Venkateshwara Marbles & Granite

Our yard is at Sp-143 in the Ambattur Industrial Estate. It’s a big, dusty area filled with stacks of marble and granite slabs. If you’ve ever been to Ambattur, you know it’s mostly factories and warehouses, so it’s always loud with the sound of machinery and heavy trucks. We spend most of our time outside moving stones around with the forklift. It’s hard, physical work and your hands get rough pretty quickly. The granite comes in all sorts of colors, and we spend a lot of time just sorting through them and making sure nothing is cracked. We don’t have a fancy office, just a small cabin with a desk where we keep the receipts and take calls. The floor is always covered in stone dust no matter how much we sweep. It’s usually just a few of us working here, and we’ve gotten used to the noise of the industrial estate. In the afternoons, it gets really hot under the metal roof, so we take breaks whenever we can. People come by to look at the stones for their kitchens or floors, and we just show them what we have piled up. We don’t do a lot of talking, just show the slabs and help load them onto the trucks. It’s a basic business, but there’s always work to be done with so much stone moving in and out. It's a heavy job but someone has to do it. We stay until the last truck is loaded.