Knowing the future, Ayaan was quickly learning, didn’t make him capable of much of anything in the present.
His stomach didn’t care that he understood banking.
His arms didn’t get any stronger because he remembered how a factory floor worked.
He’d spent twenty-one years learning to be an adult, and now he had to do it all again from nothing, a clumsy month at a time.
Their house in Eminönü was small and plain — no spare furniture, no books beyond a few ledgers his father kept, nothing bought that wasn’t needed.
They lived carefully because they had to, and Ayaan spent most of his waking hours simply watching how.
His father’s trade ran on habits Mehmet would never have called business strategy, though that was exactly what they were.
He counted his money more than once a day.
He remembered which customers paid on time and which needed a second visit.
He remembered which suppliers quoted him a fair price the first time and which always left themselves room to be haggled down.
None of it was written anywhere.
It lived in his head, sharpened by years of getting it wrong before he’d learned to get it right.
Ayaan recognized the shape of it instantly — the same idea he’d once heard from a lecture hall, dressed now in working clothes.
A small trader’s real asset usually wasn’t his money.
It was what he knew: who could be trusted, what people actually wanted as opposed to what they said they wanted, when to walk away from a deal that only looked good on paper.
Mehmet had all of that from twenty-seven years of living it.
Ayaan had the theory from another century entirely.
Watching the two line up, again and again, taught him more than any of his old textbooks ever had.
One afternoon his father came home in an unusually good mood, and Fatma noticed before he’d even set anything down.
“You made a good deal.” “A very good one.” He put a little extra money on the table, and Ayaan, watching from the floor, had the numbers worked out before his father finished explaining them.
A supplier had offered goods cheap; Mehmet had found a buyer willing to pay more, and moved fast enough that nobody else got the chance to undercut him.
Buy low, sell quickly, don’t sit on inventory that might lose its value before it sells.
Simple, in principle.
His father had simply understood the timing well enough to make it work in practice — the part no textbook could actually teach.
“What are you smiling about?” Mehmet asked, catching him.
Ayaan only babbled.
His father laughed and ruffled his hair.
“Already interested in business, are you?
Maybe you’ll be a merchant like your old man.” Yes, Ayaan thought, and said nothing, because nothing was still the only thing his mouth reliably produced.
The city outside did more of his teaching than anyone around him realized.
Constantinople was nothing like the Istanbul he remembered — no bridges of steel, no electric light, no engines anywhere — and yet it moved with its own order.
Goods passed hand to hand instead of through machines.
Animals pulled what trucks would eventually pull.
Every merchant’s call carried real information, if a person knew how to listen for it.
He began to understand the empire not as a set of dates in a textbook but as an enormous, breathing network of people — farmers, sailors, clerks, bankers, teachers — whose combined effort was the only thing actually holding any of it together.
He’d read about the Ottoman Empire once, in another life.
Now he was living inside it, and it felt entirely different from the inside.
Some mornings his mother carried him along to the smaller market near their street, and he learned to watch that too — which stallholders called out prices and which let a good product speak for itself, which ones remembered Fatma’s name and which only remembered her coin.
She never overpaid, and she never seemed to haggle either, exactly.
She simply knew, before she opened her mouth, roughly what a thing should cost, and walked away without a word from anyone who tried to charge her more.
Nobody had ever taught her that formally.
She’d learned it the way most people learn anything that actually matters: by being poor enough, for long enough, that mistakes were expensive.
Language came slowly, then all at once.
Ottoman Turkish wasn’t quite the language he’d grown up speaking — older vocabulary, a script built on Arabic characters that had looked, at first, like pure decoration.
He’d seen writing like it before, behind museum glass in another life, and that half-memory gave him a head start nobody around him could explain.
He wasn’t fluent.
He wasn’t close.
But the patterns were starting to surface, and he had years to let them.
What he had far less patience for was how little control he actually held over his own life.
Adults decided when he slept, when he ate, what he wore, who carried him where.
His mind kept insisting he was a grown man.
His body kept reminding him, loudly and often, that he wasn’t.
One afternoon it finally caught up with him.
A book had been left on a low shelf — close enough to see, far enough to be useless.
He couldn’t read it properly yet, but he wanted it anyway, the particular way anyone wants something just out of reach.
He crawled toward it, arms shaking, and got close enough to hook a finger over the edge.
It barely moved.
He tried again.
Nothing.
Frustration built until he shoved at it with both hands, and the book toppled straight off the shelf and thumped down beside him.
His mother looked over.
“What are you doing?” He stared at the fallen book instead of answering, which was answer enough.
She picked it up, studied his face, and smiled.
“You wanted that?” He nodded.
She handed it to him, and it turned out to be comically too heavy — it slipped straight out of his hands the moment she let go, and his sigh made her laugh outright.
“You have to grow first.” I know, he thought, glaring at the book as though it had personally wronged him.
“One day,” she said, setting it just out of his reach again, and went back to her work.
One day.
It stuck with him longer than she could have guessed, mostly because it was true of everything just then.
One day he’d read properly.
One day he’d walk without falling.
One day he’d earn money instead of only watching it change hands.
None of that was available to him yet, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
For now, growing was the entire job — and he’d started to understand that growing wasn’t wasted time.
It was the only kind of preparation currently on offer.
He spent some of that time doing the one thing infancy couldn’t take from him: organizing what he remembered.
He sorted it mentally into rough shelves — history, finance, technology, politics, the names of companies and inventions and wars that hadn’t happened yet — without trying to hold every date perfectly, just keeping the shape of things somewhere he could find them later.
He knew the empire was heading toward real trouble.
He knew a war was coming that would reorder the world.
He knew industry and modern finance would matter more with every decade that passed.
None of which he could do anything with yet, and he was honest with himself about why.
A small child walking into a government office and predicting the next thirty years would not be believed — and if he somehow was believed, that would be worse, because then people would start asking how he knew, and who had taught him, and who he was really working for.
There was no safe answer to any of those questions.
So the plan, for now, was simple: stay quiet, stay unremarkable, and let time do the parts of the work that only time could do.
His parents noticed the watching, even without knowing what to make of it.
“He studies everything,” Mehmet said one evening, half amused.
“Maybe he’ll be a merchant after all.” Maybe, Ayaan thought.
But it wasn’t a shop he was picturing when he pictured the years ahead — it was something larger, though he had no way to explain that to anyone yet and no real means of acting on it for years regardless.
What he did know was that he didn’t want his parents worrying over coins every evening for the rest of their lives, and that getting rich too fast, or too visibly, would draw exactly the kind of attention he needed to avoid.
Whatever he eventually built would have to start small enough to be forgettable.
Stationery, maybe, once he was old enough to run something himself — paper, pens, ink, notebooks.
Ordinary things people always needed, cheap to start, easy to explain.
Nothing about it would raise a single question.
It wasn’t an idea yet, not really — more a shape he kept turning over on the nights he couldn’t sleep, testing it the way he used to test a business case for a professor who’d never accept a half-finished argument.
Who would buy it.
What it would cost to start.
Why it wouldn’t draw eyes he didn’t want on him.
He had years before any of it mattered, and he made himself leave it there, folded away with the rest of what he wasn’t ready to touch yet.
At night, when the house went quiet, his old life came back to him sometimes — his university, the friends he hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to, the plans that had simply stopped the moment the car hit him.
It still hurt, some nights.
But then he’d hear his father’s breathing across the room, or his mother moving quietly in the next one, and the hurt would settle into something else.
He’d been handed a second life he hadn’t asked for and hadn’t earned.
The least he could do with it was actually live it, instead of spending it mourning the first one.
One evening his father brought home another newspaper, and Ayaan watched him read it the way he always did — catching fragments, not whole sentences.
Political news.
The Sultan.
Europe.
Enough to remind him that the empire he was living inside wasn’t the simplified version from his old textbooks — not as weak as the decline stories made it sound, not as strong as its old reputation either, just a large, complicated state carrying large, complicated problems, run by people solving them with the tools of their own era rather than his.
He understood, watching his father read, that history wouldn’t bend simply because he remembered how it ended.
He would need to understand this specific year — these particular people, this economy, what ordinary citizens actually wanted from their lives — before any of his knowledge turned into anything real.
And knowledge only turned into anything with resources behind it, and resources meant money, and money meant a business people actually trusted, and trust took time to build honestly.
There was no shortcut through any of that.
If anything, it was a relief.
He had time.
He intended to use it properly.
For now he was simply a boy in a small merchant’s household, watching his mother stretch every coin and his father come home tired more nights than not.
He understood, in a way he hadn’t quite managed in his first life, how easily an ordinary family could tip into real hardship, and how much quiet effort went into making sure his never did.
He made himself one more promise, stacked on top of all the others: whatever he eventually built, he would not forget where it started — this small house, these two people, the sound of the harbor carrying through the window at night.
Constantinople stretched out beyond that window, indifferent and enormous, a capital sitting between two continents with centuries of history already behind it.
He had no money.
No name that meant anything yet.
No company, no title, no connections of any kind.
But he had time.
And he had knowledge nobody else in the entire city possessed.
For now, that would have to be enough.