Janta Brick Field

Our place is out in Parorpar, over in the Tapsikhata area near Birpara. If you’re looking for Janta Brick Field, you just follow the road past the post office and you'll see the stacks. It’s a wide-open space where we set everything out to dry. The ground is often dusty in the summer and a bit of a mess when the monsoon hits. We spend a lot of time watching the sky. If it looks like rain, everyone starts moving fast to cover the unbaked bricks. It’s a lot of manual labor, bending over and stacking all day. My back usually aches by Tuesday, but you get used to it after the first few years. We have some tea together in the mornings before the real heat kicks in. It’s quiet out here mostly, except for when the tractors are running. We don’t really do much advertising. People just know we’re here at the edge of the village. The soil around Birpara is good for what we do. We just take it out of the ground, shape it, and let the fire do the rest. It’s a simple cycle that we've followed for ages. Sometimes we have to fix the chimney or clear out old debris from the site. It’s just us out here, working with the dirt and the seasons. There isn’t much more to it than that. We just try to get the work done before it gets too dark to see the road home.