Jai Shankar Kirana & Ganeral Store

Down in the Pragpura Kotputli Bazar, you will find Jai Shankar Kirana & Ganeral Store. It is a noisy place because the market is always full of people and cows and bikes. We have a lot of stuff packed into this space. It’s mostly dry goods like lentils and rice and spices that we sell by the weight. The scales are old but they still work fine. We spend a lot of time scooping things into paper bags. The air smells like turmeric and laundry soap. It gets quite hot in the middle of the day so we have a small fan that mostly just moves the warm air around. People come in from the surrounding villages to do their weekly shopping here. Sometimes they want to haggle over the price of a kilo of sugar but I usually stick to what's fair. The walls could use a fresh coat of paint but nobody really looks at the walls anyway. They are looking at the jars and the packets on the shelves. It’s a lot of work lifting the heavy bags and keeping the inventory straight. My back hurts by the end of the day but that is just part of the job. I’ve lived in Pragpura all my life so I know most of the families that shop here. It's just a regular market life for us.