Bombay, June 1983
The Air India 747 descended through the monsoon clouds, and Vinod Mehta pressed his forehead against the cold oval window, watching the city emerge below him like a dirty jewel spread across the peninsula. The Arabian Sea churned grey-green against Marine Drive, and somewhere in that tangle of streets and mill chimneys, his father was waiting with news that had arrived in yesterday's telex.
*Come directly to factory. Important.*
Eighteen hours from Logan Airport to Heathrow, another ten to Bombay, and those seven words had replayed in his mind through every time zone. His father was not a man who sent dramatic messages. Jayant Mehta believed in face-to-face conversation, in reading eyes across a desk, in the weight of silence before a deal was struck. For him to put anything in writing meant the situation was either very good or very bad.
Vinod's instinct, honed across two years at Harvard Business School, said bad.
The plane banked low over the slums of Dharavi, their blue tarpaulin roofs glistening with rain, and he felt the familiar lurch in his stomach that was equal parts homecoming and dread. He had left Bombay in 1981 with a fresh engineering degree from IIT Bombay and a scholarship that had stunned everyone, including himself. His father had stood on this same tarmac, shorter than Vinod remembered him even then, and said only: "Learn what they know. Bring it back."
Now he was bringing it back. The question was whether there would be anything left to save.
The wheels touched down with a jolt, and passengers around him stirred from sleep, reaching for luggage, adjusting saris, patting pockets for passports. Vinod remained still, watching rain streak sideways across the window. The cabin filled with the tinny announcement in Hindi and English welcoming them to Bombay, local time 5:47 AM, temperature twenty-eight degrees Celsius.
Twenty-eight degrees at six in the morning. July would be worse.
He was the third passenger through the aerobridge, suit jacket folded over one arm, leather briefcase in the other hand containing nothing more valuable than his father's telex and a notebook filled with ideas he had generated during the long flight. Ideas about textile manufacturing, about export markets, about supply chain optimization that would make Mehta Textiles competitive with the best mills in Asia.
Ideas that assumed the business still existed to receive them.
Customs took forty-five minutes—it always did—and by the time he pushed through the swinging doors into the arrivals hall, the crowd had thinned to the usual early-morning collection of drivers holding placards and families clutching garlands. He scanned for his father's face, for the familiar broad shoulders and white cotton kurta, and instead found a stranger holding a cardboard sign with his name written in careful block letters: **VINOD MEHTA**.
The man was young, maybe twenty-five, with oiled hair and a cream shirt tucked into polyester trousers. He spotted Vinod's hesitation and stepped forward.
"Vinodbhai? I'm Prakash. Jayantbhai sent me. He couldn't come."
Vinod felt the first real twinge of alarm. His father had picked him up from every train, every flight, every school event since Vinod was five years old. Even during the textile strike last year, when other mill owners had hidden in their homes, Jayant Mehta had stood on this same spot when Vinod returned for Diwali.
"Why? What's happened?"
Prakash's eyes shifted. "He'll explain. Come, the car is outside."
The Ambassador was ancient, its cream paint yellowed by Bombay's salt air, and it smelled of naphthalene balls and old sweat. Prakash drove with the aggressive competence of Bombay's professional driver class, weaving through morning traffic that had already materialized from the wet darkness—trucks carrying vegetables to the markets, BEST buses packed with standing passengers, scooters with entire families balanced on their seats.
Vinod watched the city slide past. Churchgate station, Marine Drive, the sudden opening of the sea at Nariman Point where new skyscrapers were rising to challenge Bombay's famous skyline. The air through the cracked window carried salt and exhaust and the faint sweetness of frying samosas from roadside stalls.
"Where is my father?"
"At the factory, sahib. He said to bring you straight there."
The factory was in Parel, in the heart of Bombay's mill district, where massive red-brick chimneys rose above the city like the smokestacks of a grounded fleet. In his grandfather's time, this area had been the Lancashire of the East. Now, after the strike that had paralyzed the industry for eighteen months, half the mills stood silent, their gates chained, their workers scattered back to villages across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Mehta Textiles occupied a three-acre compound on a side street off Dr. Ambedkar Road, sandwiched between a working mill and one that had been closed so long that bushes grew from its roof gutters. The gate was open, and Prakash pulled into the courtyard where bolts of grey cloth waited on wooden pallets, slowly darkening in the drizzle.
Vinod was out of the car before it stopped.
The office was a single room on the ground floor of the main building, furnished with a steel desk, four wooden chairs, and a calendar from 1981 still showing the month of March. His father sat behind the desk, and for a moment Vinod saw him as a stranger would—a man of fifty-eight who looked seventy, with deep creases running from nose to mouth and hands that lay flat on the desk as if they no longer had strength to grip.
Jayant Mehta looked up. His eyes were the same: dark, sharp, capable of seeing through any excuse or evasion.
"Beta." The word was soft, almost a sigh.
Vinod crossed the room in three steps and took his father's hands. They were cold. "What happened? Are you sick? Tell me."
"Sit down." Jayant gestured to the chair across the desk. "First, you sit. Then I tell you."
Vinod sat. Behind him, Prakash retreated, pulling the door closed with a soft click. The room was silent except for the distant clatter of looms from somewhere deeper in the factory—at least they were still running, Vinod thought. At least that much was alive.
"Three weeks ago," Jayant began, "we received an export order. Big order. Two lakh metres of grey cloth to a buyer in London. Enough to keep us running for six months."
Vinod nodded. Grey cloth—unfinished fabric—was Mehta Textiles' specialty. His father had built relationships with British buyers over twenty years, supplying cloth that would be processed and printed in Manchester.
"I borrowed from Bank of India to buy raw cotton. Best quality, from our usual supplier in Vidarbha. We worked double shifts for two weeks to meet the deadline." Jayant paused, and Vinod saw the muscle in his jaw tighten. "The shipment left Bombay on June 15th. On June 20th, we received a telex from London."
He slid a piece of paper across the desk. Vinod picked it up, though he already knew what it would say.
*ORDER CANCELLED STOP QUALITY INSPECTION FAILED STOP NO PAYMENT STOP*
He read it twice. Then a third time.
"That's impossible." He looked up at his father. "Our quality has always been good enough for Manchester. We've been shipping to them for—"
"Twenty-three years." Jayant completed the sentence. "I know."
"There must be a mistake. The inspection—maybe they used different standards, maybe the samples got mixed—"
"There is no mistake." Jayant's voice was flat, drained of emotion. "I sent Prakash to London. He met with the buyer. The cloth was inspected by their head of quality, a man named Thompson who has approved our shipments for ten years. He rejected it."
Vinod's mind was already working, the Harvard training kicking in despite his exhaustion. "Did we get samples of the rejected cloth? Can we test them independently?"
"We did. I sent our own man to London with samples from the same production batch. He had them tested by an independent laboratory." Jayant reached into his drawer and produced another sheet of paper. "The cloth meets our usual specifications. But the buyer's standards have changed. They now require a higher thread count, a different weave density. Nobody told us."
The silence stretched between them. Outside, the rain had intensified, drumming against the corrugated tin roof.
"How much did we borrow?"
"Forty lakhs."
Vinod closed his eyes. Forty lakh rupees—four million—was more than the company's annual profit in a good year. His father had bet everything on this order, and he had lost.
"The cotton?"
"Still in the godown. We paid for it. Now we have raw material we can't use for our existing orders—it's too high quality, too expensive. And the bank loan comes due in six months."
"Six months." Vinod opened his eyes. "Then we have six months to fix this."
Jayant looked at his son with an expression Vinod had never seen before—not quite despair, but something close to it. A weariness that suggested he had already fought this battle in his mind and lost.
"I don't know if we do, beta. I've been in this business for thirty-five years. I survived the Emergency, I survived the strike, I survived a dozen downturns. But this..." He shook his head. "The big mills are closing every week. The small ones are selling their looms for scrap. Maybe it's time. Maybe the world has passed me by."
Vinod leaned forward, gripping the edge of the steel desk. "Father, listen to me. I didn't spend two years at Harvard learning how to watch a business fail. There are options. We restructure the debt. We find new buyers. We pivot to different products—"
"We have six months." Jayant's voice rose for the first time. "Six months to repay forty lakhs, or the bank takes everything. The factory. The land. Your mother's jewellery that I put up as collateral. Everything your grandfather built, everything I built, gone."
"I understand the timeline."
"Do you?" Jayant's eyes blazed. "You've been in America, learning their ways. Reading their books. Talking about strategy and optimization. That's fine for companies with millions of dollars and lawyers on retainer. But this is India. This is Bombay. Here, business runs on relationships, not spreadsheets. And the relationship that would have saved us—the one with our London buyer of twenty-three years—just ended without warning."
Vinod felt the words like physical blows, but he forced himself to stay calm. This was not the time for wounded pride. His father was frightened, and frightened men said things they didn't mean.
"I'm not saying relationships don't matter," he said carefully. "I'm saying we need both. The relationships you built got us this far. Now let me use what I learned to get us the rest of the way."
Jayant stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, the tension in his shoulders eased.
"You look like your mother," he said quietly. "But you argue like me."
"Is that good or bad?"
"I haven't decided yet." Jayant pushed himself up from the chair, and Vinod saw how much effort it cost him. "Come. You should eat something. Your mother has been cooking for two days."
Vinod stood, but he didn't move toward the door. "Father—the factory. Is it still running?"
"For now. We have small orders, enough to keep the looms moving and the workers paid. But without the export order..." He spread his hands.
"I want to see it. The whole operation. Tomorrow morning."
"Today you rest."
"Today I learn." Vinod picked up his briefcase. "I've been on a plane for eighteen hours. Another few hours won't kill me."
Jayant studied him, and this time Vinod saw something flicker in his father's eyes—not quite hope, but maybe its distant cousin. The recognition that his son was not the boy who had left two years ago.
"Tomorrow, then," Jayant said. "I'll have Prakash pick you up at seven."
"Six."
"Six-thirty."
"Done."
They walked out together into the rain, and Vinod looked up at the factory building—four stories of red brick with arched windows, a water tank on the roof, and above it all, the chimney that had been pouring smoke into Bombay's air since 1952. His grandfather had built this place with his own hands, had slept on the factory floor during the first year to guard against thieves. His father had expanded it, modernized it, made it respectable.
Now it was his turn. And the first thing he had to do was save it.
The rain soaked through his shirt as he stood there, but he didn't move. He was calculating. Forty lakhs in six months. Interest at fifteen percent meant forty-six lakhs total. The factory's annual capacity was worth maybe sixty lakhs at full production. Export prices were double domestic. New markets in Southeast Asia were opening. The rupee was undervalued against the dollar.
The numbers spun through his mind, arranging themselves into possibilities, scenarios, probabilities. By the time Prakash opened the car door, Vinod had the outline of a plan.
It would require everything he had learned at Harvard. It would require his father's relationships and his own new ideas. It would require luck, timing, and the kind of aggressive negotiation that made traditional businessmen uncomfortable.
And it might still fail.
But as the Ambassador pulled out of the factory gate and into the chaos of Bombay's afternoon traffic, Vinod Mehta made his first decision as heir to a dying textile business:
He would not let it die.
Not because he loved the business—though he did, in the complicated way that sons love their father's dreams. Not because he feared failure—though he did, more than he would ever admit.
But because he had spent two years learning how the world's most successful companies thought, planned, and executed. And if that knowledge couldn't save one small textile factory in Parel, then what was the point of any of it?
The rain fell harder. Bombay blurred past the windows. And Vinod began to build, in his mind, the empire that would one day bear his name.