From Losing a Father
to Becoming a Father

There is a house in Keshod with a balcony on the first floor. In the only memory Mayank Kariya has of his father, he is four years old, standing on it, looking down at the people taking his father away.

Thirty years later he stood in a hospital corridor in Surat with his hands empty, listening to his son cry in a room he was not allowed into.

This is the distance between those two moments. A boy sent to a hostel at nine, who learned to wash his own school shirt. A young man who studied sixteen hours a day and then, one morning, could not read a single line. Six months of doing nothing. Twenty-five interviews he promised himself he would give. An hour and a half on a footpath at five in the evening, and a brother on the phone. A doctor. A promise made on a lap. A company. A son.

It is not a book about how to succeed. It is one life, told as honestly as he can remember it — the failures, the people, the work, the love, and the questions that are still open.