Akshar Cloth

You can find Akshar Cloth in the cellar of Gopal Tower, which is No. 21. Station Road in Maninagar is always packed with people, so being in the basement actually stays a little cooler than being up on the street. You have to come down the stairs, and it takes a second for your eyes to adjust to the light. It’s a long room filled with stacks of cloth from floor to ceiling. It smells like fresh cotton and a bit of old paper. We’ve been in this cellar for quite a while. We don't have much in the way of windows, so we rely on those bright tube lights to see what we are doing. It can get a bit loud when the trains go by nearby or when the traffic on Station Road gets heavy. We spend our days measuring out fabric and talking to the regular customers who’ve been coming to us for years. There’s a small desk where we keep the accounts, and it’s usually buried under a pile of receipts. Sometimes we have to move twenty bolts of cloth just to find the one someone asked for. It’s a lot of heavy lifting and our backs feel it by the end of the day. We don't use any fancy computer systems; most things are written down in our big ledger books. It’s a simple way of doing things, but it works for us down here.