The flat was what real estate agents in Delhi generously called "1 BHK" — one bedroom, one hall, one kitchen. In reality, it was a cramped second-floor unit in a DDA flat in Sector 7, Rohini, with walls that had been painted an optimistic shade of cream sometime in the 1990s and hadn't been touched since. The hall served as both living room and Priya's bedroom at night, when a mattress was rolled out. The single bedroom was Arjun's. The kitchen was a narrow corridor where two people couldn't stand side by side.
The rent was four thousand rupees a month — a sum that Ramesh Mehra wired from Mumbai along with an additional six thousand for food and other expenses. The total monthly budget for Arjun and Priya's life in Delhi was ten thousand rupees. It was tight. It was always tight.
Arjun emerged into the hall to find Priya already seated on the floor in front of a low steel plate, eating aloo paratha with curd. She looked up at him with the face he had almost forgotten — round, with their mother's nose and their father's stubborn chin, her hair in two braids, wearing the blue and white uniform of her new school.
"Good morning, Bhaiya," she said, flashing a gap-toothed grin. "Maa said you were crying."
"I wasn't crying."
"Your eyes are red."
"Allergy."
"To what? Studying?"
Arjun couldn't help but smile. Priya at fifteen had been sharp-tongued and fearless, a personality that would later be systematically destroyed by her husband and in-laws. Looking at her now, radiant with the uncomplicated confidence of adolescence, Arjun felt a surge of fierce protectiveness that made his chest ache.
*No one will touch you. Not this time. I swear on my life.*
"Baith ja, khana kha," Sunita said, emerging from the kitchen with a fresh paratha glistening with ghee. She placed it on Arjun's plate with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had been feeding her family since before dawn. "Aaj college ka pehla din hai. Dhyan se jaana. Auto lena Rohini West metro station tak, wahan se metro le lena DCE tak. Priya ko school mein chhodna padega pehle."
*Sit down, eat. Today is the first day of college. Go carefully. Take an auto to Rohini West metro station, then take the metro to DCE. You'll need to drop Priya at school first.*
Arjun sat down cross-legged on the floor and ate. The taste of his mother's aloo paratha hit him with the force of a revelation. Forty years. He hadn't tasted his mother's cooking in over twenty years — she had been too ill to cook in her final decade, and after her death, the taste had existed only in his memory, growing fainter with each passing year.
He ate slowly, savoring every bite, aware that his mother was watching him with a mixture of pride and worry.
"Maa," he said between bites, "Baba ka phone aaya tha?"
"Kal raat ko. Bol rahe the ki mahina khatam hone pe aayenge milne. Line mein bahut kaam hai." *Last night. He said he'll come to visit at the end of the month. There's a lot of work at the office.*
Arjun nodded. He needed to talk to his father — about his health, specifically. Ramesh Mehra had been a man who considered doctors a luxury and illness a weakness. His cholesterol was through the roof, his blood pressure was uncontrolled, and he consumed copious amounts of oily food from the office canteen. The heart attack that would kill him in 2007 was already being constructed, brick by brick, in his clogging arteries.
But Arjun couldn't just say, "Baba, you're going to die in two years if you don't change your lifestyle." He was seventeen. His father would pat him on the head and tell him to focus on his studies.
He needed a strategy. For everything.
"Maa, Baba ka last health checkup kab hua tha?" Arjun asked casually.
Sunita frowned. "Health checkup? Tera baap doctor ke paas jata hai kya kabhi? Kehti hoon jaao, kehte hain time nahi hai. Kyun?"
*Health checkup? Does your father ever go to the doctor? I tell him to go, he says he doesn't have time. Why?*
"Bas aise hi. College mein ek health awareness program hai first week mein. Soch raha tha ghar mein sabka karwa lein." He fabricated the excuse smoothly.
Sunita looked at him strangely. "Tujhe kab se health ki chinta hone lagi?"
*Since when did you start worrying about health?*
"Maa, bas..."
"Theek hai, theek hai. Baba se bol dena phone pe. Woh meri toh sunte nahi." *Fine, fine. Tell your father on the phone. He doesn't listen to me.*
Priya, who had finished her breakfast, was washing her hands at the small basin. "Bhaiya, jaldi karo. Meri school 8 baje hai."
Arjun finished his breakfast, washed his hands, and went to get dressed. As he changed into jeans and a clean shirt — the "good" shirt, reserved for important occasions — he caught his reflection in the cracked almirah mirror again.
Seventeen. Thin. Dark circles under his eyes from what must have been a night of anxious sleeplessness (his first life's anxiety about starting college, perhaps). His frame was slight — he had never been physically imposing — but there was a sharpness to his features that suggested intelligence.
He had two years before his father's death. Two years to change everything.
*No,* he corrected himself. *I have today. Everything starts today.*
He grabbed his bag — a cheap Wildcraft knockoff with a broken zipper — slung it over one shoulder, and stepped out of the room.
"Chalo, Priya," he said, holding his hand out to his sister.
Priya took it, and together they walked out of the flat, down the narrow staircase with its paan-stained walls, and into the blazing July morning of Delhi, 2005.
The Rohini that greeted them was a suburb in transition. The DDA flats, built in the 1980s and 90s, stood like concrete sentinels among the newer builder floors that were coming up rapidly. The roads were potholed, with construction debris piled on the sides — remnants of the Commonwealth Games preparation that would intensify over the next five years.
As they waited for an auto, Arjun noticed a small cyber café across the street — "Sify iWay" — with a banner advertising "High-Speed Broadband Internet: Rs. 20/hour." His pulse quickened. Internet. Access to information. A way to start building his empire.
"Bhaiya, auto aa gaya," Priya said, tugging at his shirt.
They climbed into the green-and-yellow three-wheeler. The driver, a middle-aged man with paan-stained teeth, agreed to thirty rupees after the customary haggling. As the auto rattled through the streets, Arjun mentally calculated his resources.
He had about three hundred rupees in his wallet — pocket money his father had given him before leaving for Mumbai. The monthly budget of ten thousand would arrive next week via demand draft. His mother would leave for Mumbai tomorrow, trusting her seventeen-year-old son to take care of himself and his sister.
Three hundred rupees. In 2005, it could buy fifteen hours of internet time, or fifteen plates of chole bhature from the street vendor, or three pirated DVDs from Palika Bazaar. It wasn't much.
But empires had been built on less.
They reached Kendriya Vidyalaya, Rohini, at 7:45 AM. The school was already buzzing with activity — students in crisp uniforms streaming through the gates, teachers standing guard like sentinels, the morning assembly being prepared in the courtyard.
"Bhaiya," Priya said as she got down, "tumhe kaise pata chalega ki main theek hoon?"
*How will you know if I'm okay?*
The question caught him off guard. In his first life, he had been too preoccupied with his own college anxieties to worry about Priya's adjustment to a new school in a new city. He had assumed she would be fine. She always seemed fine.
He hadn't known that she cried herself to sleep for the first month, homesick and lonely. He hadn't known about the group of senior girls who would bully her for her Marathi-accented Hindi. He hadn't known about the mathematics teacher who would humiliate her in front of the class for not understanding trigonometry quickly enough.
All of this she had told him years later, when it was too late to do anything about it.
"Priya," he said, getting down from the auto and kneeling so they were at eye level. "Listen to me very carefully. You're my sister. My responsibility. If anyone — and I mean anyone — troubles you, you tell me immediately. Understand?"
She nodded, surprised by his intensity.
"I mean it. Teacher, student, anyone. You're not alone here. I'm here. Always."
"Okay, Bhaiya." She looked at him strangely. "Are you sure you're okay? You're acting weird today."
"I'm fine. Just... I realized something important."
"What?"
"That you're the most important person in my life."
Priya's eyes widened. Then she laughed — the pure, unguarded laugh of a fifteen-year-old. "Did you hit your head? Since when do you say such filmy dialogues?"
"Since today. Now go. Be brilliant. Show these Delhi kids what a Mumbai girl can do."
She grinned and ran through the school gates, her braids bouncing behind her.
Arjun watched until she disappeared into the crowd, then got back into the auto. "Rohini West Metro Station," he told the driver.
As the auto navigated through the morning traffic, Arjun's mind was already racing ahead. College would start at 9 AM. He had roughly an hour. The first day would mostly be orientation — speeches by the principal, department introductions, campus tour. The real classes wouldn't begin until tomorrow.
He needed to accomplish several things today:
1. Register at college and get his ID card
2. Open a bank account (if possible)
3. Apply for a PAN card
4. Find the nearest cyber café to the college
5. Start his first income stream
The auto reached Rohini West station. Arjun paid the driver and walked into the metro station. It was still new enough that the tiles gleamed and the escalators actually worked. He bought a token for ten rupees and made his way to the platform.
The Yellow Line train arrived within three minutes — another thing that would change as Delhi's population exploded and the metro became overwhelmed with commuters. He found a corner spot and stood, holding the overhead rail, his mind still planning.
The train stopped at stations that would become familiar to millions of Delhiites — Rohini East, Rithala, Netaji Subhas Place, Kohat Enclave, Pitampura. Each stop brought more passengers, mostly office-goers and students. The demographics of Delhi were visible in microcosm — the upwardly mobile middle class heading to Gurgaon's tech parks, the government employees bound for Central Secretariat, the students clutching their notebooks and dreams.
At Kashmere Gate, Arjun changed trains and then exited the metro system entirely. The bus to DCE was waiting — the infamous "Mudrika" service that connected the metro to the college campus in Bawana. The bus was already packed with DCE students, recognizable by their mix of nervous excitement and forced casualness.
As the bus lurched forward, Arjun overheard conversations that transported him back forty years:
"Yaar, mechanical mein kitne log honge?"
"Suna hai professors bahut strict hain..."
"Hostel mila kya tereko?"
"Placement ka scene kaisa hai?"
*How many people will be in mechanical? / I heard the professors are very strict... / Did you get hostel? / What's the placement scene like?*
The anxieties of eighteen-year-olds who thought these four years would determine their entire lives. They weren't entirely wrong — these years were crucial. But not in the way they imagined.
The bus reached the DCE campus at 8:45 AM. Arjun stepped out and paused for a moment, taking in the sight.
The campus looked exactly as he remembered it, yet completely different. The main building stood proud with its red brick facade. The grounds were less developed than they would become — several buildings that would exist in the future were missing. The computer center was still using Pentium 4 processors. The library still used a card catalog system.
This was 2005. Facebook existed but wasn't available in India yet. Google was still primarily a search engine. YouTube had just been founded. The iPhone was still two years away. India's GDP was less than a trillion dollars.
Everything was about to change.
And Arjun Mehra — seventeen years old, armed with forty years of future knowledge and an absolute determination to rewrite his destiny — walked through the gates of Delhi College of Engineering to begin the revolution.