Padmanabhaswamy Rice Mil

Our place is over at 3-6-9-9 in Madhura Puri Colony. Dilsukhnagar is always a bit of a mess with the traffic and the noise, so getting the trucks in and out of here takes some real patience. It’s just a rice mill, nothing really fancy to look at. Inside, it’s mostly big machines and piles of bags filled with grain stacked all the way to the roof. Most days it’s just me and a couple of other guys trying to keep the equipment running like it should. We spend a lot of our time cleaning out the filters and making sure the paddy is drying the right way before it gets processed. It gets extremely loud once the motors start up in the morning, but you get used to it after a week or two. Everyone around this part of the colony knows the sound. You end up with white dust all over your clothes no matter how careful you try to be. Sometimes the power goes out in the afternoon, so we just sit on the steps and wait for it to come back on. That’s just how life is in this town. We don’t have any big signs or posters, just the main gate and the smell of the grain. It’s a steady kind of job, though it definitely wears you out. We see the same faces every harvest season. They drop off the crop and we get to work. It’s mostly just lifting and moving heavy things at Padmanabhaswamy Rice Mil.