Agarwal's order for twenty units was a starter's pistol shot. The quiet, focused energy that had filled the Kandivali plant during the prototype phase vanished, replaced by the frantic, clattering chaos of a real production deadline.
The problem wasn't will. Rahim and his fifteen reassembled workers were fervent, their pride fiercely tied to this second chance. The problem was the gulf between crafting one perfect device and manufacturing twenty identical ones.
The first crisis hit before they'd even assembled five units.
"It's the capacitors," Rahim said, his voice tight with frustration. He held up two boards. To Harsh's eye, they looked identical. "Batch number 341 from our supplier. The tolerance is off. Just by a fraction. But it's enough. It causes a low-level hum in the left channel on every third or fourth unit. You can only hear it during quiet passages, but it is there."
Deepak took the boards, hooking them up to his oscilloscope. The green line on the screen for the good board was a clean, steady wave. For the other, a faint, jagged ripple ran through it—the visual signature of the hum. "He's right," Deepak said, his face grim. "The entire batch is contaminated."
The entire batch. One hundred capacitors. ₹4,000 worth of components, wasted. And worse, a day lost.
"There is no time to wait for a new shipment," Rahim said, the stress etching lines on his face. "The deadline..."
Harsh made a decision. "Scrap the batch. Deepak, get on the phone. Call every component supplier in the city. I don't care if you have to pay a premium for a taxi to bring them. We need a hundred new capacitors by tomorrow morning."
It was a ₹10,000 solution to a ₹4,000 problem. The math was terrible. But the math of missing their first major order was catastrophic.
The next day, the new capacitors arrived. The line started again. Crisis two hit at noon.
The custom-machined aluminum faceplates, their pride and joy, were arriving from the Kurla workshop. But the drilling for the play and stop buttons was off by a millimeter on a dozen of them. The buttons either jammed or rattled loosely in their housings.
"Aesthetic," the foreman from Kurla had shrugged when confronted. "Still works, no? You want perfect, pay double. Go to a German machine shop."
They didn't have time or money for double. Sanjay, in a fit of desperate ingenuity, drove to the workshop and spent the afternoon with the foreman, a packet of expensive cigarettes serving as a lubricant. Together, they hand-filed the misaligned holes on the spot, a painstaking, imperfect fix that left the edges slightly rough. It was a compromise that would have made the prototype-stage Deepak physically ill. The production-stage Deepak just nodded, his jaw tight, and said, "We'll inspect each one. We'll use the best for the Agarwal order."
The human cost was the hardest to bear. The workers, so eager at the start, began to flag under the relentless pressure. A veteran assembler named Mrs. Iyer, whose hands were usually steadier than a rock, mis-soldered a connection in her fatigue, frying an entire main board. She didn't cry. She just sat at her bench, staring at her hands as if they had betrayed her, until Rahim gently moved her to packaging duty.
Harsh was everywhere. He wasn't a CEO; he was a crisis manager. He fetched chai. He ran components from one end of the line to the other. He settled a heated argument between two workers about the correct polarity of a diode. The sleek vision of the "Bombay Groove" was being beaten into existence not by a smooth process, but by sheer, dogged force of will.
The final, back-breaking blow came on the evening of the sixth day. They had eighteen perfect units. Two more to go. The last of the hand-filed faceplates were being screwed on when Sanjay, who was doing a final audio check on each unit, held one to his ear and frowned.
"Bhaiya," he called out, his voice weary. "Listen to this."
He handed the unit to Harsh. The music was clear, the bass rich. But there it was. A faint, almost imperceptible whirring sound underneath the music. The sound of a slightly off-center flywheel in the tape mechanism.
It was the kind of flaw ninety-nine out of a hundred customers would never notice. But Agarwal was the one-in-a-hundred. He was buying these for his most important clients. He would notice. And his disappointment would be a thousand times more damaging than Goyal's rejection.
A silence fell over the production line. They all heard it. It was the sound of their collective failure.
Rahim closed his eyes. "The mechanism housings. From the new supplier. I thought the tolerance felt... loose."
They had two choices. Ship them and hope Agarwal didn't notice, or tear all eighteen units apart to replace the mechanism—a four-hour job that would make them miss the delivery deadline.
Harsh looked around the room at the exhausted, defeated faces. These people had given him everything. They had cleaned the filth, worked double shifts, and poured their skill into this order. To ask them to tear it all down now...
"Pack them," he said, his voice hoarse.
A collective, relieved sigh went through the room. Sanjay began to look for the boxes.
"Pack them carefully," Harsh continued. "Then, everyone, take a break. Get some dinner."
The workers began to move, the tension easing.
Deepak looked at Harsh, a question in his eyes. Harsh met his gaze and gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head.
When the workers had shuffled out, heading to the nearby dhaba, Harsh, Deepak, Sanjay, and Rahim were left alone in the quiet factory.
"Rahim," Harsh said quietly. "Show me how to open the casing."
For the next three hours, the four of them worked under the harsh fluorescent lights. They didn't speak. They moved with a grim, shared purpose, carefully prying open each of the eighteen beautifully packaged units, replacing the faulty tape mechanisms with spares from the prototype batch, and resealing them with a care that bordered on the reverential.
Their hands grew sore. Their backs ached. But with each unit they fixed, the heavy weight of compromise lifted.
When the last one was repaired, repackaged, and placed back in its box, the first light of dawn was tinting the sky outside the grimy windows.
They were exhausted, covered in grease and solder, but the eighteen boxes sitting on the workbench were perfect.
Harsh looked at his team—the technician, the salesman, the foreman. They weren't employees. They were comrades.
"We didn't just build players," Harsh said, his voice raw with fatigue. "We built a standard."
It was the most expensive lesson yet. They had spent nearly ₹1,00,000 and a week of their lives to earn ₹44,000. They were deeper in the hole than ever.
But as Sanjay loaded the boxes into the truck for delivery, none of them felt like they had lost. They had passed through production hell, and they had come out the other side, scarred but intact.
The machine was broken, the process was a mess, and they were running on fumes.
But it worked. They could build them. And they would build them right.
(Chapter End)