The world’s largest retailer is permeating the complex tapestry of the only billion-people-plus market open to it If it wasn’t for last year’s extraordinary events, there would be nothing even remotely remarkable about Jayshri Hodkar’s struggle to survive as a single mother of two on the earnings of her tailoring shop, a single machine in one room of a rented house. It’s one of those tens of millions of tiny businesses you see everywhere in India. Most are so nondescript it’s hard to imagine that together they supply the wheels on which the $2.7 trillion economy runs. Their value only became clear when the wheels came off. This week last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a sudden, complete lockdown. And that’s when the Mahi tailoring center in Indore, a historic city of 3 million in central India, become important to one of the world’s richest men — 7,000 miles away in Seattle. With no customers coming to get blouses stitched, Hodkar came to a conclusion: Her shop coul...