Aai Jee Hardware

If you walk down Kika Street in Gulalwadi, you will find us at Building No. 121. It’s a busy part of town and there is always noise from the street outside. Aai Jee Hardware is basically just shelves full of things people need for their houses or jobs. We spend a lot of time counting stock and moving boxes around. Kika Street is narrow, so it gets crowded when people are trying to move items in and out. Most of our day is spent looking for specific sizes of screws or tools that someone saw in a catalog. We don't really have a big office or anything, just a desk near the front where we keep the ledger. Sometimes the light in the back of the shop flickers, so we have to go back there with a torch. It is dusty work, and our hands are usually a bit dirty by the time lunch rolls around. Kika Street has a lot of history, and we’ve seen shops come and go, but we just keep doing our thing here. We don't use any fancy systems to track things, mostly just our memory and some notebooks. It’s a straightforward life. We open early when the sun is just coming up and close when the street lights finally turn on. There’s always something to fix or organize, so we never really sit still for very long during the day. We usually share a few jokes with the neighbors before locking up the doors.