Pukhrayan Brick Field

You can find us out in Haldharpur village, right near where the railway crossing is. If you’re standing in the field, you can hear the trains going by all day, which makes the ground shake a little bit sometimes. It’s a large open space where we do all the brick making and drying. The kiln is always going when it’s the right season, and there’s a lot of smoke and heat around the area. We spend most of our time out in the sun, checking on the stacks of bricks to see if they’ve dried enough to move. It’s a muddy job when it rains, and we usually have to stop everything then. Kanpur gets quite cold in the winter and very hot in the summer, so our work schedule changes with the weather quite a bit. We have a small shed where we keep the records and take a break for tea when we can. The road leading to the crossing isn't always the smoothest, so the tractors have to go slow when they’re loaded up with bricks. It’s a lot of manual labor, digging the clay and setting the molds by hand. We don't use any high-tech machines, just old-fashioned hard work. People from the nearby villages know us well because we’ve been at this spot for years. It’s just a simple brick field, nothing fancy to see here, just stacks of red clay. It keeps us busy enough throughout the seasons.