Vijay Varma was 10 years old when he first learned what hunger really costs. Born in October 1978 in Bisau village, Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan, his childhood was shadowed by loss almost from the start – his paternal grandparents were both gone by the time he turned 10, and within a year, his father too. What remained was his mother, alone, with six children to feed and no one left to lean on.In a community where women rarely stepped past their doorstep, wrapped always in long ghoonghats, she had little room to defy tradition. “My mother had six kids to feed but could not challenge her conditioning. So she found a way around it instead,” Varma recalls. Before sunrise each day, she would slip into the forest behind their house, gathering dried leaves, firewood and dung, trading those 30-40 kgs for one kg of flour.A family held together by small merciesEvery now and then, life offered a crumb of relief. Varma’s elder brother picked up work at a government hospital, ferrying workers’ lunch boxes for Rs 2 a day. “After 7 days, Rs 14 came to our house in 1989. My mother said, ‘Let’s get what we don’t normally have – vegetables and milk,’” Varma remembers, the memory of that small indulgence still vivid decades later.One year later, the work ended, and the family was back to battling uncertainty. It was then that a family acquaintance, Sitaram bhai, walked in one day with an offer that sounded too good to be true: he would take Varma’s elder brother to Mumbai and pay him Rs 500 a month. For a family used to measuring survival in kilograms of flour, the number was staggering. Ten-year-old Vijay – a class monitor in Std 6, sharp in English and Maths – sat nearby with his schoolbooks open, but his ears were on the conversation. “I decided I wanted to go and work too, instead of continuing school,” he says.The next morning, he didn’t leave for school. When his mother asked why, he told her plainly: he wanted to go to Mumbai too. She tried to dissuade him, but a 12-year-old’s stubbornness eventually won.Streets, stench and a stranger’s kindnessThe journey via Jaipur to Mumbai delivered the boys straight into hardship. Their guardian lived above a gutter in Ulhasnagar, sleeping on wooden planks laid over the filth. “Coming from Rajasthan’s clean, golden desert sand, the filth and mosquitoes in Ulhasnagar overwhelmed us,” Varma says. His disheartened elder brother wanted to turn back – until another man in the same shed suggested they try Pune instead, for cleaner surroundings.Their mother’s emergency fund of Rs 200 was handed over to them by Sitaram, and the brothers boarded a train alone, arriving in a city where they knew no one. Rs 26 had gone toward tickets; the rest vanished from their pockets while they slept on a railway platform bench. “We got up and cried, wondering what to do,” he recalls.Story continues below this ad“It was a stranger’s compassion that turned the tide. A Muslim ‘chacha’ who maintained the railway toilets, hearing that two robbed children from Rajasthan had nowhere to go, fed us for three days, allowed us to use the toilet and let us sleep on its roof – asking for nothing in return. We stayed there for 18 days, earning Rs 3 a day washing dishes for a vada pav vendor.”Their fortunes shifted when a Rajasthani contractor named Niradhar offered Varma’s brother renovation work at Mangala Theatre for Rs 18 a day. Too young to be formally hired, Vijay instead began helping an elderly woman sift sand at the site – working three times faster than her. A stunned contractor began paying him Rs 8 a day too.“Over the following months, we shifted to a single room in another location, rented a bicycle for Rs 2 a day to scour Pune for work, gradually mastering every facet from tile-flooring to plastering to RCC in the building trade. Every 25th of the month, we sent money orders home – from Rs 90 to 170. After a year, we returned to our village with Rs 65,000 in cash hidden inside tiffin boxes, using it to clear the bushes behind our house and build a protective wall,” recounts Varma.The break that changed everythingEmboldened, the brothers set their sights on becoming contractors in their own right, recruiting six boys from their village to train. They set their sights on work from a well-known builder, Vimal Kumar Jain. For three months, they were dismissed by his engineer as “just children”. Varma finally pushed back, claiming expertise in tiling, kitchen platforms, RCC, and plastering. Given an impossible eight-day deadline for a 15-day sample flat – with no pay if it failed – the team worked around the clock and finished in three.Story continues below this adJain, stunned by the speed and quality, handed the brothers Rs 5,100 as blessings. “It proved to be the turning point,” says Varma. Their company, Shyamsundar Cheeranjeevlalji Construction, named after the elder brother, grew from a handful of workers to 350 by 1994-95, eventually securing contracts with major builders.From contractor to entrepreneurBy 1998, the firm employed around 850 workers and was clocking an annual turnover of Rs 8 crore – a figure that kept climbing, reaching Rs 20 crore by 2004-05. From the lobby of five-star hotels to farmhouses, Varma never looked back. In 2008, he struck out on his own, founding Sai Vijay Construction, formalising it as an LLP in 2011. In 2017, the company even faced an income tax inquiry but emerged unscathed. “Our records were so meticulous that investigators couldn’t pin even Rs 5,000 in discrepancies on it,” he says, still visibly proud of it. Today, the company is valued at Rs 160 crore, and he owns four houses in Pune, one of them being his dream farmhouse. His ambitions eventually crossed borders too – international projects worth Rs 730 crore in Oman and Yemen, where he trained over 3,800 workers, 3,200 of whom now run successful businesses of their own.Also Read | FDA crackdown: Burger King, Sayaji Hotel among 16 facing actionSomewhere along the way, a mentor nudged him toward finishing what school had never let him: he completed his 10th grade through open schooling in his 30s, followed by a Civil Engineering Diploma and a PhD. He now lectures engineering students – his planned half-hour talks routinely stretching into two hours, egged on by students unwilling to let him stop. His son incidentally is also studying computer engineering.Lessons from a hard-won lifeAsk Varma, 48, what it takes to build a life like his and the answer comes without hesitation. “Honesty, hard work and perseverance. I have never shortchanged a single person for even one rupee in my life. It’s what my mother has taught me.”Story continues below this adNot every scar has faded, though. In the early ’90s, the police mistook him and his brother for thieves late one night and beat them without a word of explanation, injuring his brother badly enough to need hospital treatment. The incident left a permanent imprint. “It taught me a vital lesson: build genuine relationships with respectable people. The company you keep is very important.”These days, when the ledgers close and the site visits end, Varma turns to something far gentler – singing Marwari folk songs and learning the piano – reclaiming a part of his childhood he had traded for making a life.