Steel Mart

Steel Mart is located at 2/14 Pais Street in Byculla West. If you know this part of Mumbai, you know it’s a bit of a maze. The street is narrow and always packed with people and handcarts moving things around. Our shop is right in the thick of it. It’s a small space, mostly filled with metal and the smell of grease. We’ve been here for years, and the walls are covered in marks and scratches from moving stock in and out. There’s a small desk in the back where we keep the ledger and the phone. It’s noisy and dusty, but that’s just Byculla for you. We don’t have any air conditioning, just a couple of old ceiling fans that creak when they’re on high speed. Most of our day is spent talking to people who drop by or trying to find a specific piece of steel buried under a pile. We know all the other shopkeepers on Pais Street, and we usually get our tea from the same place every morning. It’s a hard-working neighborhood and we fit right in. There’s no point in trying to make the place look modern when the work we do is so hands-on. We open up early and stay until the sun goes down, just like everyone else on the block. It’s just how we do things here at Steel Mart and it seems to work out for us.