The week that followed was a whirlwind of controlled chaos. The Patel Holdings office became a war room. Spreadsheets of component costs were taped to the walls. Samples of speakers, resistors, and capacitors from different suppliers littered every surface. The air hummed with a new kind of tension—not the fear of an external threat, but the focused pressure of creation.
Harsh and Deepak became inseparable, their world shrinking to the dimensions of a circuit board. The "Bombay Groove" wasn't just a product; it was a statement. It had to be better. Not just marginally better, but unmistakably, undeniably superior to the cheap Japanese knockoffs and the shoddy local assemblies that flooded the market.
The design was Harsh's, pulled from the deep well of his future memory—a sleek, ergonomic shape that felt modern, with a brushed aluminum faceplate instead of cheap plastic. The internal architecture was Deepak's domain. He obsessively compared capacitors, rejecting batch after batch until he found ones with the exact tolerance for rich, clear bass. He sourced thicker gauge copper wire for the internal connections, a cost that made Harsh wince but Deepak insisted was non-negotiable. "The signal is the soul, Bhaiya," he'd say, his soldering iron poised like a surgeon's scalpel. "We cannot let it get weak on the journey."
The money flowed out. ₹40,000 for the first batch of high-quality components. ₹15,000 for the custom-machined aluminum faceplates from a nervous little workshop in Kurla. Each decision was a gamble, another withdrawal from the dwindling "Arun Patel" fund.
Meanwhile, at the Kandivali plant, a quiet revolution was underway. Rahim had taken Harsh's command to heart. When Harsh and Deepak arrived a week later, they barely recognized the place. The floors, once gritty with grime, were swept clean. The workbenches gleamed, every tool laid out with military precision. The windows had been scrubbed, letting in pale, dusty sunlight.
The workers were there. Not all thirty-five, but a core group of fifteen—the most skilled, the ones Rahim trusted implicitly. They stood in a silent, nervous row, their postures straight, their eyes fixed on Harsh. They had cleaned for a chance. Now they waited to see if the chance was real.
Deepak set up a small workstation at the head of the main assembly line. He didn't address the group; he let his hands do the talking. With Rahim and his top assemblers watching intently, Deepak began to build the first prototype of the "Bombay Groove." He moved with a slow, deliberate grace, explaining each step in a low, calm voice.
"This is the capacitor. See the gold band? That is the tolerance. You must place it exactly so, with the leads trimmed to this length. Too much heat for too long, and you kill it. The sound becomes flat." He held up the soldering iron."The iron is not a hammer. It is a paintbrush. You are not joining metal; you are making a connection that must sing."
It was a masterclass. The workers, men who had been forced to rush and sabotage their own work for years, watched in rapt silence. You could see the spark of professional pride, long buried, beginning to rekindle in their eyes.
When the last connection was made, Deepak carefully fitted the device into its sleek aluminum casing and snapped it shut. He inserted a tape—a well-worn cassette of R.D. Burman classics that Sanjay had provided.
He pressed play.
The first, clear, soaring notes of "Chura Liya Hai" filled the silent factory. It wasn't just loud. It was clean. The vocals were crisp, the instrumentation distinct, the bass a deep, resonant hum you felt in your chest, not a distorted rattle. It was a sound that belonged in a showroom, not on a dusty factory floor.
The effect on the workers was electric. The nervous tension shattered, replaced by murmurs of awe. One of the older assemblers, a man with glasses thick as bottle bottoms, stepped forward, his hand outstretched. "May I?"
Deepak handed him the player. The man held it with a reverence usually reserved for religious objects. He turned it over in his hands, examining the flawless solder joints through the battery compartment, the perfect alignment of the casing. He put the headphones on. They watched as his eyes widened, and a slow, incredulous smile spread across his face. He took the headphones off and looked at Harsh, his voice thick with emotion.
"We... we made this?" he asked, though he knew they hadn't, not yet.
"No," Harsh said, his own voice tight with a sudden, unexpected surge of feeling. "But you will. And you will make it even better."
That evening, Harsh took the prototype to Priya. He found her in the college library, surrounded by textbooks. He didn't say anything, just placed the player and the headphones on the table in front of her.
She looked at him, curious, then put the headphones on. He pressed play.
He watched her face. He saw the initial curiosity, then the surprise as the quality of the sound registered. Then, something else. A slow-dawning realization. Her eyes moved from the player to his face. She took the headphones off.
"You built this?" she whispered, the library silence making the question feel momentous.
"We're building it," he corrected. "This is the first one."
She listened again, her critical, physicist's ear analyzing the sound. "The frequency response... Harsh, this is... this is incredible. It's better than my brother's Sony. Where did you... how?"
"The plant Swami owned," he said, the pride in his voice unmistakable. "The workers there. They just needed the right parts and the right reason."
Priya looked at the device, then back at him, her expression shifting from awe to something softer, more profound. It was a look he hadn't seen before. It wasn't just admiration for his hustle. It was respect.
"All this time," she said quietly, "I thought you were just... surviving. Fighting. But you're not, are you? You're actually building something."
It was the validation he didn't know he needed. The money was draining, the problems were endless, but he had taken a ruin and from it, produced this. A thing of quality. A thing of beauty.
He walked home that night with the prototype in his pocket, its weight a comforting, solid promise. The ledger still showed a terrifying financial precipice. The warehouse was still a tomb. The trucks were still unreliable.
But he held in his hand the first, tangible proof that his dream wasn't madness. It was a seed, and it had just broken through the concrete, reaching for the sun.
(Chapter End)