March 2002.
The railway breathed like an old lung across the body of Pakistan, iron ribs laid in colonial times now soaked in the sweat and spit of a nation that still hadn't learned how to wait. Trains pulled into dusty stations with men hanging from windows and children running alongside with hope in their hands and hunger in their bellies.
And just beyond the platforms, in brick buildings painted a humble beige, Al-Riyaz had arrived.
Not through speeches. Through tenders.
Not through slogans. Through silence.
The contracts had been stalled since 1995—red-taped, sabotaged, passed around like poisoned gifts. But Arslan knew how to oil systems. You didn't protest a government that didn't move. You greased it until it slipped forward into your arms.
This time, it wasn't just cash. It was something holier.
A quiet donation to the army—land, equipment, a retirement center built in Chakwal—made out to the Ministry of Defence, hand-delivered with a letter from Malik Riyaz written in Qur'anic Arabic and humility.
The next week, the tenders passed.
Every railway station in Punjab, Sindh, and parts of Balochistan now listed Al-Riyaz as the default supplier for canteens, kiosks, and utility stalls. The signatures were clean. The language was precise. The donations untraceable.
Factories bloomed like weeds. Small, silent, designed for efficiency. Just big enough to produce biscuits, tea powder, and snacks. Near every station. Linked by the same transport fleet.
The web tightened.
Every railway station mosque was now an Al-Riyaz branch. Like the 40% of mosques in over 400 towns across Pakistan, regardless of sect—Shia, Sunni, Deobandi, Barelvi. The name on the prayer mats was Al-Riyaz. The soap in the ablution area was Al-Riyaz. The tea after Jumma, Al-Riyaz. The molvi's stipend, quietly paid in gold or goats or land—Al-Riyaz.
The people bowed to God. But they stood up and shook hands with Al-Riyaz.
By now, no tribal sardar or political strongman dared interfere. They had either rented property from the empire, had a son working inside it, or owed a loan in gold through the Friday sermons.
The gold moved like a current beneath the soil of Pakistan.
No interest. Just honor.
No compulsion. Just reputation.
And no one defaulted—not because they were afraid. But because they were ashamed.
In the schools, the Al-Riyaz curriculum was expanding. More booklets, more tales of divine dreams, fables of a silent boy blessed with wisdom. Every story was a parable. Every parable was a metaphor. And every metaphor—Arslan.
He never signed them. But everyone knew.
In 2002, Arslan made his most dangerous move yet.
He opened a bank.
Not in name—officially, it was a "public finance cooperative initiative for the underserved rural populace." But in structure, it was a bank. With accounts. With ledgers. With internal credit scoring.
Still no interest.
Still all in gold or goods.
Every school+madarsa now had a small room: tiled, air-cooled, clean, with two clerks behind a desk and a landline phone.
Send money. Receive money. From Layyah to Larkana. From Bahawalnagar to Badin. Fax machines ran day and night, updated logs. Cross-check slips. The verification system was brutal. A rotating central audit team reviewed every receipt. Mistakes were punished. Integrity, rewarded.
Al-Riyaz now had a shadow banking system used by tens of thousands every day. The state pretended not to notice. Because the state's own banks were bloated, corrupt, and missing in half the places Al-Riyaz thrived.
In the cities, ATM-like concepts were being prototyped—not machines, but mobile clerks with small briefcases, rotating daily, offering limited cash withdrawal through verification codes.
And Arslan?
He had turned sixteen the previous year.
But his hands moved like he had seen the end of the world.
Now, in 2002, he was staring at a keypad phone.
Nokia 3310.
He spun it in his hand like a weapon.
"It will become a limb," he said to Riyaz. "People will hold it before they hold their children."
"How soon?" Riyaz asked.
"Three years for the elites. Five years for the middle. Seven for the poor."
"So?"
"So we prepare."
He ordered teams to study the PCB schematics of these phones. How they store SMS. How ringtones are made. How company towers function.
He met with engineers from NUST under secret patronage. Offered them grants. Gave them land. Promised research freedom.
"We won't make phones," he said. "But we will control what gets heard through them."
And he meant it.
Print media was already 50% controlled. He had shares in every regional printing press worth anything, funded through shell companies with innocuous names. Most Urdu weekly magazines now featured sponsored pages by Al-Riyaz. Most popular columnists received stipends for "charity projects."
And now, radio.
Not official stations. Those were still bureaucratic. But the grey zone—mosque loudspeakers, village drama setups, puppet shows with hidden narratives. Snack boxes with built-in speakers that played two-minute stories. Cassettes given free with every Al-Riyaz textbook.
Even in the dark, something always whispered his story.
Every month, more tenders passed. More lands were bought.
The agricultural zones of Rahim Yar Khan, Liaqatpur, Uch Sharif— they bloomed with kikkar trees and African drought-resistant palms planted by the 200-person environmental team Arslan formed back in 1998.
Every hectare had a border of mango, jamun, grape, guava—dividing the land silently like elegant fencing.
The land monopoly was impossible to trace now.
Some lands registered under shrines. Some under trusts. Some under alumni groups. Some under the names of dead people Arslan had never met—all of them managed through proxies.
Every plot had purpose.
Every purpose, profit.
But no profit ever taken.
The money never left the system. It only cycled. Paid salaries. Built new structures. Bought new factories. Paid for 80% of the nation's school blackboards. Built the roads outside the very railway stations now selling its snacks.
By April 2002, the following were under direct or indirect Al-Riyaz control:
2300+ madarsa-school centers
500+ wedding/gathering gardens
90+ factories for food, soap, toys, fragrance, ink, cloth
12 dairy farms
4000+ shops either owned or branded
70+ district departments managing everything from zakat to distribution
One ghost bank.
Three mobile intelligence teams.
12 Parado vehicles.
5 homes in every major city.
More gold in circulation than 3 Olympic pools.
And one boy who sat under a neem tree, writing the next digest story to be read in Lahore, Quetta, and Karachi.
A story about a silent prince who built a kingdom with dreams.
And ruled without a throne.
Beijing was grey and industrial, a maze of concrete veiled in coal-dusted fog. The air tasted like burnt copper, thick with the scent of ambition. Beneath it, a foreign calm — the order of a nation silently rising, unaware that it was being watched by a boy two decades ahead of time.
Arslan stepped out of the tinted Prado, the one specially imported and registered under the Pakistani embassy's cover. He wore a modest dark overcoat, his curls neatly oiled and combed, eyes wide with the practiced innocence of a mascot. Beside him walked Malik Riyaz, calm and upright as always, the Sargodha-born general draped in a black woolen shawl, his medals long retired but his command still sharp.
They were flanked by two translators and four loyal bodyguards — all retired from the Pakistan Army, now permanently on Arslan's payroll. Behind them, five of Al-Riyaz's lawyers walked with briefcases chained to their wrists, legal blueprints of a future no one in this country yet imagined.
The factory grounds smelled of paint and plastic. Hundreds of workers in blue uniforms moved like synchronized ants. There were no smiles. Just production.
The Chinese director was waiting in the steel conference room, sipping bitter green tea. He stood, shook Riyaz's hand, and nodded politely at Arslan, mistaking him for a precocious grandson tagging along.
Arslan simply smiled.
The translators took their places. Lawyers sat. Arslan stood.
"Tell them," Arslan said, voice soft but clear, "we are here to build the cheapest phone in the world. Not the best. Not the fastest. The cheapest. And the most addictive."
The translator hesitated, unsure how to phrase addictive.
"Make them understand it is not a phone. It's a seed. And I want it planted in every hand from Hyderabad to Hangu. Every man. Every woman. Every child who has never owned a watch or a toy."
The director listened, nodding slowly.
"We are not here for technology," Arslan continued, pacing now. "We are here for plastic. Batteries. Bulk. We don't need cameras. We don't need internet. We need calls. SMS. Torchlight. Radio. Snake."
He smiled. "And branding."
He pulled out a wrapper — brightly colored, childish. A candy toy shaped like a cartoon rooster in prayer.
"This," Arslan said, holding it up, "is Pakistan's Mickey Mouse."
Silence. Then the room shifted — subtly, respectfully.
Arslan was no longer a boy in the room. He was the architect.
Riyaz leaned back, watching the scene unfold with the ease of a man used to following orders quietly given.
The lawyers laid out documents — joint ownership contracts, exclusivity clauses, import/export duties, even a legal provision for dummy holding companies in Shenzhen and Islamabad.
By nightfall, Arslan had commissioned a prototype.
A basic keypad phone. Thick body. Long battery life. Built-in flashlight. FM radio. The startup screen would display a crescent moon wrapped around the Al-Riyaz logo. Each phone would be sold with candy. The packaging would resemble snack boxes.
He named it Raqeem-1.
It meant inscribed tablet — holy, silent, powerful.
Arslan then insisted on inspecting the production line. They walked the corridors where plastic was molded, where lithium-ion met copper, where thousands of faceless workers assembled pieces of the future with hands calloused by revolution. He asked questions. Not of specs — of costs. Raw materials. Shipping routes. Factory uptime. Worker conditions. The scalability of assembly in underpaid clusters. He calculated how long it would take before Al-Riyaz could replicate this system in Pakistan itself.
They flew to Guangzhou two days later, then Shanghai. Each city brought new contacts. New ideas. And with every handshake, Arslan made mental notes of technologies that would boom by 2010. He met battery specialists. Packaging moguls. Toy designers. Logistics managers. He met the man who would later design a sub-brand for Xiaomi.
He bought him dinner.
He spoke little. Watched everything.
Back in the hotel suite, Riyaz read namaz while Arslan sat on the balcony in a thick shawl, faxed papers spread around him. Financial projections, phone specs, early design sketches.
The moon above was pale. Like a peeled egg in the Beijing smog.
"They don't even know," Arslan whispered.
Riyaz looked up. "Who?"
"Them. China. The world. What's coming. What we're building."
Riyaz folded his prayer mat. "Then it's your duty to keep it quiet."
"I will."
The deal was signed three days later. Not under Arslan's name, of course. Not even Riyaz's. A shell company in Lahore, owned by a shell company in Hong Kong, owned by a trust in Dubai, owned by a foundation in Bahawalpur. Every wire traced back to nowhere.
They would ship the first batch in six months.
Back in Pakistan, preparations began immediately. Warehouses retrofitted. Mobile counters built inside Al-Riyaz madrasa branches. Flyers designed for those who couldn't read. Toys shaped like the phones distributed to children. Crate loads of pre-orders taken in cash. Arslan approved discount packages — soap bundles with a down payment on a phone. Farmers offered goats in exchange. Brick kilns promised labor.
By Ramadan, the first 10,000 units arrived.
They sold out in three days.
Every phone came with a laminated dua. A small pouch of candy. A prayer bead keychain. And a sticker of Arslan's silhouette in prayer, under the crescent.
It was faith. It was candy. It was communication.
It was a monopoly.
And it was just the beginning.