The Calcutta Safe Deposit Vault. (Kolkata)

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Inside the underground chambers of a non-descript office building on BBD Bag's Netaji Subhas Road, lies a piece of Kolkata's banking history. Here, in the basement of the four-storeyed structure, constructed by a Gujarati entrepreneur in 1940, Kolkata had one of its first private vaults — The Calcutta Safe Deposit Vault.

In the absence of locker facilities in banks then, it was a huge success with British citizens and business families. Seventy-five years later, the vault — probably the only privately owned one in Kolkata now — still survives.

Spread across 5,000 sqft, the vault has an astounding 8,600 lockers and three strongrooms. Dozens of safes, chests and almirahs, some of which are nearly a century-old, take up space in the strongrooms. Several lockers are still in the name of foreigners who rented them three generations ago. Around 2,000 of these lockers are now 'dead' and their holders are untraceable.

But the rest are active, says Sriram Ojha, a member of the board of management that runs the vault.