December 1997.
The haveli was silent except for the scratching of a pencil. No fan spun overhead. No servant dared interrupt. The winter air outside curled like smoke around bare branches. In the main study, Arslan sat on the carpet—legs folded, shawl pulled tight, eyes lowered.
A candle flickered beside the ledger.
Not digital.
Not modern.
He insisted on paper for this—the closing of a year.
Riyaz stood near the fireplace, sipping kehwa. No sugar. No cream. Just bitter green clarity.
"Final number?" Riyaz asked.
Arslan tilted the ledger, eyes glancing once more down the columns:
Land purchases: 3,200 acres across Sindh and Balochistan
Total canteen revenue: irrelevant
Government grants: laundered as donations
Divine dreams this year: 17
Approximate prophetic earnings: 13.5 million rupees
Employee count: 12,044 (excluding volunteers and clerics)
Registered assets across front companies: ~8.1% of Pakistani territory by legal loophole
He looked up.
"Solid. We've passed the point of collapse. The empire sustains itself now."
Riyaz nodded. "Too big to hide."
"Which means," Arslan said softly, "we build mirrors."
Riyaz didn't reply. He watched the boy reach for a second notebook, leather-bound, unlabeled. The "vision book." No facts. Only futures.
"Next decade belongs to print and pixels," Arslan said, sketching a line graph. "Not now. But soon. Newspapers. Radio. Then private TV. Then internet. But we don't wait for the future. We'll meet it halfway."
He flipped the page.
"People can't read yet," he said. "Perfect. We teach them how. On our terms."
Another page. Names of ghost publishing houses. Blank editors. Shell printing presses.
"The illiterate are the most loyal readers," Arslan muttered. "They don't question. They memorize. Like parrots. Like prayer."
Riyaz finished his kehwa. "Media is too loud."
Arslan smiled. "That's why we won't speak."
He pointed to a page titled "Silent Media Plan."
"Not headlines. Footnotes. Schoolbooks. Flyers. Sponsored essays. Government circulars ghostwritten by our lawyers. Lesson plans we 'donate' to madrasa boards. We won't run a newspaper. We'll write the one they already read."
"And later?"
"Later, we buy paper mills. Then printing machines. Then the language itself."
He snapped the notebook shut.
"Urdu is ours now. Arabic, we've already woven into the daily breath of children. English we'll harvest slowly. Rural Punjab will never pronounce it right, but they'll fear it."
Silence settled again.
"Radio?" Riyaz asked.
"Useless for now. Too many wires. Too many bribes. But print—print is god. And god is always early."
A servant knocked once. Entered. Placed a wooden box on the floor. Inside, early drafts of school readers printed in Faisalabad under the name "The Baraka Foundation." Arslan flipped through them. Bright colors. Simplified Urdu. Phrases like "Cleanliness is part of faith," beside illustrations of a child washing his hands—branded shirt, Al-Riyaz canteen packet in the corner of the frame.
Page after page.
He approved all but one. "Too many vowels," he said.
As the servant left, Riyaz asked, "Will we make TV one day?"
Arslan stared at the fire. "Not TV. TV is noise. But audio... voices... yes."
He closed his eyes.
"In a few years, someone will try cassette-based education. Small radios. Cheap speakers. Qur'an recitations. Poetry. Philosophy. We'll fund it. Quietly. Distribute it like dawat. Mix it with our slogans. Sell obedience as rhythm. Make worship a jingle."
He paused.
"Eventually, they'll beg for content. That's when we own their ears."
Riyaz took out a folder—district breakdowns. "The Multan land near the GT road..."
"Perfect for a paper mill," Arslan said without looking.
"The Turbat land?"
"Hold. That's not for factories. That's a gift for 2023."
"And the Uch Sharif bypass?"
Arslan finally looked up. "A school. But not a real one. A factory of thought. One day we'll plant philosophers there."
Riyaz didn't ask how he knew. He hadn't asked in years.
"Register three new imprints," Arslan said. "Low budget, spiritual names. Dar-ul-Fikr. Saadaat Press. The Light of Unity Foundation. Publish children's books, fake biographies of saints, translations of fake French philosophers. Make it all feel ancient."
"And what of government curriculum?"
"We'll make a curriculum of our own. Then offer it free to poor districts. The government will adopt it eventually, out of laziness."
He wrote on the page: Control the lazy, not the elite.
A boy from the workforce entered. One of the delivery runners. Dust on his shalwar. Clutching two envelopes—one from Karachi, one from Khuzdar.
Arslan read both.
First: a shipment of offset printing machinery from Japan had arrived early.
Second: the land near Khuzdar contained trace amounts of bauxite.
He handed both to Riyaz. "Sign for the press. Hide the mining permit under an agricultural endowment."
The boy bowed and left.
Arslan watched him go. "They're the real media," he murmured. "These runners. These boys. Their feet are faster than satellites."
He stood and stretched.
"Prepare the 1998 plan," he said. "Full media acquisition phase. Start with literacy. Control textbooks. Control the paper they're printed on. Control the editors. The language will obey before the people do."
"And television?" Riyaz asked one last time.
Arslan turned to the window, watching dusk fall like spilled ink over Bahawalpur.
"When they invent screens," he said, "we'll already own the light behind them."
And so he wrote in his vision book that night, under candlelight:
> The soul of a country is not in its leaders, but in the words it reads in silence. We will become those words. Not now. But soon. Before they know how to read.
January 1998.
The month passed without celebration.
No banners. No fanfare. No "Happy New Year" painted on school walls or stitched onto madrasa scrolls. Time didn't need permission to pass—it slipped like sugar into chai, unnoticed until it stirred.
In Bahawalpur, the cold lingered longer than expected. Even the trees felt indecisive. Riyaz spent most mornings beside the main courtyard heater, reading civil service dispatches that now arrived stamped in green instead of red. Al-Riyaz had been quietly inducted into what bureaucrats called "strategic partnerships"—a euphemism for being too useful to ignore.
And Arslan?
He had stopped dreaming for now. Dreams weren't needed. Not when the machine was running.
By early January, 217 Al-Riyaz madrasas dotted Pakistan's skin like blessed scars. The figurehead remained the same: Malik Riyaz, the retired major turned holy benefactor, a man so pious he claimed no credit. But inside, under the surface, buried like wires, was the truth—every decision, contract, and corner plot traced back to the quiet boy with winter breath and endless notebooks.
Arslan had centralized education and piety in a single shell: the madrasa-canteen-school hybrid. Children now studied math after duhr, memorized Qur'anic surahs before learning alphabets, and munched chili-flavored wafers between science lessons taught by molvis hired on six-month rolling contracts.
No one stayed long enough to gain a following.
Each madrasa came with the same blueprint: tiled prayer halls, solar-powered lighting in select rooms, insulated quarters for teachers, and a sealed corner booth that sold snacks, stationary, and subsidized uniforms—all branded.
Riyaz called them "Gifts from God."
Arslan called them "Control Vectors."
Revenue was irrelevant. Nothing earned money except the divine dreams—and even that wasn't really earning. It was conjuring.
In 1997 alone, Arslan had "dreamt" 17 times: four cricket match outcomes, five flood warnings, two surprise election results, three lottery combinations, and three agricultural forecasts no one else could have known. Altogether, it made them roughly 13.5 million rupees—raw, untraceable, mostly in cash or gold or land promises.
Every rupee was poured back.
Into land.
Into silence.
Into shadow.
A document from Islamabad arrived in the second week of January. A new partnership between the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Al-Riyaz was quietly approved—non-binding, unannounced. It allowed for the "assistance and contribution of the private sector" in upgrading religious schools. In exchange, Arslan's team would receive data. Demographics. District breakdowns. Land registries disguised as enrollment lists.
The machine began mapping Pakistan not just by land—but by mind.
He called it The Quiet Census.
By mid-January, ten more school-madrasas were under construction. The concrete came from factories in Multan and Sukkur now indirectly under Arslan's control—shell companies managed by assistants who signed papers with trembling hands, unaware their salaries were being logged in the same ledgers as prayers.
In a board meeting held inside a guesthouse in Dera Ghazi Khan, under the pretense of a dawat, Arslan sat at the head of the table while Riyaz introduced him as "our little hafiz with Allah's light in his heart." The managers around the table smiled and nodded, eyes not on the boy but on the folder he opened.
Inside were maps.
Red zones marked for aggressive land offers.
Green zones for soft purchasing via donations.
Blue zones already under their foot, like pressure points on a body.
"Every province has its pulse," Arslan said softly. "We don't dominate it. We become its rhythm."
A manager from Sukkur asked where the funds were coming from.
Riyaz laughed and lifted a hand to the sky. "God provides. Dreams guide."
The men chuckled nervously. No one asked again.
By the third week of January, the snack empire had split into regional brands. The name Al-Mut'amim was still stamped on every carton, but local variations began to appear:
Balochi Bites in Quetta, with fish-shaped chips wrapped in verses from local saints.
Sufi Sweets in Sindh, backed by shrines and subsidized by land grants.
Nimko Noor in Punjab, now sold in paper sachets with rhyming slogans:
"Namaz ke baad, Nimko ka saath."
Each snack packet was a prayer and a poison. A promise and a trap.
Arslan didn't eat them.
He never did.
He still preferred dried dates and roasted lamb. Real food. Truth, not temptation.
By the last week of the month, he called a quiet meeting with Riyaz under the mango tree, now leafless.
"I want cement next," Arslan said.
"Cement?"
"Factories. Kilns. Control of aggregate."
"Why?"
"Because roads are coming," Arslan replied. "Because China will wake up. Because dirt is cheap now but gold tomorrow. And when CPAC finally reaches these ghost towns, I want to already own the spine."
Riyaz didn't argue.
Five days later, two offers were sent to abandoned cement plants in Thatta and Dera Ismail Khan. One was accepted. The other returned with a polite refusal.
Arslan smiled at the rejection. "They'll crawl back in six months."
In the evenings, he wandered the estate. Silent. Shawl wrapped. Watching construction from afar. Sometimes he paused by the underground pantry built into the back orchard—the one filled with old VHS cameras, batteries, laptops, and future tech stored like relics in a shrine.
He didn't touch them.
Just stared.
As if to remind himself what was coming.
On the last day of January, he called in the head of logistics, the chief accountant, and two of the five retired army officers. In a cold side room with peeling paint, he laid out the plan for Strategic Internal Oversight—the official name for what would become their internal check and balance division.
Every employee, from assistant to molvi, from warehouse worker to manager, would now be shadowed, documented, and ranked. Loyalty would be quantified. Deviance measured. Promotions adjusted accordingly.
"They will never know who watches them," Arslan whispered. "But they'll feel it."
That night, as fog settled over Bahawalpur like wet cloth, Riyaz found Arslan alone in the study.
Reading Qur'an.
Not for effect.
Not for image.
Just reading.
The candlelight made the shadows of the text dance. His lips moved silently.
"Tomorrow?" Riyaz asked.
"We start digging new bore wells for the madrasas," Arslan replied without looking up. "Clean water is the next tool. Filtration systems. Hygiene campaigns. Wudhu fountains branded with Al-Riyaz's seal."
Riyaz smiled faintly. "You're turning Pakistan into a diorama."
Arslan closed the Qur'an. "No. I'm turning it into a machine."
He stood.
Outside, a distant prayer call echoed across empty fields.
The boy walked to the window. Looked out. And whispered, to no one:
"Machines don't cry. They just keep turning."
The room pulsed with breath and belief.
It was June 1998. Karachi's Gulshan-e-Iqbal madrasa branch—the largest in Sindh—stood dressed like a bride. Green banners fluttered above the marble courtyard. A giant tent arched overhead like a cathedral of commerce and faith. Children lined the outer perimeter holding roses. A dozen cows were tied to a corner stall, their faces dabbed with turmeric and prayers. And in the middle, beneath a gilded canopy, sat a wooden pulpit built higher than tradition allowed.
It was Friday.
And the angel-child had arrived.
They called him Bachay Mola, Noor ka Tukra, Mehboob-e-Riyaz. His face was printed on wrappers, his silhouette was on matchboxes, his name whispered in between business deals and baby cradles. But no one ever saw him—until a day like this.
Arslan stood up slowly, dressed in a soft white kurta with a beige Arabic cloak over his shoulders. His face was a poem sculpted by stillness—lips slightly parted, eyes wide and downcast, his posture that of a reluctant saint.
A boy carrying Qur'an. A boy who never raised his voice.
The microphone squealed.
Then silence.
Then breath.
Then Arslan recited.
"Wa yarda lakum al-Islam deenan."
And He has chosen for you Islam as your way.
The voice was pure, soft—high and unbroken. He sounded like revelation itself. People wept before the meaning even arrived.
And then Arslan began the khutbah, prepared three nights ago by candlelight with ink and calculation.
---
> "I am not worthy to speak," Arslan whispered, just loud enough. "But my grandfather says silence without truth becomes cowardice. And in cowardice, faith dies."
The crowd leaned in.
> "In this world, my brothers and sisters, there is hunger. Hunger for food. Hunger for safety. Hunger for dignity. Some hunger is of the body. Some is of the soul. And some—" he paused, raising his eyes slightly, "—is of the future."
> "We at Al-Riyaz try. We are not perfect. But with your prayers and Allah's will, we are building. One nail at a time. One child at a time. One prayer at a time. Faith must feed. And food must be earned."
He glanced at the edge of the tent, where three goats stood leashed beside bags of flour marked "Zakat Gift."
> "This Ramadan, our offices received 14,000 kilos of wheat. 700 goats. 92 bighas of land. These were not donations. These were declarations—that Pakistan is not poor. That we are rich in heart."
Murmurs. A few old men cried openly.
> "And to those who borrow from Al-Riyaz—we ask for no rupees. No bank slips. No harassment. Only one promise: if you borrow in gold, return in gold. That is all. Because your child's wedding deserves it. Your daughter's dowry deserves it. Your tired hands deserve it."
The hall erupted in "SubhanAllah."
---
In the women's area behind the curtain, veiled mothers passed around cartoon booklets their children had bought that week—brightly printed characters like Mullah Murgi, Captain Imandaar, Baba Biryani, and Rocket Roti—all fighting invisible enemies like "Lalach Monster" and "Jhoot Badshah." At the back of each booklet, a row of collectible Qeemti Cards—colorful prints that kids tore out and traded.
This week's prize was a slingshot with the Al-Riyaz logo—if you collected the full set of "Sadiq 7."
In cities like Lahore, Peshawar, and Sukkur, kids gathered in alleyways yelling about swaps.
> "Mujhe Captain Imandaar ka Qanooni Form chahiye, main Rocket Roti ki topi doon ga!"
By evening, Arslan's "cartoon economy" had become larger than Pakistan's stationery market.
The illiterate could finally collect. And for once—be equal.
---
Back at the sermon, Arslan closed with a prayer.
> "Ya Allah, let us be useful. Let our money mean mercy. Let our buildings breathe patience. And let every snack we eat remind us—this world is sweet, but temporary."
Then silence.
Then the nod.
Riyaz stepped forward, as if claiming his grandson like a shepherd retrieving a blessed lamb. He placed his hand on Arslan's shoulder, looked at the crowd, and declared:
> "We are not rulers. We are your servants. And Al-Riyaz is your home."
They cheered.
From the front row, a local MNA stood, beaming. He had just received a new water pump for his village in exchange for 5 acres of worthless land.
From the left, a teacher cried as she handed over her daughter's wedding list to a smiling assistant in an Al-Riyaz badge.
From the right, children waved booklets in the air, chanting:
> "Taste Taqwa Ka! Taste Taqwa Ka!"
---
Later that evening, in the back seat of the car, Arslan didn't speak. He sat cross-legged with a small notebook open. Riyaz drove silently.
The boy was calculating.
Not how much money they made—but how many families had shifted allegiance.
This wasn't profit. This was prophecy.
A soft radio voice whispered from the front:
> "Next week's episode of Captain Imandaar vs Dhokaybaaz Daaku will be available in all major shops by Thursday…"
Arslan looked up. Smiled.
And wrote:
> Phase Five Initiated: Emotional Infrastructure.