Goyal Provision Store

If you are walking down Kotri Road in Gumanpura, Kota, you will find us right on the street where Sangam Restaurant is. It’s a busy little pocket of the city. We have been running this provision store for a long time, mostly dealing in bulk grains, oils, and all the stuff you need to run a kitchen. The street outside is always full of motorcycles and people going to eat at the restaurant, so there’s a lot of energy around. Inside the store, it smells like a mix of roasted spices and raw sugar. We have big jute bags filled with different grades of rice and wheat lined up on the floor. It can get a bit crowded when two or three people come in at once because the bags take up a lot of space. We don't really do much advertising or anything like that. Most of our customers are people who live in the back lanes of Gumanpura and have known us for years. We know who likes which brand of tea and who prefers a certain kind of cooking oil. Sometimes we run out of things because the delivery truck got stuck in traffic, but we just tell the customers to come back in the evening. It’s a very hands-on job, lifting heavy sacks and weighing out lentils by the kilo. We just keep at it every day, from morning until the lights go out.