The eight hundred rupees were a burning hole in Harsh's pocket, a tangible weight of potential that demanded action. The solitary triumph of crossing a thousand rupees had faded, replaced by a cold, pressing reality. There was a ceiling to working alone, a limit defined by the number of hours in a day and the endurance of his own two hands. To shatter that ceiling, he needed to evolve from a lone craftsman into something more. He needed a system.
His first attempt at scaling was a lesson in humility, delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Flush with cash and confidence, he'd marched into Chor Bazaar and targeted a mountain of discarded radios at a stall known for moving volume. The dealer, a man named Joseph with a gold-capped tooth and a laugh like grinding gravel, saw his eagerness and pounced.
"For you, my friend? Special price," Joseph had said, slapping a crate of dusty units. "All from good homes. Just need a little love."
Harsh, seduced by the prospect of bulk, paid the man's asking price without his usual haggling fervor. The victory felt immense as he hauled the crate back to his spot. The feeling lasted exactly as long as it took to open the first few units. "A little love" was a catastrophic understatement. They were hollowed-out corpses, picked clean of anything valuable—copper wire, magnets, speakers. He'd bought a crate of plastic shells and broken dreams. The financial loss was sharp, but the blow to his ego was sharper. The market had reminded him that ambition without street-smarts was just a faster way to fail.
The defeat sat like a bad meal in his gut for a full day. But Harsh Patel was a man who metabolized failure into fuel. He didn't see a loss; he saw data. The strategy was wrong. He couldn't act like a wholesaler; he had to think like a guerrilla.
He abandoned the idea of one big, glorious purchase. Instead, he became a ghost, a persistent, observant specter in the market. For two days, he didn't buy a single thing. He watched. He noted which smaller, less flashy dealers the established repairmen frequented. He wasn't looking for the cheapest; he was looking for the most consistent. He found her tucked in a quieter corner: Meena, a woman with sharp eyes and a no-nonsense demeanor, who ran a stall specializing in audio components. Her piles were messy, but her descriptions were brutally honest.
He started small. Five radios one day. Three tape decks the next. He haggled with her, but fairly, respecting her knowledge. He paid promptly. He was building a different kind of currency: reliability. In return, she began to set aside devices with specific, repairable faults—a cracked casing but intact mechanics, a faulty output jack but a perfect drive belt. It was a slower, less dramatic strategy, but it built a pipeline of quality raw material.
The second part of his new equation was manpower. The two boys, Raju and Vijay, were scrawny fixtures near the fabric dyers, their eyes always scanning for a chance to earn a coin carrying packages or fetching chai. Harsh approached them the day after his disaster with Joseph, the lesson raw and immediate.
"New work," he stated, his voice leaving no room for negotiation. "Not running. Sorting. Proper job."
They looked at him, a mixture of skepticism and hunger on their young faces. "What sorting?" Vijay asked, the more cautious of the two.
Harsh led them to the growing pile of devices from Meena. He picked up a gutted radio. "See this? Speaker. It works or it doesn't." He produced a small battery, touching the wires to the terminals. A satisfying crackle emerged. "Working ones, here." He held up a circuit board. "These little metal things? Transistors. You learn what the good ones look like. They go in this tin. You break it, you lose it. You steal…" He let the sentence hang, his gaze flat and hard. "You don't work again."
Then he offered the deal: a daily wage. Ten rupees each, paid every sunset, rain or shine. Plus a one-rupee bonus for every twenty working components they sorted. Their eyes widened. It was a fortune. It was stability.
The first day was pure chaos. A good speaker was tossed into the dead pile. A handful of precious transistors were swept away with the trash. But Harsh didn't yell. He stopped, showed them again, his patience a thin but steady wire. He wasn't just hiring hands; he was programming a system.
Within a week, a new rhythm was born. Harsh would return from his strategic morning buys. Raju and Vijay would have the previous day's haul sorted into neat, organized piles—working components, dead components, specific parts for specific models. The transformation was revolutionary. Harsh's time was freed from mindless sorting and put to use on what he did best: the skilled soldering, the complex diagnostics, the strategic sales. His output didn't just increase; it exploded.
He was no longer a lone repair boy. He was a manager. A foreman of a tiny, grimy factory. The hiss of his soldering iron was now the melody over the percussion of components being sorted by his two apprentices.
One evening, as he handed them their daily wage and a small stack of bonus rupees, Raju looked up, his usual streetwise bravado replaced by a flicker of something else. Pride.
"The other boys," he said, jerking his head toward the market. "They see us. They ask what we do. They say it looks… professional."
Harsh just gave a curt nod, but the word echoed in his mind. Professional. He looked at his operation—the organized chaos, the production line, the two boys who now had a vested interest in its success. It was small, it was born from the streets, but it was a system. It was replicable. It was a foundation.
The eight hundred rupees had been spent, but they had been transformed. They were no longer just cash. They were inventory. They were infrastructure. They were the first bricks of something much larger.
But as he looked at the hungry pace of his new operation, a cold knot of understanding tightened in his stomach. This efficient new beast consumed broken electronics at an alarming rate. His carefully cultivated supply from Meena's stall would soon be a drop in the ocean.
The real source, the motherlode, lay elsewhere. In the whispered stories of railway scrap auctions, where pallets of forgotten electronics were sold by the ton to the highest bidder. To play in that league, he would need more than a system and two helpers.
He would need a much, much larger war chest. And the nerve to swim with far bigger, far hungrier sharks. The game was accelerating, and the stakes were about to be raised higher than he had ever imagined.