Chapter 1 – Born in Dust...
The first sound Sanjay remembered was not laughter, nor the soft voice of a lullaby.
It was the creak of his father’s bicycle chain, rusty and tired, carrying sacks of wheat down a broken road.
Sanjay was born in a small town on the edge of Pakistan, where the streets were narrow, the houses leaned on each other like tired men, and dust hung in the air so thick that even the brightest afternoons felt dim. His family’s home was a single room made of bricks that never saw paint. The roof leaked in the rains, and the walls carried scars of smoke from an old kerosene lamp that burned every night.
His mother would often press his cheeks between her palms, smile through her tired eyes, and whisper, “One day, Sanjay, you will not live in dust. You will rise from it.” At the time, Sanjay didn’t understand what rising meant. All he knew was hunger, cracked heels from running barefoot on stones, and the way his father’s hands always smelled of iron and sweat.
Money was a stranger in their home. His father earned just enough to feed them lentils and roti, sometimes stretching the food so thin that Sanjay pretended he wasn’t hungry to let his younger sister eat more. But hunger was not the hardest part—it was the silence. The silence when his father returned home after a long day, too tired to speak. The silence when his mother stitched torn clothes, her needle moving as if it c
carried the weight of the world.
From a young age, Sanjay learned to read silence better than words.
Yet, in that silence, a dream began to form.
One hot afternoon, when Sanjay was no older than ten, he followed his father to the marketplace. The air was full of noise—hawkers shouting, donkeys braying, children crying. His father was unloading wheat for a shopkeeper when Sanjay’s eyes caught something across the street.
It was a glass store, glowing with imported watches and shining shoes. A young man, barely older than his cousins, walked out of it wearing a suit so fine it seemed impossible in that dusty town. His shoes gleamed, his hair was neatly combed, and in his hand he held a small phone—a mobile phone, the kind Sanjay had only seen in movies.
For a moment, Sanjay forgot the dust on his face and the sweat sticking his shirt to his skin. He watched the man get into a car with tinted windows, and something inside him ached—not with jealousy, but with fire.
He tugged his father’s shirt.
“Baba, who is he?”
His father glanced, then shook his head. “Someone born lucky.”
Sanjay’s small hands tightened into fists. “One day, I will be like him.”
His father laughed, a tired laugh that held no cruelty, only disbelief. “Dreams are for rich men, Sanjay. People like us—we survive.”
But Sanjay wasn’t convinced. That day, on the dusty street of the marketplace, he promised himself he would not just survive. He would live. He would build a life where hunger was a memory, where silence did not rule every meal, and where his mother’s whispers of hope could finally rest.
By thirteen, Sanjay was restless. He began small hustles—selling secondhand pens to his classmates, running errands for shopkeepers, carrying bags for travelers at the bus stand. He earned coins, not notes, but each one felt like a brick in the foundation of something greater.
At night, when his family slept, he would sit outside under the dim moonlight and count his coins. He would polish them with the corner of his shirt until they shone, pretending they were diamonds. Sometimes his sister would wake up and join him, her sleepy eyes wide with curiosity.
“What will you do with all that money?” she would ask.
Sanjay would smile, his teeth flashing in the dark. “One day, I’ll build a shop bigger than all of this street. You’ll never have to sew torn clothes again. And Baba will not have to ride that bicycle.”
His sister would giggle, half-believing, half-dreaming. But for Sanjay, it was no game. Every coin was a soldier, every rupee a weapon against poverty.
School was not easy. Teachers often mocked him for his ragged clothes. Other boys laughed when he carried old notebooks bound together with string. But Sanjay had one advantage—he listened. He absorbed every word in the classroom, every figure in mathematics, every concept in science. Knowledge, he realized, was a currency too, one that no one could steal from him.
Yet even knowledge came at a cost. One winter morning, his mother sat him down.
“Sanjay,” she said softly, “we can no longer pay your school fees. You must stop.”
Her voice broke as she spoke, and Sanjay felt the world tilt beneath him. But he only nodded. He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream. That night, he sat outside with his pile of coins, staring at them until his eyes burned. If the world demanded sacrifice, he would not bow down.
The next morning, instead of going to school, he went to the marketplace and offered to work full-time. He carried sacks heavier than his body, cleaned shop floors, ran errands until his legs ached. But each evening, he saved a few rupees.
One day, when his father scolded him for dreaming too much, Sanjay answered with steady eyes:
“I may have been born in dust, Baba. But I will not die in it.”
His father had no reply.
And so, a boy of dust began to walk toward diamonds.
Not with luck. Not with shortcuts.
But with hunger, with scars, with fire that even poverty could not extinguish.
This was the beginning of Sanjay’s journey.
The world had not yet seen the storms waiting for him, the failures, the betrayals, the heartbreaks that would nearly destroy him. But it had also not seen the strength he carried, buried deep beneath his skin.
And Sanjay himself did not know—
that one day, this boy with torn shoes and empty pockets would become a billionaire....
✨ End of Chapter 1 ✨
Author:- Akash Singh...
