General Shingar House

If you head into Sadar Bazar and find Swadeshi Market, we are at shop number 48. It’s a crowded area, so you have to watch your step with all the carts and people moving around. Our shop is quite small, and we have boxes stacked all the way up to the ceiling. It’s a bit of a puzzle sometimes to find exactly what a customer is looking for, but we usually know where everything is. We sell all sorts of things, mostly items for shingar and daily use. It’s a wholesale market, so things move in big batches. We open up early because the market starts moving before the sun is even fully up. It’s noisy and dusty, but there’s a lot of energy in the air. We don’t have fancy display cases. Everything is just in the boxes they came in, piled high. We’ve been in this same spot for a long time, and we know all the other shopkeepers around us. We share snacks and complain about the heat together. It’s a community. We don’t use computers for everything; a lot of our notes are still written by hand in those red books. It’s not a polished retail store, it’s a working shop in a busy market. We just try to keep up with the orders and get things delivered on time.