Jayendrakumar Jayantilal Shah & Co

Getting to Kalbadevi every morning is a bit of a struggle with all the handcarts and people rushing around. Our office is at 101 in the Pimple Saudagar building, which is an old structure with those narrow stairs that make your knees ache if you climb them too many times. Jayendrakumar started this whole thing a long time ago. The desks are mostly covered in piles of papers and those yellow files that we keep meaning to organize better. We spend a lot of time on the phone or just talking to people who drop in without calling first. It’s not a quiet place. You can hear the bells from the temple nearby and the constant honking from the street below. We drink a lot of cutting chai throughout the day just to keep going. The walls could probably use a fresh coat of paint, but there’s never a good time to move all the furniture out. We handle a lot of the usual business stuff that people in this market need. Sometimes the electricity goes out for a few minutes and we just sit there in the dark waiting for the generator to kick in. It’s a busy life here in Mumbai, and we’ve just become part of the background of Kalbadevi. Most of our regulars know exactly where to find us, right past the spice sellers and the cloth shops. We don't have a big sign, just a small brass plate on the door.