Smith Electronics Electricals

Bama Charan Roy Road is always full of life, and our little shop at No. 1/3-A is right in the thick of it. In Behala, everyone knows everyone, so half the time we’re just chatting with neighbors who pop in. Smith Electronics Electricals isn't a large place; it’s mostly just shelves filled with wires, old circuit boards, and boxes of components. There’s a lingering scent of burnt solder that never really leaves the room. My workbench is usually buried under three different projects at once, and I’m always losing my favorite screwdriver. We take in a lot of old fans and motors that people don’t want to throw away. It’s a lot of fiddling with small screws and trying to figure out why a connection isn't working. The walls are covered in calendars from three years ago because we never bothered to take them down. When the power goes out, which happens now and then, we just sit out front on stools and wait for it to come back. It’s a simple life here. We don’t have a fancy computer system to track everything; it’s mostly just notes scribbled in a big ledger on the counter. Sometimes we find a cat sleeping on the warm transformers in the back. It’s just how the shop is. We’ve been here long enough that the front step is worn down in the middle from all the feet walking over it. We usually keep the radio on low to keep the silence away.