Deepak Kirana Store

Running a shop in Johari Bazar at number 353 means you are always in the middle of a crowd. We sell all the basic stuff like pulses, rice, spices, and tea. It gets really packed in here during the festive seasons when everyone is looking for specific ingredients for their cooking. We try to keep everything stocked up, but sometimes a bag of sugar or flour runs out faster than we thought. The shelves are high and we use a little ladder to reach the top items. My family has been around this market for a long time. People come in to buy a few kilos of dhal or just a packet of biscuits. We talk to the neighbors and the other shopkeepers while we wait for the next customer. The floor needs sweeping several times a day because of the dust from the street outside. It isn’t a big supermarket or anything like that, just a regular corner store where we know most of the faces that walk through the door. Sometimes the inventory gets a bit mixed up, but we find what people need eventually. It is just daily life here, weighing out grains and packing them into small bags. We open early before the sun gets too hot and stay until the bazar starts to quiet down at night. There’s always a bag of something that needs to be tied or a shelf that needs a bit of straightening up. It keeps us on our feet throughout the day.