Meena Departmental Store

If you walk through Bhagwati Nagar in Jhotwara, you’ll find us easily. This store is where we spend most of our lives, surrounded by bags of flour and rows of bottled drinks. It’s a neighborhood spot, pure and simple. We open up early because the milk delivery comes while the sun is barely up. Throughout the day, mothers come in for snacks for their kids, and later in the evening, men stop by to pick up whatever their wives told them to get on their way back. The store is a bit cluttered because we try to stock a little bit of everything. We have toiletries, pulses, spices, and those big jars of candies that the children like. Sometimes we run out of something popular and have to wait a couple of days for the van to bring more. It’s not a supermarket; it’s just a place where we know most of our customers by their first names. We talk about the local news or whose daughter is getting married. Sometimes the billing takes a minute if the power goes out, but nobody seems to mind much. We use a simple calculator and keep our records in a thick register. It’s been this way for years and it works for us and the people who live around here. We just try to keep the shelves full and the shop open.