Pashmina

Stall 41 sells pashminas, which it does not, and scarves, which it does.

Nusrat has explained the distinction perhaps four thousand times and has long since stopped minding. A real pashmina is goat. What she sells is a viscose blend from a wholesaler in Leicester, and it is soft and it drapes and it costs nine pounds, and she says so, out loud, unprompted, to every customer, which is not a normal sales technique and which is the reason stall 41 has outlasted every other unit on the row.

She has eleven designs. She has had the same eleven designs since 2003.

The market has views on this. The market has views on everything, but on this it is united: eleven designs is not a range, it is a hobby, and Nusrat should have expanded years ago into bags, or jewellery, or those phone cases.

Nusrat has considered bags. Nusrat has considered bags roughly annually for twenty-two years and has concluded, roughly annually, that bags are not the business she is in.

Here is the business she is in.

A woman comes to stall 41 in the second week of November looking for something to wear to a wedding. She is not sure about the neckline. She has, in fact, been not sure about the neckline for a fortnight, and has told nobody, because it is a small thing and everyone is busy.

Nusrat looks at the dress on the phone. Nusrat says: the grey, not the blue, and wear it back rather than forward, and she will look — Nusrat is very specific about this — like she chose the dress rather than the dress chose her.

Nine pounds.

The woman comes back in March about a christening.

That is the business. Twenty-two years of it. Eleven designs is enough because eleven designs is not the point; the point is that there is somewhere on this row where a person can arrive uncertain about a neckline and leave sorted, and where nobody will make them feel foolish for the fact that it mattered.

Nusrat knows what her regulars wear. She knows what suits them, which is different, and she knows what they think suits them, which is different again and is the hard part.

She has told perhaps two hundred women not to buy anything.

This is not modesty. It is that the grey does not work with everything and saying so costs nine pounds today and buys twenty-two years, and Nusrat did that arithmetic in about 2005 and has never revisited it.

The market is being redeveloped.

They have been saying this since 2018 and this time there are drawings. The new units are smaller and cost more and there is a document about "curated retail offer" that Nusrat has read twice and understood perfectly, because she has been in retail for twenty-two years and knows what that phrase is for.

She is sixty-three. She could stop.

Her son thinks she should stop. Her son is thirty-four and works in logistics and is a good boy and has run the numbers and the numbers say stop, and he is right, and he has shown her a spreadsheet.

Last Tuesday a woman came in about a funeral.

Not for a scarf. She said she needed a scarf, and she looked at the grey for a while, and then she stopped looking at it and stood at the stall with her hands on the counter and did not say anything for some time.

Nusrat waited. There is no technique for this. You just do not fill it.

After a bit the woman said her mother had died on Friday and she did not know how to do any of it and she had come out for a scarf because it was the only thing on the list she thought she could manage.

She was at the stall forty minutes.

She bought the grey. Nusrat did not charge her, and the woman noticed at the bus stop and came back, and Nusrat took the nine pounds because taking it was kinder than not.

Her son is right about the numbers.

She has not told him yet that she is going to take a unit in the new market.