Choudhary Kirana & Gen Merchant

Choudhary Kirana & Gen Merchant is tucked away in the Housing Board colony. It’s the kind of shop where people come when they realize they ran out of salt or tea leaves in the middle of cooking. I keep the place stocked with all the usual stuff—bags of pulses, cooking oil, various soaps, and those big jars of pickles that people like. The Housing Board area is mostly residential, so I know most of the faces that walk through the door. I spend a lot of time dragging heavy sacks of wheat from the back room to the front. The shelves are a bit high, so I have to use an old wooden stool to reach the stuff at the top. It’s not a big supermarket or anything like that, just a regular corner store where things are piled up according to what fits where. I usually have the radio playing quietly in the background while I’m tallying up the bills. Sometimes the kids from the nearby houses come in for a single piece of chocolate or a packet of chips, and they take forever to decide which one they want. My hands are usually a bit dusty from handling the grain sacks all day. The shop stays open late because there’s always someone who forgot to buy milk for the morning. It’s steady work, and it keeps me busy from sunrise until long after dark.