“Huh?”
An exclamation escaped my lips without me realizing it.
Right in front of me stood something resembling a filtration tower.
It looked absurdly advanced for such a shabby factory.
‘Isn’t that a filtration column?
Though now that I look closely, it’s an old batch-type setup.’
On closer inspection, the cylindrical metal tanks weren’t integrated into one body but separated into sections.
It wasn’t perfect equipment.
It felt more like an early-20th-century experimental apparatus for synthesizing and grinding compounds.
“Who are you?”
“Hello, sir. I’m Rohit Karmakar from Nayara Corporation. I came in after seeing the sign.”
An old man with white hair suddenly appeared from somewhere, so I greeted him first.
“I’m not the boss. My son’s the boss. I’m just the security guard here.”
“Excuse me?”
He didn’t feel like a security guard at all.
His gaunt frame and piercing eyes gave off not just eccentricity, but something extraordinary.
“Anyway, what did you come here for?”
“I’m looking for a yarn supplier. I was wondering if I could get Rayon yarn here.”
“What, Rayon? Must be because you’re young — doing things nobody else bothers with.”
“The sign outside said this was a Rayon specialty shop.”
“Yeah, yeah, fine. Since you’re here, eat first. You can look at the yarn afterward.”
“Pardon?”
The old man abruptly told me to eat first.
Come to think of it, lunchtime had long passed.
“What, you don’t want to eat in a place like this?”
“No, it’s not that…”
“Then get inside. Judging by your face, you’ve been running around all day without eating. You can only do business if you are healthy so let’s talk after a meal.”
The old man casually shoved me forward with a wave of his hand and pushed me into the factory.
“Honey, who’s that young man?”
“No idea. Says he’s a fabric merchant. Came looking for Rayon and apparently hasn’t eaten.”
“Well then he should eat first. We all work just to survive, don’t we?”
“Don’t just talk — hurry and make room for him.”
“Come over here. Going hungry makes you sick.”
“We’ve got পটল today. Throw in some আলু too, so it’s decent enough.”
It seemed to be a family-run factory.
An elderly couple sat at the table along with a young man who resembled them closely, so it was almost certain.
The meal itself wasn’t anything fancy.
They dumped rice into a huge plate, piled on assorted vegetables and green chili, then drenched it with oil and mixed everything thoroughly.
They scooped generous portions of the Aloo-Potol.
It looked like a lot of food, but maybe because I’d spent all day running around, it disappeared endlessly into my stomach.
“You’ve got such a refined face, but you sure eat heartily.”
“…Ah, yes. It’s really delicious. Thank you.”
Gulp.
Gulp.
“They’re toughening up the rookie, huh? Which trading company are you from?”
“Pardon?”
The man who appeared to be the son poured me a glass of water as he spoke.
He was probably the “boss” the old man had mentioned.
“What kind of yarn did your senior tell you to find? They probably didn’t explain the specifications, so just describe roughly what you’re looking for.”
Apparently, wandering around searching for yarn made me look like a rookie employee.
Then again, in the 1950s and ’60s, companies constantly sent new employees out to sell products under the excuse of “training,” or told them to develop clients out of nowhere, work part-time at dealerships,.
“I’m looking for 130-denier Rayon-cotton blended yarn. I’d like various cotton blend ratios from ten to forty-five percent.”
“Hmm… pretty impressive for a rookie. Must’ve had a good senior teaching you.”
“What kinds of yarn do you handle here?”
“We don’t have any yarn. Now that you’ve eaten, leave.”
“Father!”
Huh?
I’d been talking to the son, but suddenly the old man beside us exploded.
I was dumbfounded.
He’d said he was just the security guard, yet he interrupted a business discussion with the owner.
And now he claimed a Rayon yarn factory didn’t even sell yarn.
Today had truly been chaotic.
I’d been treated to meals, acquired a factory, learned smuggling tricks from a British company branch office, and now I was apparently getting kicked out of the house that had just fed me.
“What? Am I wrong? If we can’t even spin proper thread, what’s there to sell?”
“Maybe not the forty-five-percent cotton blend, but the ten-percent blend is perfectly sellable. The quality’s decent.”
“What decent quality?! That yellowish rayon that snaps at the slightest pull — who’d buy that? Forget it all!”
“Honey, if you say things like that, the customer will misunderstand.”
The grandmother hurriedly tried to calm the furious old man.
It felt like watching an old sitcom.
The old man patted my backside and shooed me outside like a chicken.
“Mother, take Father inside. Quickly.”
“Alright, alright. Young man, don’t misunderstand. This old fool’s getting senile.”
“No, not at all.”
“Oh dear… . I’m sorry, young man.”
The grandmother beat her chest in despair.
I couldn’t understand either why she wanted to die or why she felt sorry toward me.
The whole thing felt like an old comedy skit.
“Why would you do this?”
“Because you keep acting like this! Come here already. Stop interfering with our son’s business!”
“Oh come on, woman. Let go of me.”
The mother dragged the old man away somewhere, while the son looked at me awkwardly.
“That surprised you, didn’t it? My father gets angry over the smallest things.”
“Ah, yes. I understand.”
“Even so, my father was a senior researcher from Bengal Chemical.”
“So he was an insider.”
Wait… that old man was actually impressive.
Wasn’t Bengal Chemical one of the best chemical and pharmaceutical companies and only swadeshi company that had capacity to do its own independent R&D even during the British Colonial period?
Back then, it gathered the best minds in the chemical industry.
“Yes. He’s skilled enough to build this Rayon processing machine himself. All he had was what he’d glimpsed while working in a some sketch and blueprints ”
‘Wait… this structure is a Rayon processing machine?’
No wonder it resembled a filtration column — it was a Processing machine.
That’s why it looks like this.
The fact the old man was a genius was surprising enough, but the fact that he’d replicated a Rayon processing machine just from observation was even more astonishing.
‘So this really is the early Pioneer Group?’
It was well known that the founding family of the Pioneer Group were all engineers, Research and what not.
Though the group had shrunk later as the political situation got worse in the late 20th century, it had once been extremely influential.
“You produce Rayon directly in this factory?”
“Yes. We make Cellulose Fibre, then spray them through that spinning machine to create thread. For blended yarn, we purchase cotton thread separately and twist it together with our rayon before winding the final yarn.”
Though no rayon was currently loaded into the equipment, the owner explained the entire spinning process through gestures alone.
This wasn’t the unpolished explanation of someone doing it for the first time.
He really did feel like a proper company president.
“Could I see some samples?”
“Of course. This way.”
We walked deeper into the factory.
Everything was neatly organized, but none of the equipment was running.
Even the yarn samples looked old.
“Were these spun a long time ago? The rayon yarn seems discolored.”
Rayon should have been white is not it?, but these samples had a faint yellow tint.
As though they were stained with grime.
“It’s not discoloration. Our product naturally comes out this way.”
“This is the original color?”
“Our technology is still lacking. That’s why my father said we had nothing worth selling.”
The owner’s face turned red as he explained, as though he’d been humiliated by buyers countless times before.
Still, his honesty made him more trustworthy.
“Would dyeing fix the issue?”
“It’s fine with dark colors, but bright colors lose vibrancy. If you decide to purchase, we can match the price at 1.20 rupee .”
1.20per pound…
At an exchange rate of 3.31 per dollar… wait, that was less than 40 cents per pound.
That was extremely cheap.
“So it’s cheaper than others.”
“Yes. Since we process it ourselves, we can still make a little profit even at that price. Anyway… whether or not dyeing works, you’ll need to test how often the yarn snaps when weaving fabric.”
He was an astonishingly honest man.
Even while looking troubled, he openly admitted his yarn broke easily.
“So it snaps more easily than British yarn.”
“Yes, I admit it. No matter how much we alter the twisting conditions, we can’t match the strength of the British thread.”
“By twisting conditions, you mean twisting the threads together?”
“That’s right. That machine over there is the twisting machine. You’ve twisted straw rope before, haven’t you? Thread also becomes stronger when twisted together like straw.”
The owner rubbed his palms together, mimicking the motion of twisting rope.
That was strange.
You weren’t supposed to twist thread like that.
I might not know straw rope, but I did know cables.
Even in construction, suspension bridge steel cables were made by twisting steel wires together, and subsea cables used in industrial plants also twisted their outer sheathing.
Things that absolutely must never snap could never be made by simply twisting them together like rope.
If you twisted them carelessly like straw rope, the restoring force inside the wires or outer materials would gradually weaken the structure over time as they tried to untwist themselves.
To make proper cable, you didn’t twist everything together equally.
One core wire had to remain fixed in the center while the surrounding wires wrapped around it.
Without a central core, the structure would loosen and weaken over time.
And if that still wasn’t enough, heat treatment was sometimes added during the winding process.
“Yes. My father built it himself.”
The craftsmanship itself was remarkable.
But they lacked the crucial know-how.
“I think the strength problem can be solved.”
“What?”
“Thread the yarn through the machine. I’ll make a small adjustment.”
“You’ll adjust it?”
“Haha, don’t worry. I won’t break it.”
I removed one thread from the twisting disk of the twisting machine.
This thread would serve as the core.
Whether it was people or thread, there always had to be one central point holding things together.
It was probably so simple that it had escaped even the old man’s sharp eye.
The owner tilted his head in confusion, but I gestured for him to start the machine anyway.
Whiiiiiiir.
“That should do it.”
“You’re saying that was the entire adjustment?”
“Of course. That’s all.”
I pulled out the twisted thread and handed it to him.
He looked baffled as he accepted it, but after tugging at it several times, his body began trembling.
He pulled on it repeatedly, then even tried biting through it with his teeth as though unable to believe it.
“What is this? What kind of tricks did you use?”
“It’s not a trick. Just logical engineering. You need one core thread in the center for proper twisting. If every strand rotates equally, they’ll loosen too easily.”
“Ah! Of course! This is…”
The more I explained, the more the owner gasped in amazement.
“If the strength still isn’t enough, try adding heat. Just raising the temperature of the thread drum slightly should help.”
“So are you a researcher?”
“Not quite.”
I am not
I was simply an engineer from the 21st century who’d survived every kind of industrial disaster imaginable.
“Would you like me to run the rayon processing machine too? I think I can help.”
“Yes! Of course!”
The owner practically ran toward the machine in excitement.
He poured powdered materials into the dormant chamber, raised the temperature, and started pressing various switches.
Everything seemed completely manual from start to finish, but his movements were practiced.
After watching for a while, just as the machine grew noticeably warm, you can say fibre come out well, not necessarily as it needs aging and other after treatment .
The fibre should have been transparent silver-white, but instead they were yellowish.
No wonder the yarn looked like that.
The process seemed set far too aggressively.
At its core, the equipment appeared to operate through Wet Spinning Bath and Spinneret assembly and post and pre-treatment techniques.
It was basically an extremely primitive chemical plant, and it seemed like all it needed was optimization of catalysts and reaction-control materials.
“Let me ask a few things. What catalyst are you using?”
“Catalyst?”
“When treating,do you simply raise the temperature, or mix things ?”
“Yes. We pour in zinc sulphate— raw material — then mix with H2SO4 and water, raise the temperature through 45°C, maintain it around 50°C for a while, then push it up to 55°C before cooling it slowly.”
The owner recited the entire reaction process without hesitation.
These kinds of industrial conditions were practically trade secrets, yet he trusted me enough to explain them openly.
“So you’re using H2SO4 Then what reaction stabilizer are you using?”
Using H2SO4 as the reaction medium shouldn’t have caused discoloration by itself.
Which meant the culprit had to be the stabilizer.
“Reaction stabilizer?”
“Judging from your process, the reaction begins around 45°C to 55°C. That’s when stabilizer should be added.”
People often described reactions as “explosive,” and that expression literally came from chemical engineering.
But in real industrial settings, explosive reactions were dangerous and produced inconsistent material quality, so engineers deliberately slowed the reaction rate.
That’s what reaction stabilizers were for.
“I… I didn’t know that. We don’t add anything else during the process.”
So they didn’t even understand the concept of reaction stabilizers.
Another consequence of lacking basic modern chemical engineering knowledge.
“Alright then. Try adding more ZnSO4. About 9~12%of the total weight should do.”
When in doubt about stabilizers, ZnSO4 was a safe choice.
It mixed well with almost anything, had excellent heat resistance, and as an sulphate material, it could even help filter impurities from organic compounds.
Technically, the correct ratio should have been calculated in mol percentages, but for such a tiny plant, rough approximations were good enough.
“more ZnSO4?”
“Yes,you should be able to find it easily at a chemical supplier, and also lower the concentration of H2SO4 around 3% and maintain the temperature by 25-35°C, I think it’s roughly enough.”
“Understood. I’ll definitely acquire some more and test the process .”
Hope filled the young owner’s voice.
Somehow, it seemed I’d found my Rayon yarn supplier after all.
And at a cheaper price than smuggled British imports, no less.