Chapter 2: The Morning of July 18, 2005
The ceiling fan wobbled on its axis with a rhythmic thuk-thuk-thuk that Arjun hadn't heard in decades.
He stared at it for a long moment, his mind struggling to process the sensory information flooding his brain. The fan was old — a Crompton Greaves model, cream-colored with dust caked on its blades. The ceiling above it was cracked, the paint peeling in patches, revealing the gray concrete beneath.
He was lying on a thin cotton mattress on the floor. The sheet beneath him was coarse and smelled of Surf Excel and sunlight. Somewhere nearby, a pressure cooker was whistling — three sharp blasts that cut through the morning air with the precision of a factory siren.
Arjun sat up.
The movement was strange. His body felt... different. Lighter. More responsive. The chronic pain in his lower back that had been his constant companion for thirty years was gone. His hands — he looked at them — were smooth, unblemished, without the liver spots and tremors of old age.
These are not my hands.
He scrambled to his feet, which were bare on a cold mosaic floor, and stumbled toward the small mirror hanging on the wall next to a faded calendar. The calendar showed a photograph of Shirdi Sai Baba above the month: July 2005.
Arjun's breath caught in his throat.
The face in the mirror was his own — but forty years younger. Sharp jawline, thick black hair that fell across his forehead, dark eyes that still held the spark of youth and hadn't yet been dimmed by decades of disappointment. A thin frame, almost scrawny, wearing a faded blue t-shirt with "NIIT" printed on it — a promotional shirt his father had gotten free from some computer education fair.
He was seventeen years old.
"This is not possible," he whispered. His voice was lighter, higher, without the gravel that age and cheap cigarettes had ground into it.
"Arjun! Uth ja, nalayak! College ka pehla din hai!" Get up, useless boy! It's the first day of college!
The voice came from beyond the thin wooden door of the room. It was a woman's voice — sharp, exasperated, loving in its harshness.
His mother's voice.
Sunita Mehra. Who had died of kidney failure in 2023. Whose funeral Arjun had attended in a daze, unable to cry because the grief was too enormous for tears.
"Maa?" The word escaped him like a prayer.
The door opened, and there she was. Forty-two years old, her hair still black with only a few strands of gray, her face lined but not yet broken by the years of hardship that lay ahead. She wore a simple cotton saree — the kind she always wore for school — and her bindi was a small red dot, perfectly centered.
"Kya 'Maa'? Ghante se awaaz de rahi hoon. Priya toh kabse ready hai. Tujhe aaj DTU jaana hai ya nahi?" What 'Maa'? I've been calling you for an hour. Priya has been ready for ages. Do you have to go to DTU today or not?
Arjun stared at her. His eyes filled with tears.
Sunita Mehra stopped mid-scold. Her expression shifted from irritation to concern. She stepped forward and pressed the back of her hand to his forehead.
"Bukhar toh nahi hai? Kya hua? Ro kyun raha hai?" No fever? What happened? Why are you crying?
Arjun grabbed her hand and held it. The hand was warm, alive, real. The hand that had packed his tiffin with parathas and achaar every morning. The hand that had slapped him when he failed his Hindi exam in Class 9. The hand that had wiped his tears when the neighborhood boys had bullied him for wearing torn shoes.
"Kuch nahi, Maa," he said, his voice thick. "Bas... ek bura sapna dekha." Nothing, Maa. Just... had a bad dream.
Sunita's expression softened. She cupped his face in her hands. "Sapna hi tha na? Chal, muh dho, nashta kar. Aaj se tu engineer banega." It was just a dream, right? Come on, wash your face, eat breakfast. From today, you'll become an engineer.
She turned and left the room, her slippers shuffling against the floor.
Arjun stood motionless for several minutes, his seventeen-year-old body trembling with the memories of a sixty-seven-year-old man.
He looked around the room. It was small — maybe eight feet by ten feet. A steel almirah stood in one corner, its mirror cracked diagonally. A wooden study table, scarred by years of use, held a stack of textbooks — H.C. Verma's Concepts of Physics, R.D. Sharma's Mathematics, and a brand new copy of Engineering Mechanics by R.S. Khurmi. A Natraj geometry box sat next to them, along with a pack of Reynolds pens.
On the wall, a poster of Sachin Tendulkar in his iconic straight drive pose shared space with a small photograph of the family — Ramesh, Sunita, Arjun, and little Priya — taken at Essel World three years ago. Priya must have been twelve in that photo, gap-toothed and grinning, holding a cotton candy bigger than her head.
Priya.
His sister was alive. Fifteen years old. Before the bad marriage. Before the in-laws who would starve her. Before the divorce that would shame the family. Before the years of depression and loneliness.
Baba.
His father was alive. Ramesh Mehra, who would die of a heart attack in 2007 if Arjun didn't do something to prevent it. Ramesh, who was even now probably sitting at the dining table in their Mumbai flat, eating his breakfast of poha and chai before heading to the MSEB office, completely unaware that his son had just been reborn from the future.
Wait — Mumbai.
Arjun's mind raced. He looked at the room again, trying to place himself. This wasn't their flat in Dadar, Mumbai. This was somewhere else. The sounds outside the window were different — horns blaring, but with a different cadence. Auto-rickshaws. The distant rumble of the Delhi Metro, which had just begun operations.
Of course. This was their rented accommodation in Delhi. The tiny flat in Rohini that his father had arranged for Arjun and Priya. Arjun was starting his BTech at DCE (Delhi College of Engineering, which would later be renamed DTU), and Priya was enrolled in a school nearby. Their father stayed in Mumbai for his job, and their mother... their mother must be here for the first few days to settle them in.
The memories were coming back now — not the memories of his future life, which were crystal clear, but the memories of his first life at this exact moment. The nervousness of starting college. The anxiety about living away from home for the first time. The weight of his father's expectations — "Beta, humne apni saari zindagi ka paisa lagaya hai tere admission mein. Kuch ban ke dikhana." Son, we've invested our entire life's savings in your admission. Become something.
In his first life, Arjun had responded to that pressure by buckling under it. He had been an average student, distracted by the newfound freedom of college life, overwhelmed by the competition, and gradually disillusioned by a system that seemed designed to crush creativity and reward rote memorization.
But this time, he had something no seventeen-year-old had ever possessed: the complete knowledge of the next forty years.
He knew which stocks would rise. He knew which startups would succeed. He knew the exact date of every major economic event, every political upheaval, every technological revolution. He knew about Bitcoin, about the iPhone, about WhatsApp and Instagram and Tesla and Amazon. He knew about the 2008 financial crisis, about demonetization, about COVID-19.
He was a man with the wisdom of sixty-seven years trapped in the body of a teenager, standing on the threshold of 2005, with the entire future spread out before him like an open book.
The question was: where to begin?
Arjun walked to the study table and picked up a Reynolds pen. He tore a page from a fresh notebook — the kind with the single-line ruling that every Indian student used — and began to write.
IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES:
Keep Baba alive (heart attack prevention — diet, exercise, medication)
Protect Priya (prevent the marriage to that bastard Vikram)
Make money — starting capital needed
Build an empire
TIMELINE OF OPPORTUNITIES:
2005: Google stock ($300 → will reach $2,800+ by 2021)
2007: iPhone launch — Apple stock will 100x
2008: Financial crisis — short the market, buy the dip
2009: Bitcoin mining begins — mine/buy as much as possible
2010: Instagram, WhatsApp — invest early if possible
2016: Jio revolution — telecom disruption
2020: COVID — massive market crash and recovery
OBSTACLES:
I'm 17. No money. No connections.
Father's salary: ₹18,000/month
Need to find initial capital without arousing suspicion
Indian regulations make foreign stock investment difficult in 2005
Need a front/mentor to execute financial moves
He stared at the list. It was overwhelming. In his previous life, he had known all of this — but only in retrospect, when it was too late. The cruel irony of hindsight is that it is always perfect and always useless.
But not this time.
"Arjun! Nashta!" his mother called again.
He folded the paper carefully and tucked it into the pages of his physics textbook. Then he walked out of the room, ready to face the first day of his second life.