Malik Provisional Store

Running Malik Provisional Store in Shah Faisal Colony keeps us pretty busy throughout the year. We are located in the Ellahi Bagh area of Buchpora here in Srinagar. When the winter comes, it gets really cold, and we spend a lot of time huddled near the small heater between serving customers. The shop is a place where people from the colony come to grab their daily necessities. We keep things like tea, cooking oil, and lentils. It’s not a big supermarket, just a local store where we know almost everyone by name. Sometimes the electricity goes out and we have to use candles or a torch to find things on the back shelves. The road outside can get a bit muddy when it rains or snows, so we’re always mopping the floor to keep it somewhat clean. We don't have any complicated systems for keeping track of things, mostly just memory and a small notebook for the regular accounts. It’s a quiet life for the most part, except when the morning milk delivery arrives and everyone wants their packets at once. We do our best to keep the shelves full, but sometimes the transport from the main city takes longer than expected. It’s just a neighborhood shop where we try to be helpful to the people living nearby in Buchpora. We’ve been at this spot for a long time and seen the kids in the colony grow up and start their own families.