Ambika Marble

Our spot is in Badarda, right opposite Hotel Shiv Shakti Kathiyawadi. It’s actually a good landmark because people are always stopping there for food. We can smell the spices from the kitchen while we are working in the marble yard. It’s a funny mix of smells—dhaba food and wet stone. The yard itself is pretty standard for this part of the country. We have slabs of marble lined up and a lot of scrap pieces piled in the back corner. Badarda is a place where you see a lot of traffic heading toward the city. We spend our time checking the quality of the blocks that come in from the quarries. It’s a lot of manual labor, washing down the stone so people can see the real color underneath the dust. Sometimes we sit on the edge of a block and watch the cars go by when things are a little slow. We don't have any polished speeches for our customers. They come in, look at the marble, and we tell them the price. It’s very straightforward. The hotel across the road gets busy at night, but we are usually closed and heading home by then. It’s a simple life here in Badarda, just handling stone and making sure the trucks are loaded properly for their long trips out of town. We just do the work that needs doing.