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It was only yesterday that I was having this long-winding discussion with my daughter on how hard work unfailingly yields fruits. At the end of a half-hour discourse, she asked, “But not everyone can be a Dhirubhai Ambani, right dad?” “One needn’t be,” was my riposte. “But one can certainly be Surjan Singh Ahuja,” I said. Surjan who, my daughter queried. I told her, and I’ll tell you now.

The humility in the smile behind the bushy beard was infectious as the fifty-something sardar clasped my hand. It must have been the late ‘80s. The place: Kalbadevi in Mumbai. “Meet Surjan Singh Ahuja, owner of the biggest cloth shop in the area,” my friend Baljeet Parmar did the formalities. “I’m a small man, sir. Worked hard to reach here,” the self-effacing man told me.

The flames of partition were yet to be doused when Surjan reached Mumbai in 1947. As a refugee in Kalbadevi, he got a menial job with a cloth shop and a shelter at a Dickensian slum nearby. Vivacious at 15, he befriended many Gujarati cloth merchants there. In between his slog, he would often visit the Kalbadevi gurdwara, only to be stung by the sight of poor Punjabi women without chunnis to cover their heads inside the sanctum. An aghast Surjan struck a deal with his Gujarati friends. He would buy cloth from them, make chunnis and sell them to poor women at the gurdwara for 3-4 annas.

His profit: an anna a chunni. Soon, he would work in the shop in the morning, sell chunnis at the gurdwara at noon and go from house to house in the evening selling his wares to families. “I wanted to help poor Punjabi women. Profit was secondary,” I remember Surjan telling me. Gradually, his earnings rose. From chunnis to shirt, trouser and suit cut-pieces — his business ramified, clientele burgeoned. The growing years saw him being rechristened from Surjan Singh dupattawala to Surjan Singh cloth merchant. Now, he had the biggest cloth showroom in Kalbadevi.

Twenty years after our meeting, Surjan, a near-octogenarian and owner of Ahuja Silk Mills in Kurla, is today one of the richest Sikhs in Mumbai. What’s striking in this instance of ‘Singh is King’ is not merely an affirmation of inventor Thomas Alva Edison’s “success-is-99%-perspiration theory”, but also the fact that philanthropy needn’t part with fame. Surjan donates generously to Guru Nanak Hospital and educational trust, while his sons manage his business. Verily, hard work, bolstered by gumption and a touch of humanity, can never ever fail anyone.