Ramji Lal Anil Kumar General Store

Our store is located in the Main Market of Kotkhawada, out near Tonk Road in Jaipur. Ramji Lal and Anil Kumar are the names on the board, and we’ve been working here together for quite some time. It’s a typical market shop. We have stacks of items piled up high, sometimes almost reaching the ceiling. It gets very dusty out here on Tonk Road, so we’re always dusting things off. The market is a lively place, especially on weekends when everyone from the nearby villages comes in. We sell everything from plastic buckets to spices and notebooks. There’s no fancy lighting, just a few tubes that flicker sometimes. We don't have a computer system; we just use a big register book and a calculator. It’s a bit slow but it works for us. We drink a lot of chai throughout the day while waiting for customers. The sun hits the front of the shop pretty hard in the afternoon, so we pull down the shade a bit. It’s not a glamorous job, just handling goods and talking to people. We know the other shopkeepers around here well. We just try to keep the items people actually use in stock so they don't have to travel all the way into the main city of Jaipur. The floor is rough stone and the wooden door takes a bit of muscle to lock at night, but it’s been our second home for years now. We just keep doing our daily work and hope for good business.