Ganpati Jute Udyog

If you go to 71, Cotton Street and head up to the 1st floor, that’s where we are. Cotton Street is always a mess of people, carts, and rickshaws, so getting anything up the stairs is a real challenge. Our place smells like raw jute and old paper. It’s a heavy, earthy smell that sticks to your clothes. The rooms are high-ceilinged but very packed with bundles of jute. We have to stack them almost to the top to make everything fit. There’s a lot of shouting from the street below that comes right through the windows. We don't have air conditioning, so we just keep the big wooden shutters open. It’s a very old building with creaky floors. Most of our day is spent talking to traders and checking the quality of the sacks. My father started this years ago, and not much has changed in terms of how we do things. We use a heavy iron scale for weighing, and the ledgers are all kept in big red books. It’s a very traditional way of working. There’s always dust in the air from the fibers. We don’t have a website or anything like that; we just do business face-to-face with the people who come by. It’s busy and loud, and by the end of the day, our hands are usually pretty rough from handling the material. It’s just the way the jute business goes here.