarovar. We just keep the shelves filled and the door open.