The poem opens with the speaker (the "Singh" of the title) talking about his responsibilities in his father's shop. Right away, readers will notice how the poem's phonetic spellings (things like "ov" and "vunt") evoke an Indian accent. While readers don't yet know that the poem actually takes place in the UK, some context is helpful for understanding what's happening here:
- In the U.K., shops like the one described in the poem are generally known as corner shops. From the '60s onwards, these were often owned by Indian immigrants and their descendants (Daljit Nagra's parents, who immigrated to Britain in the 1950s, ran a corner shop in the northern town of Sheffield).
The poem implies that Singh's father is a hardworking man, giving that this store is just "one" of many that he owns and that he expects his son to work 12-hour days without a break.
Readers can also tell a lot about the speaker himself from these lines. For one thing, the word "daddy" makes him seem a bit young and immature. And it's clear that he doesn't really care for his job. Line 2 captures the dull drudgery of running the shop through the diacope (the quick repetition) of "9 O'clock":
from 9 O'clock to 9 O'clock
The repetition of the phrase captures the repetitiveness of Singh's days—getting up early, selling produce, restocking, going to bed, and so on—and sounds that much more boring than something like "for twelve hours." But the speaker also leads a kind of double-life. In line 4, he says:
but ven nobody in, I do di lock -
In other words, once the shop is empty, he closes and locks the door. The caesura, the first real pause in the poem thus far, indicates that something is changing—that there's much more to learn about Singh's life. That is, the locked door signals a transgression between two very different worlds. Readers will see what happens after this door-locking in the next stanza.