The Mumbai dawn was not a gentle awakening but a sudden ignition. One moment, the sky was a deep indigo, the next it was slashed with streaks of orange and pink, the light catching on the smoke and dust that perpetually hung over the city. Harsh stepped out into the cool, pre-heat stillness, his senses already sharpened. Today wasn't about buying or selling. Today was about intelligence gathering.
He left his bag of tools and repaired devices at home. Today, his only weapons were his eyes and his ears.
His first target was Chor Bazaar. Even at this hour, it was stirring to life. The air here was different from Bhuleshwar—thicker, older. It smelled of dust collected over decades, of old leather, and the faint, metallic tang of rusting metal. He moved through the cramped lanes not as a customer, but as a ghost, absorbing everything.
He watched a transaction between a hardened scrap dealer and a young, nervous boy. The dealer offered ten rupees for a sack of components. The boy hesitated, then accepted. The dealer's eyes flickered with victory before his face settled back into a bored mask. Harsh made a mental note: That dealer lowballs. Find the boys before they reach him.
He saw the flow of goods—where the carts came from, which alleys were used for larger, bulkier items. He noted the specific stalls that specialized in certain brands of electronics, their proprietors experts in Sony or National or Philips. This wasn't a random junkyard; it was a library, and each stall was a shelf of specialized knowledge.
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Lamington Road was a different beast entirely. If Chor Bazaar was a museum, Lamington Road was a frantic, high-stakes trading floor. The noise was a physical assault—a cacophony of blaring demo tapes, shouted negotiations, and the constant revving of scooters trying to navigate the choked streets.
Here, Harsh didn't look at the goods; he watched the people. He stood for nearly an hour outside a bustling components shop, observing the owner. The man, Mr. Agarwal, had a system. He served the big clients first—the established repair shops from across the city who placed large, regular orders. He was polite, efficient. Then came the small fry—the individual repairmen like Ramesh-ji. For them, his patience was thinner, his prices slightly higher.
But Harsh saw the crack in the system. Mr. Agarwal hated downtime. Between big clients, he'd glance around, looking for anyone, anything, to keep the cash flow moving. He'd sell a single resistor to a schoolboy just to make a sale.
He values constant action, Harsh deduced. A small, quick order between big ones might get a better price.
He noticed something else. The shops here weren't just selling to end customers. They were wholesalers. They sold boxes of resistors, spools of wire, stacks of circuit boards by the kilo. This was the source. Bhuleshwar was the retail outlet; Lamington Road was the distributor.
A plan began to form, audacious and clear. He couldn't keep buying broken devices one by one. He needed to buy components in bulk. He needed to manufacture repairs.
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Returning to Bhuleshwar felt like coming home to a familiar battlefield. The sounds and smells were comforting in their known chaos. But his perspective had shifted. He no longer saw just stalls; he saw a network.
He saw which repairmen were artists, taking pride in their work, and which were butchers, just slapping things together for a quick rupee. He saw the subtle hierarchy—the older, established men at the prime corners, the younger, hungrier ones like himself pushed to the edges.
And he saw the predators.
He noticed Gopi, the boy who had confronted him, not working, but watching. He was leaning against a wall, observing the stall of an elderly repairman who was struggling with a complex radio. Gopi wasn't learning; he was waiting. When the old man finally threw up his hands in frustration, Gopi sauntered over. Harsh couldn't hear the words, but he saw the exchange. Gopi offered a pittance for the now-"unfixable" radio. The old man, defeated, accepted.
Gopi didn't take it to a workbench. He carried it down the lane and sold it, still broken, to another man for a small profit. He wasn't a repairman. He was a scavenger, a parasite feeding on the frustration of others.
Harsh stored the information away. Gopi wasn't a direct threat to his business, but he was a symptom of the ecosystem's ruthlessness.
As the sun began to dip, casting long shadows through the market, Harsh found a quiet spot near a chai stall. He didn't need a journal. The map was now etched in his mind.
Chor Bazaar: The source of raw materials. Buy in the early morning from the source, before the scavengers get to it. Lamington Road: The source of components. Target Agarwal's shop between big orders for best prices. Bhuleshwar: The marketplace. Sell value, not just function. Quality will beat the scavengers.
He sipped the sweet, spicy chai, the warmth spreading through him. The three markets were no longer separate entities. They were three points on a triangle, and he was now the only one who could see all three points at once.
He had the blueprint. The next step wasn't to make a sale. It was to build a supply chain. The game had just evolved from checkers to chess. And for the first time, Harsh felt he could see several moves ahead.