Direction seekers: Middle of afternoon not a good time to ask for direction

Having moved to Santiniketan in 2003, from Mumbai, I had started a small crafts store in 2004. After the first year in a tiny place, we managed to move to a reasonably large bungalow and have stayed there ever since. Meanwhile, there has been an increase in both the number of crafts that we work with and the number of artisans that we engage. But we have not needed to look for a larger space to house our shop.

The shop is in an otherwise quiet residential area, quite a bit recessed from the main market road and can easily be missed if a person is not specifically looking for it. We have no signage leading to the store and no heavy duty lights on “look at me” signboards. Since much of our custom is word of mouth and now through repeat customers, this low-key existence has worked. A personal dislike for the smells and lights of shopping malls has probably made me go to the other extreme. 

Many of the shop assistants that I recruited were initially skeptical about the fortunes of this badly lit, not advertised shop in a quiet bylane, but a few days in our shop convinced them that they may not lose their jobs soon. Most of the people who walk in come to buy and that currently means work for over 150 artisans.

Anyone familiar with Santiniketan will know that like any other small town, downtown Santinketan is an area of not more than 1 km radius. And for a small town of this size, 14 years is a long time. So almost every able bodied resident who travel in and around town, or tourists who visit often, know where the shop is located.

Many of my friends now living all over India invariably tell their friends visiting Santiniketan about us and our shop. I often get calls to ask me where the shop is, what the hours are. I answer patiently even if it is in the midst of my afternoon nap.

Once I go back to sleep I am often woken up again by the same voice. “Hello, we are searching for your shop but people are saying it has been shut for a while”. It is difficult to explain to tourists from out of Bengal that the middle of the afternoon is not a good time to ask for directions.

Also unlike other stores in Santiniketan that give T-shirts and commissions to auto and toto (electric versions of autos) drivers and taxi drivers we do not do any of that. So if they are asked for directions to the store they often say that we have shut down hoping they may interest unsuspecting tourists to go to other stores, which might reward them for getting them customers.

What becomes truly challenging is when friends’ friends call you for directions. The younger generation, well armed as they are with their GPS, poses less of a challenge. But their parents often require much direction giving on the phone. Most of those who call immediately assume that I am at shop or that the shop is located in my house and are rather disappointed when I tell them I am at home but can give them directions on phone.

Sometimes we are successful in steering them to the destination but quite often I have to request one of the shop assistants to fetch them from a nearby location.

But sometimes even that doesn’t work. Recently when somebody called for directions I asked them where they were so that I could tell them how to get to the shop and they replied “we are now in a toto”.