S S Fabrication

S S Fabrication is tucked away at Shop No. 59, or 90-A as some people call it, on Chellapan Street in Katoor. If you come by, you’ll probably hear the grinding of metal before you even see the shop. The place is full of iron scraps, welding machines, and long pipes leaning against the walls. I’ve lived and worked around Katoor for a long time, and Chellapan Street is always humming with some kind of activity. My hands are almost always black with soot or metal dust. We do all the cutting and joining right there on the shop floor. It’s not a clean place, but it’s where things get built. There’s a specific smell of hot metal and ozone that stays in your clothes long after you go home at night. I have a small stool in the corner where I sit to have my tea, but mostly I’m standing over a workbench. The light from the welding torch is bright, so we use those handheld masks that are getting a bit worn out now. People bring in broken gates or ask us to make frames for windows. It’s loud, it’s hot, and there are sparks flying everywhere, but that’s just a normal day at Shop 59. We don’t have a fancy office; we just have our tools and a lot of heavy lifting to do every single morning. It is hard work but we are used to the noise and the heat by now.