Gulab Kirana Store

Gulab Kirana Store is right in the middle of Karim Chowk in the Maqbara area of Kota. It’s a local neighborhood shop, and we’ve been here in Kota City for quite a while. The 324006 area is a mix of homes and small businesses, so we see a lot of the same faces every day. We sell the usual kirana items like spices, grains, and oils. The shop isn't very large, so we have to stack things high. Sometimes it feels like the boxes might fall over, but we have a system that works for us. The streets around Maqbara can be narrow, making it tricky for the delivery vans to get through. We spend a lot of time carrying sacks from the main road. It’s hard work, especially when the Rajasthan sun is beating down. We don't have any air conditioning, just a ceiling fan that creaks a bit. We keep a ledger for the regulars and try to stay on top of what’s running low. It’s a quiet life mostly, just weighing out goods and chatting with the people who live nearby. We don’t have a big corporate story. It’s just a family-run store on the corner. We close for a few hours in the afternoon when it’s hottest and stay open late into the evening. Dealing with the heat is just part of the job here in Kota. It is a simple place where we do our work.