Laxmi Venkatesh Kirana

If you walk down Sardar Patel Road into Kachi Bazar, you’ll find us tucked in among the other shops. Laxmi Venkatesh Kirana is basically a room full of everything you might need for your kitchen. We have big open bags of grains and rows of jars filled with spices that make the air smell strong. The space is tight, and we often have to stack cardboard boxes on top of each other to make room for new stock. It’s a bit of a maze sometimes. Customers come in with their handwritten lists, and we go around picking out the items. It gets really loud in the bazaar, especially in the evenings when everyone is finishing work and heading home to cook. We don’t have fancy displays or anything like that. It’s just wooden shelves and old counters. Sometimes the inventory gets a little mixed up, but we fix it eventually when things slow down. We’ve been here at this spot for quite some time, so we know which brands the local families prefer and which ones stay on the shelf too long. It’s just a regular kirana store. We try to keep things fresh and move the stock quickly so nothing sits too long in the heat. The floor is concrete and a bit worn down from all the heavy bags being dragged across it. We don’t mind. It’s just a place of business. Every morning we roll up the heavy iron shutter and start again. That’s our life here in the middle of the market.