Tilak Ram Dev Raj

We are bartan merchants, so our shop at Bohar Wala Chowk is full of metal. There’s stainless steel, brass, and aluminum everywhere you look. If you walk into Tilak Ram Dev Raj, you’ll hear the clinking of pots and pans hitting each other. It’s a noisy place, especially when we are unloading a new shipment at Mour Mandi. We stack the buckets and bowls in high piles that look like they might fall, but they usually stay put. It’s a lot of heavy lifting. My back gets tired by the end of the day from moving all those heavy utensil sets around for customers to see. We don’t do anything fancy here. People come when they are getting married or if they just broke their favorite cooking pot. We show them what we have on the shelves, they check the weight and the shine, and that’s it. There’s no big sales pitch needed for a good steel pot. The metal speaks for itself. The chowk is always busy with traffic, so there’s a lot of dust from the road that we have to wipe off the display pieces every morning. It’s a never-ending job, cleaning that metal to keep it looking decent. But it looks good when it catches the light in the afternoon. We’ve been doing this for years, and most of the other shopkeepers around here are like family now. We just keep the shop running and help whoever walks through the door looking for something for their kitchen. It's just a regular business.