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After 52 years, Aziz & Company closing doors for good

At just 17 and a new mother, Zubeda Ujjainwala was told to go to university and focus on her education rather than help her husband, Aziz, run a newly opened store in Ottawa in 1965.

A relative told her she could hire a babysitter to watch her daughter while she studied. But Ujjainwala, a newcomer to Canada from her native India, didn't even know what the term babysitter meant at the time. Instead, she ignored the advice and chose the entrepreneurial path, raising her kids in the store at Bank and Gilmour.

Her kids were fed in the store, had their diapers changed on the counter, and took naps while the parents tended the cash register, day in and day out.

Aziz & Company is a Centretown success story, serving the customers for more than five decades. But in October, the Bank Street staple will close its doors for good.

"It feels like losing a child. Because to me, I gave birth to it," Ujjainwala told CBC Radio's All in a Day on Friday.

Expo '67 a boom for Bank Street shop

She said business was slow in the first few years, but later picked up when Expo '67 came around.

"Then, of course, the hippies came. They made my day. Well, they made money, anyway," she said, laughing.

Standing at the corner of Bank and Gilmour convincing passersby to come inside the shop and making upwards of 20 cups of tea for customers a day are what kept bringing people back to the store, she said.

The store's current owner, daughter Sheena Zain, recently decided to close the store in the fall — a decision she said she made after months of meditation. Doing so now will allow her to spend more time with her mother as she gets older.

"She sacrificed her ability to travel, her ability to have nice things, her ability to do what she wants and come and go as she pleases so that her kids could have whatever she could provide them with," Zain said. "We all went to school on the bank of mom and dad."

Store hosting thank-you event Saturday

The first thing Zain wants to do is compile a video library of her mother's recipes that she said she's taken for granted over the years. But, more importantly, she wants her mother to travel the country while she still can.

For Zain, closing the store now is also a chance to honour her mother.

"She opened this. It was her idea as a young woman … it should close in her lifetime," Zain said.

"People have been coming in, 10, 20 a day to say thank you. And it's been incredibly moving and I've been very privileged to be on the coattails of what she started to receive that gratitude, but it's hers. And she should see it."

On Saturday, the mother and daughter will host a "Chai and Goodbye" event from 12 to 5 p.m. to thank their customers.