E-Kantipur

AUG 21 - On a recent Thursday afternoon, a man got off a taxi at New Road Gate to buy a packet of gundpak. He looked hurried as he wrestled through a horde of people lined up at a shop to buy the same thing. Get in line, said the shopkeeper, and so did the others waiting for their turn. The man told the shopkeeper he had to catch his flight to Pokhara in the next two hours. Unfortunately, other customers also had a similar problem: Most of them had to leave the Valley soon, and they had come there to buy gundpak, for which the shop has been famous for many years now.

A shop adjacent to the Gundpak Bhandar and another shop few houses away all sell the same item. But despite being in a hurry, the man quietly fell in line waiting for his turn. “Whenever I go home from Kathmandu, my parents tell me to get gundpak from this very shop. This is where my father got it for us 20 years ago,” said the man, reasoning why he wouldn’t buy it from any other shop. “I have bought gundpak from other shops, but the taste here is different.”

Gundpak Bhandar is probably the oldest store in the whole of New Road, consistently attracting customers since being established more than 50 years ago. Locals say the shop was once somewhere around the middle of New Road--close to the Munchha House--and it shifted to its current location later around 20 years ago. Owned by the Maskey family of Basantapur, the store has even prompted various others to open similar businesses around New Road. Today, the street has about five stores that sell similar items, and it’s safe to say that all of them get customers on a regular basis throughout the day just because people run out of patience to stand in queue to buy from the original store at New Road gate.

As the city gets crowded by the day, the demand for their products has increased tenfold, says Yojana Maskey, one of the owners. But the ever-growing population has also hampered their business. Due to increasing demand because of urbanisation, the store has not been able to get enough raw materials to produce adequate gundpak now. As a result, they have been forced to stop selling pushtakari, another huge hit of the store.

“Kathmandu is no longer the place it was before with abundant amounts of greenery for cattle to graze. Thus, we no longer get enough milk needed to produce these goods,” Maskey laments. “We have somehow managed but it’s not enough to meet the growing demands.”

Maskey says they could still produce pushtakari but the reputation of the shop did not allow them to produce goods with inferior raw material. “We could have sold pushtakari made from cheaper raw material, but we also have to be careful of our reputation. People complain if we cannot give them the taste that they expect.”

Most of the customers, she says, come from outside the Valley. It’s a kind of

tradition to take gundpak as souvenir from Kathmandu when people travel home. This fact is further cemented during the Dashain season, when the police have to be deputed to get the customers in line. “There are times when people have to return empty-handed as we run out of stock. We have to tell them to come the next day,” she adds.

And customers are willing to wait that extra day just for the shop’s delicacies. Anidigna Rauniyar of Gaighat says his parents always ask him if he bought the gundpak and pushtakari from the shop or not. “I don’t want to disappoint them by not living up to their expectations so I make it a point to stop by this shop every time I go home,” he says, as he joined the others in line.

Posted on: 2010-08-21 09:20

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