Safia Silk Industries

Our place is on the second floor of a building along G.T. Road South. If you know that road in Howrah, you know how loud and crowded it gets with all the traffic, trucks, and shops. We’ve been working with silk and other textiles here for a long time. It’s a bit of an older building, so the stairs can be a bit of a climb in the heat, but the space inside is good for our looms and the cutting tables. Working with silk requires a bit of a delicate touch, which our workers are very used to by now. We spend a lot of time checking the weave and making sure the colors are exactly what they should be. It’s not a high-tech lab; it’s a workshop where you can see the thread being handled by hand. The air usually smells a bit like raw fabric and the tea we brew in the corner. We have a small window that looks out onto the main road, but mostly we are focused on the work in front of us. It gets pretty humid during the monsoon season, which affects how we handle some of the materials. We aren't a massive corporation with fancy suits, just a local industry trying to do a good job with the materials we have. Everyone here lives nearby, so it’s a bit like a small community inside the workshop.