The Scrub Pad King

Meet the man who turned scrap into scrubs, and unemployment into opportunity

- Gowher Bhat

When Riyaz Ahmad Zargar talks about his childhood, he doesn’t sugarcoat it. “We had nothing,” he says, sitting on a wooden bench outside his small factory in Budgam. “Not even the home we were born in. We lost that too.”

He was still a teenager when his father died. A sudden heart attack, right after the small street-food business his father started collapsed under mounting debt. The man who had cooked his way through hard times, who believed a little bit of spice and sweat could build a life, was gone.

Riyaz didn’t have time to cry. “There was no space for grief. My mother and sister were looking at me. I had to do something.”

After trying to rebuild their lives in Anantnag, they returned to their hometown Rainawari's narrow lanes where his father once dreamed of a home.

But the house had already been sold to cover debts. All that remained was a battered suitcase and a prayer.

Some men stumble into business with capital and connections. Riyaz had neither. What he did have, he says, was "a mind full of worry, and hands ready to work."

So he worked as a salesman, as a delivery guy and as someone knocking on strangers’ doors trying to sell things people didn’t want. “One man slammed the door in my face. Another didn’t even let me finish my sentence.”