Indian Railways

Quarter No-104 in the Sonarpur Railway Quarters is where we spend our working hours. This is out in the South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, and it definitely has a suburban feel. The office is part of the residential colony, so it’s very close to the actual tracks. You can hear the trains passing by all day and night, and the whistle becomes a backdrop to everything we do. Indian Railways set this up to be close to the action. The space is a bit tight, as these quarters weren't originally meant to be offices. We have files tucked into every corner and the desks are squeezed together. It gets quite warm in the afternoons, and the old ceiling fans do their best to keep us cool. We handle a lot of the local ground-level work here. It’s a lot of manual logging and checking on the staff who live nearby. There is a real sense of community in Sonarpur because everyone knows everyone else. We don’t have a big corporate sign or a lobby. It’s just a door with a number on it. We eat our lunch together and talk about the local market prices or the train delays. It’s a humble, straightforward place to work in West Bengal. We try to keep the place organized, but with so much paper, it’s always a struggle.