He reached for his own soldering iron, its tip cold and untouched for months. For the first time in years, Mr. Gupta wasn't looking at a relic. He was looking at a library. And tomorrow, he was going to start building.

The rain hammered against the corrugated roof of Gupta & Kumar Electronics, a sound Mr. Gupta had once found soothing. Now, it was just noise. He sat on a rickety stool behind a glass counter full of dusty capacitors, staring at the blinking cursor on his ancient desktop computer.

"The part is obsolete," he said, pointing to a tiny, silver cylinder. "Nobody makes the 2N5457 transistor anymore."

"It is our family Gita," his father had whispered on his deathbed. "Everything we know is in there. Don't let it die."