The village shop, the hatti or kiryana, sells everything and sells most of it on credit, recorded in a notebook and settled at harvest.
The shopkeeper was traditionally from a trading caste and was in a specific relation to the farming households: creditor, information point and, in a bad year, the person to be avoided.
The account book, the bahi, is the household's actual financial record and is more complete than anything the household keeps itself.
Credit at the shop, credit from the arhtiya at the mandi, credit from the cooperative society and credit from a relative abroad make up rural Punjab's financial system, and only one of those appears in any official statistic.
The shop is also where a village's news is exchanged and where the men who are not at the satth are standing.
Modern retail has reached the towns and not the villages, and the hatti is still the most common commercial institution in Punjab by number.
The hatti carries flour, oil, salt, tea, soap, biscuits and mobile recharge, and it runs on credit recorded in a notebook and settled at harvest.
The shopkeeper is often not from the landowning caste, and the shop was historically one of very few non-agricultural livelihoods in a village.
What is replacing it is the town supermarket and the delivery app, and the notebook credit is being replaced by a digital payment, which does not wait for the harvest.