The Corner Shelf

When Anil finally unlocked the door of his little stationery shop, he thought the hard part was over. It had only begun.

The first surprise was overhead. Rent, electricity, the fee for the card machine, the insurance nobody warned him about — the numbers piled up before he had sold a single pen. His savings shrank a little faster than he liked.

To survive, he had to think about markup. If a notebook cost him forty rupees, what could he charge without scaring people off? Too little and he lost money; too much and the shop down the street won. He settled on a modest margin and hoped volume would carry him.

Then came the matter of supply. His main vendor, a cheerful woman who delivered every Tuesday, offered better prices if he ordered in bulk. But bulk meant risk, so he started small and paid attention to what actually sold.

By the end of the first month, Anil had learned to take inventory obsessively, counting what was left on each shelf after closing, jotting numbers in a battered notebook. The corner shelf of fountain pens, he noticed, never moved.

An older customer taught him the last lesson. She picked up a pen, examined it, and cheerfully began to haggle, insisting the price was too high. Anil almost refused on principle — then remembered the pens had sat untouched for weeks. He met her halfway, and she left smiling, promising to return.

That evening he crossed the fountain pens off his reorder list and, for the first time, felt like a shopkeeper rather than a man guessing in the dark.