Couturewala

You can find us at S1/59 in A. P. Nagar, which is over in the Sonarpur area of Kolkata. We have been here for a good while now, doing our sewing and pattern work in this space. Kolkata is a city that really loves its clothes, especially during the festival seasons, so we stay pretty busy most months. The workspace is a bit tight because we have so many rolls of cloth and mannequins standing around in the way. It is not a shiny boutique with bright spotlights and a doorman. It is just a place where we sit down and work on different designs. Sometimes the heavy monsoon rain makes the roof quite noisy, but we just keep going with our tasks. We do not have a big staff, so everyone ends up doing a bit of everything, from picking out the right buttons to talking to the neighbors who walk in. Sonarpur is a bit of a distance away from the main city center, which we actually like because it is a bit calmer, even though getting new supplies can sometimes take us a whole afternoon in traffic. We do not use a lot of fancy words to describe what we do. We just make outfits that people want to wear. There is always a bit of thread on the floor and the smell of the steam iron in the air. We have our routine and it works for us.