Beads N Beads

If you walk behind the Bikaner Wala in Punjabi Bagh Extension, you’ll find us. It’s a bit of a maze back here. We have thousands of these little things. Beads of all sizes. They come in bags and we have to sort them into these plastic bins. It’s a lot of sitting and looking at small details. My eyes get tired by the afternoon. We have some shelves that are getting a bit old, and the floor is usually covered in a few stray beads that escaped. People come in looking for something specific for a dress or a piece of jewelry they are making at home. We just point them to the right corner. It’s not a quiet place because of the traffic outside, but inside we just focus on the colors. Sometimes we get a new shipment and the whole place is a mess for three days. We don't have a computer system that tracks everything perfectly, we mostly just know where things are by memory. The lighting in the back is a bit flicker-y sometimes. It’s a small shop, really. Just enough space to walk between the rows. We drink a lot of tea while we work. If you need something very particular, you might have to dig through a few boxes. It is what it is. We’ve been at this address, 25/15, for a good while now and the locals know us. The dust settles on the jars but the beads inside stay bright.