Prabhat Motor Stores

If you walk into Mandir Gali, off A J C Bose Road near Circus Avenue, you’ll find Prabhat Motor Stores at number 37. It’s a bit tucked away, so you have to look for the sign among all the other shops in the alley. The store is packed from floor to ceiling with boxes of motor parts. There’s barely enough room to move around sometimes. It smells like old paper and metal in here. We have been in this spot for a long time, and we know exactly where everything is, even if it looks like a mess to someone else. The street outside is always crowded with people and rickshaws, especially near Circus Avenue. It’s a very busy part of the city. We spend our days helping people find specific parts for their vehicles. It’s a lot of looking through old catalogs and climbing up ladders to reach the high shelves. We don't have a modern computer system for everything; a lot of it is just kept in our heads or in handwritten ledgers. It’s a local shop where we know many of the regular mechanics who stop by. We don't do any big advertising. People just know we are here in the Gali. Sometimes it gets a bit dark in the back of the store, and the fan doesn't always do much against the humidity. But we like it here, being right in the middle of all the city’s energy and doing what we know best.