Chapter 1: The Monsoon That Wasn't Supposed to Happen
Mumbai, June 2002.
The rain should have come by now.
That was the first thing Arjun Mehra noticed as he stood at the edge of the crowded Andheri railway platform, sweat clinging to his shirt, the air thick with heat and impatience. June in Mumbai without rain felt wrong—like a line of code missing a semicolon. Everything still ran, but you knew it would crash soon.
Arjun looked down at his hands.
They were younger than he remembered. No faint scars from years of keyboard burns and caffeine-fueled deadlines. No slight tremor from too much coffee and too little sleep. Just smooth skin, long fingers, and the restless energy of eighteen.
Eighteen.
He exhaled slowly.
This wasn't a dream. He had already tested that theory—pinched himself, splashed water on his face at a grimy public tap, even tried recalling something he shouldn't know if this were real. The result had been terrifyingly consistent.
He remembered everything.
The stock market booms.
The IT explosion.
The telecom revolution.
The rise of cheap data.
The startups that would one day be worth billions—and the ones that would burn to ash.
And most importantly…
He remembered how India would change.
Arjun Mehra, thirty-six years old, senior computer science engineer, product architect, burnout survivor—had somehow died in a nameless accident and woken up in Mumbai, 2002, inside his own eighteen-year-old body.
A body that wasn't originally his.
This Arjun Mehra was supposed to be an average middle-class boy from a chawl in Andheri East. First-year engineering student. Father: clerk in a government office. Mother: homemaker. Life path: predictable, safe, small.
But fate—or something far more complex—had made a critical edit.
The local train screeched into the station, metal wheels screaming like an angry compiler error. People surged forward, instinctively forming chaos with purpose. Arjun stepped back instead of joining them.
"No rush," he muttered.
Time, for the first time in his life, was on his side.
He walked instead, weaving through narrow lanes where tea stalls hissed with boiling milk and radios played old Hindi songs. Posters of coaching classes and mobile recharge offers covered every wall. Nokia phones were king. Internet cafés advertised "Fast Net – 56 kbps" in faded paint.
Arjun smiled faintly.
56 kbps… You don't even know what's coming.
He reached the small one-room house he now called home. His mother looked up from the stove.
"Arjun? College khatam ho gaya?" she asked, surprised.
"Lecture cancelled," he replied automatically, the words flowing without thought. The memories of this body helped—small habits, tone, vocabulary. He could blend in.
He sat on the edge of the bed as his father folded a newspaper nearby. The headline spoke of global uncertainty, markets wobbling, foreign investors cautious.
Arjun's mind, however, saw a different headline—one from years in the future.
Sensex crosses 60,000.
India becomes startup hub.
Digital payments reshape economy.
All of it was ahead.
All of it was exploitable.
But not recklessly.
That night, as the city buzzed outside with generators and distant horns, Arjun lay staring at the ceiling fan.
Step one: Survive without attracting attention.
He had no money. No influence. No shortcuts.
But he had something infinitely more dangerous.
Foresight.
He knew that in a few years, IT services would explode. That outsourcing would become India's golden goose. That companies would beg for skilled engineers who understood systems, not just syntax.
He also knew something most people didn't realize until it was too late:
Wealth wasn't built by following trends.
It was built by arriving just before them.
"History doesn't repeat," Arjun whispered, "but it compiles with the same logic."
He sat up.
Tomorrow, he would visit an internet café. Not to browse—but to observe. Infrastructure. Costs. Access. Gaps.
Then he would learn the market the way he once learned new programming languages—by breaking it apart and rebuilding it in his head.
He wouldn't gamble on stocks yet. That required capital and timing.
He wouldn't rush into startups either. Too visible. Too risky.
No.
First, he would build skills that didn't exist yet—but soon would.
Scalable skills.
Exportable skills.
Skills that would let him earn in dollars while living in rupees.
And when the time came…
He wouldn't just get rich.
He would reinvest into the system itself—education, infrastructure, opportunity.
Not charity.
Optimization.
The fan creaked overhead. Outside, thunder finally rumbled in the distance.
The monsoon was coming after all.
Arjun closed his eyes, a slow smile forming.
"Welcome to 2002," he murmured.
"Let's rewrite the future—cleanly this time