The two-storey building in central Calcutta's Bow Street has not seen a coat of paint in years. The signage above the grilled entrance reads L. Madeira & Co., Undertakers, in no-nonsense black serif.

Undertakers, as in morticians or funeral directors, or to go strictly by the dictionary - one who makes a business of carrying out the arrangements for funerals.

Dickensian? Well, then what would you say if you went through that door? The wooden door is painted blue. Not a sky blue or even a navy blue, but a dodgy azure. It opens into a dimly lit hall, stark, except for a solitary wooden cross hanging on a pale blue wall and a handcart with an empty coffin astride it. There are two rooms on either side of the hall. The one on the left looks like an office, the one on the right with the distinctive chemical smell is where the deep freeze is - to preserve the dead. The contraption itself looks a bit like a ramshackle file cabinet.

As I take the stairs to the first floor, a spooked emptiness begins to whirl in the pit of my stomach for no apparent reason. The house number is 13. Passers-by behave as if it doesn't exist. But if you look closely, they pick up pace as they pass by this building, as if outrunning death itself.

This particular business - J. Madeira & Co. - was started by Henry Joseph and Joe Charles Madeira. Now, it is called L. Madeira & Co., possibly after the last owner, Leon Madeira. The Madeiras have been undertakers for eight generations spanning 200 years.

Florence, who currently runs the place, is not a Madeira by birth; she is the widow of Leon Madeira. She is nothing like Dickens' Mr Sowerberry. She is not gaunt of face, neither does she have a coffin-shaped snuffbox. She is in her mid-thirties, dressed in a purple nightie, hair tied in a tight bun. Sitting next to her is her mother, the very chirpy Sushila Biswas. Florence refuses to be photographed - "I'm not dressed right."

The other human fixture in this place is Ashok. He is Florence's Man Friday, drives the hearse-van, handles arriving dead bodies and as is obvious, keeps his employer's counsel. But he seems to inhabit the liminal spaces of the house - the threshold, the hall, the stairs...

Florence tells you in clipped English that L. Madeira & Co. is one of the three places in the city that offer the service of storing corpses. "The other two - Peace Haven and Peace World - are mortuaries. We are the only ones who share our home with the dead."

The ground floor is for the dead and the first floor, where we were sitting, is where the family lives. Says Sushila, "I can sleep beside dead bodies too. In one instance, I actually have." Perhaps sensing an unarticulated query, the ever sharp Florence says with a laugh, "We aren't scared of dead bodies. I think dead bodies are scared of us."

L. Madeira & Co. makes coffins, digs graves, cleans, preserves and embalms dead bodies and also takes care of the funeral rites. Florence says she has "sent bodies" to Ukraine, Israel and other places. "We've sent Mr Nahoum's (of New Market's Nahoum & Sons) body to Israel. We've preserved Jyoti Basu's sister, as well as CPI(M)'s Gita Mukherjee... In 2003, a young Japanese national met with a car accident and died here. We kept her body for 22 days before it was taken to Japan. The consulate general of Japan in Calcutta sent us a certificate." The coffin used for Mother Teresa's practice funeral run was also made by L. Madeira. It is not the kind of boast one is used to hearing, but there it is.

"Being an undertaker is not easy, people say a lot of things and criticise us. But if we stop our service, do you think people could see their near and dear ones for the last time?"

Florence talks about the "huge" expenses, the hefty electricity bills she runs up from "deep freezing bodies" and then moves from complaint mode ("It's not like the government helps us with it") to evangelist mode ("There are very poor people who come to us and we serve them for free").

She makes sure you get the whole picture. She talks about how she has lost so many hands. "There used to be 27 [staff] till a few years ago, but now there are eight. People shifted to other professions." She employs men and women to separately tend to corpses - a courtesy extended to the dead by most undertakers. Her son, Leonardo, has been lending a hand - cleaning and dressing bodies - since he was six. He is 11 now.

Sushila chips in, " Log boltey hain hum dome ka paisa khaate hain, jisko jo samajhna hai samjhe (People look down on us for doing this. Let people say what they want to). We are Christians and we are doing our duty."

Bright Kafan Shop takes the first half of its name from the street it stands on - Bright Street, also in central Calcutta. As is apparent from the second half of its name - kafan is the white cloth or shroud Muslims wrap their dead in - it, too, is in the death business. Bang opposite lies the Raja Kafan Shop. And because of them, locals refer to the lane as Kafan gully.

The green signage above Bright Kafan Shop has a red patch. It reads: Open Day and Night. Ashique Ahmed, the current owner of the 100-year-old enterprise, says that the family owns two more kafan shops in other parts of the city. "We mainly cater to Muslims. But people from other communities also contact us from time to time," he says while running a pair of scissors along the length of a kafan. " Takleef hoti hai jab ye sab dekhte hain, but yahi rozi roti hai hamari (It is not as if we are immune to people's grief. But this is what earns us our bread and butter)," he said.

Ashique's shop also sells rosewater, sandalwood, surma, lohban (myrrh) - basically death service end-to-end. His visiting card reads: Full package with kabristan.

The mention of packages brings us to Anthyesti, a new-age funeral service in the city. Its founder, Shruthi Reddy, is a techie. Unlike Florence and Ashique, Shruthi's sales pitch is sharper, more in sync with the times, makes dying sound convenient even - a package for almost every social demographic. Incidentally, Bengalis are charged the lowest, because they have the least number of rituals, according to Shruthi. There is an Arya Samaji package and a Gujarati package. The Marwari package is the most expensive. Online bookings are also accepted.

"Demonetisation did not affect us," she announces with practised ease and goes on to mention a client from the UK who applauded her for accepting Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes when his mother passed away in Calcutta in November.

Unlike our other two protagonists, Shruthi did not inherit this business. She was a Java program developer quite in love with her 9-5 job. This start-up idea struck her only after a death in the family. "I saw how difficult it was to arrange everything for the last rites, especially given the emotional turmoil."

Shruthi's mother stopped talking to her for six months. But the obstacles did not end there; they continue and vary from case to case. It could be something like procuring a death certificate or the coffin turning out to be bigger than the grave or just seeing grieving families day after day. "It's a very orthodox society. People are not okay with outsourcing funeral rites, which typically the close family handles. But I think, gradually, they will understand how we make life easy. We provide comfort and the quality is never compromised," she says.

It's a different world altogether - this death business.