Shamon Engg. Corporation

Starting the day at 227/A, Rash Behari Avenue is always a bit of a rush. You can hear the trams and the cars outside before we even get the shutters up. Shamon Engg. Corporation has been sitting here for a while now, right in the middle of all that noise. The shop isn’t fancy or anything. There are shelves reaching up to the ceiling filled with all sorts of engineering parts, nuts, bolts, and tools that have been sitting there gathering a bit of dust. Most days it’s just us handling the orders and making sure the stock levels don’t get too low, which is harder than it sounds. People come in with broken parts from some old machine and ask if we have a match. Sometimes we do, sometimes we have to look through the old ledgers to see where we can get it. It’s a lot of manual work, lifting heavy crates and moving things around to find that one specific valve or pipe fitting. The afternoon heat gets pretty bad, so the old ceiling fan just pushes the warm air around while we drink tea and wait for the next customer. It’s a simple life here on the avenue. We don’t have a big office or a reception desk, just a counter where the wood is worn down from years of people leaning on it. You get used to the grease on your hands and the smell of metal after a few hours.