Arslan was seated cross-legged under the same neem tree where, twelve years ago, he had told Riyaz they would rot the world. The winter had not yet turned cruel, but the sun was limp, like a tired god. The garden of the Bahawalpur estate had grown full and heavy. Jamun trees lined the old boundary wall. Custard apple hung like lazy bells from fat branches. A mongoose darted past a bush.
He was eighteen now. His voice had settled somewhere between recitation and command. His wrists had thickened, his hands still carried the softness of someone who'd never lifted anything heavier than a fountain pen. And that morning, in December 2003, he spoke with a clarity that made even the wind fall silent.
"It's done," Arslan said, brushing invisible dirt from his shawl. "The foundations are no longer sinking. They're fossilized. We can begin the main event."
Riyaz sat nearby, nursing a brass cup of green tea, wrapped in a camel wool shawl that had once belonged to a general. He didn't ask what the main event was. He never asked anymore.
A servant approached. Bowed. Handed Riyaz a bound folder and withdrew. It contained the final reports for 2003—assets, acquisitions, movement.
Arslan didn't look at it.
"Do you know what we did this year?" he asked the breeze, then looked to the fountain, where ducks circled with tragic dignity. "We passed the greatest threshold in this country's history. And no one noticed."
In hard cash, Al-Riyaz now held over a billion dollars. Liquid. Available. Unborrowed. Unclaimed by any debt, any shareholder, any foreign power. Not in vaults. Not in accounts. In motion. In muscle. In loyalty.
"We are not worth a billion," Arslan whispered, smiling bitterly. "We are a billion."
He pointed lazily toward the eastern garden wall. "That land—dead. Cracked. Useless. But under our name since '92. That's not a field. That's the headquarters of a 2023 logistics empire. That patch of dust behind Uch Sharif? Future trade depot. That canal-side plot in Khairpur? Data center. Someday."
Riyaz nodded, eyes half closed.
"And that entire valley north of Dera Ghazi Khan?" Arslan said, flicking a stone toward a squirrel. "The Chinese don't know they need it yet. But they will. They'll beg for it."
He stood up, brushing the folds of his shawl, and walked toward the paved garden path, speaking as he moved.
"Four thousand madrasa-schools. All operational. Multipurpose. Education, faith, remittance. And weddings," he added with a faint smile. "Four hundred thousand daily attendees, children and staff combined."
"One hundred and forty thousand rented shops," Riyaz muttered, almost to himself. "Registered under various shells. Operating under our SOPs. All loyal."
"Ninety-three factories," Arslan said. "Not even counting the mobile workshops and the small-scale production units in villages. Copper, plastic, iron—being bought, cleaned, and stored. Not sold. Stored. Pakistan doesn't understand recycling yet. We do."
His eyes glittered in the low sun.
"We're five years ahead in agriculture," he said. "Fruit yield doubled this year. Mango, citrus, guava, jamun, even date farms are maturing. Entire markets now run on Al-Riyaz fruit. Packed in Al-Riyaz paper. Sold from Al-Riyaz pushcarts."
"Stationery?" Riyaz asked.
Arslan laughed. "We are stationery. Paper. Pens. Cardboard. Crayons. Schoolbooks. Every copy used in every primary class from Peshawar to Rahim Yar Khan—we print those."
He stopped walking and turned, eyes on the fountain again.
"The women's institutes?" he asked.
"Seventy-three," Riyaz answered. "Spinning, stitching, soap. Sewing machines we imported last year have all arrived. They're productive. Half of them are now making Al-Riyaz sanitary napkins. Branded modestly. Sold in brown packaging. Huge demand."
"Phones?"
"We've sold over 300,000 units of Al-Riyaz 3000," Riyaz said. "Our version of the 3001 releases next April. Same price. More battery. Bigger torch. New slogan: Roshni Har Haal Mein."
Arslan nodded.
"Every railway station now has a tuckshop that sells our snacks," he murmured. "Every mosque under our influence now uses our prayer mats, our perfumes, our tasbeeh, our shoe shelves, our plastic water bottles. Every marriage we host happens under our tents, on our carpets, with our fans and our microphones."
He turned to Riyaz again. "We own 11% of Pakistan's legal landmass," he said. "From Karachi to Gwadar, from Bahawalpur to Dera Ismail Khan. Dead land. But we know it's sleeping."
"Water?" Riyaz asked quietly.
"We're expanding wells," Arslan said. "Hand-pumps continue. But soon, underground storage. Rainwater harvesting. Experimental. Not for people—for farms. We'll build water like others build walls."
The air shifted.
"We haven't talked about our gold," Arslan said finally, walking back to sit beside his grandfather. "We have more in private circulation than the State Bank of Pakistan. Our gold loans are being used for weddings, funerals, shops, and land purchases. The gold is never lost. Always returned. And always comes back more than it left."
He paused. Then whispered:
"And no one has a clue."
A gardener passed by with a wheelbarrow. He greeted them both. Arslan responded softly.
"Now," he said. "We build desire."
Riyaz raised an eyebrow.
Arslan's smile turned crooked.
"The shops are not enough. The toys are not enough. I want ads. I want dramas. I want toys that blink. I want books that sing. I want to sell identity. National loyalty through branded longing. I want Al-Riyaz to be a feeling."
"And how?"
Arslan's eyes gleamed.
"Cartoons. And sweet shops."
A beat passed.
"We're starting Al-Riyaz Studio next year. Lahore. Gulberg. Basement. Four floors. Half animation. Half propaganda. We'll dub Islamic stories, create our own. Collectable items in the back. Comics. Plush toys. Bubblegum with cards."
"And the sweet shops?"
"Franchise. Tiered. Candy. Syrup. Chocolates. Sweets in the shape of saints and animals. Halal Haribo. But better. Not just snacks—gifts. Everything a child can crave. Add a loyalty card system. And include scholarships hidden in random packages. They'll beg to buy."
The wind picked up again. A koel called from far beyond the garden wall.
Arslan lowered his voice.
"We've built the body," he said. "Now we seduce the soul."
And in the east, behind the neem, the call to Asr prayer began.
The walls were high and sealed with rusted iron gates, each one padlocked with symbols even the workers couldn't decipher. They were ordinary to the untrained eye—empty plots tucked between old graveyards, crumbling havelis, and dried canals around Uch Sharif. Nothing moved there. Nothing grew. Just bricks, dust, and silence.
But Arslan remembered.
From his past life, he remembered the flood of treasure reports in 2010—the sudden discovery of locked trunks inside false floors, of courtyards hiding forgotten basements, of merchants' houses from the British Raj hiding Ottoman relics, Persian gems, and gold coins that glittered with unfamiliar faces. Forgotten by time. Hidden by fear. Preserved by the paranoia of a dying elite who thought their world would return.
It never did. But Arslan did.
He had started buying those plots in 1998 under various shell trusts—names like Bait-ul-Maal Qadim Foundation, Yaateem Khidmat Committee, Uch Purana Asra Ghar. Always through someone else. Always with the same conditions: the property would be secured, maintained, and eventually restored to house orphanages or widows.
No one asked why the walls were so tall. No one asked why the doors were never opened. They assumed it was under repair. They assumed Arslan's people would do what they always did—build parks, install water pumps, run soup kitchens.
But Arslan didn't want to build. Not yet.
He wanted to dig.
In March 2003, under a thin moon and without a sound, the first of the 27 gates creaked open.
It began with the haveli behind the old Shahi Masjid. The structure had collapsed during a thunderstorm in 1986, killing three squatters. It had stood untouched since then. But Arslan knew what lay beneath. A false floor. Under it, a spiral staircase. Below that—history.
The operation was surgical. Riyaz's team of veterans had long since developed a specialized excavation crew. Officially, they were demolition experts used for clearing construction rubble. Unofficially, they were the ghost team—trained to open graves without leaving a scar.
They worked only at night. Tents covered the interiors. Generators hummed softly behind high walls. Every artifact was logged, documented, and transported in steel briefcases with wax seals.
Within a month, the first yield came in:
Three trunks of 24k gold coins dated between 1795–1930, mostly pre-Partition, wrapped in silk pouches from Bombay and Calcutta banks no longer in existence.
Dozens of antique weapons—daggers with jade hilts, Persian flintlocks, a carved ceremonial sword rumored to be from Sher Shah Suri's lineage.
Rare manuscripts—Arabic, Farsi, Sanskrit—some older than the Mughals, wrapped in lead casings.
A child's wooden toy elephant carved from ivory, still intact, with a mechanism that made it trumpet when rolled.
Arslan ordered everything moved to Karachi.
Beneath his seaside mansion—officially used for "retreat and reflection"—lay an underground hall built like a vault in a foreign museum. Humidity-controlled chambers, velvet-padded drawers, and a private catalogue managed by two archivists who had no idea whose collection they curated.
Each relic was numbered. Each coin traced. But nothing was sold.
"Do not flood the market," Arslan had warned. "Antiques are like memories. Too many, and they lose value."
By the end of 2003, 11 of the 27 plots had been opened. Not all yielded treasure—but enough did. Even the ones that didn't held value in stone carvings, old bricks, lost scripts. A few sites revealed bones—small, wrapped in silk, buried like secrets. Those were left undisturbed. Arslan had no interest in curses.
He used the excuse of Ramadan charity campaigns to pour in extra funds. Trucks full of cement, bricks, and iron were seen entering the plots. The public assumed construction had begun. In truth, underground vaults were being reinforced.
From the outside, each site looked identical: a sealed rectangle with a green and white board that read:
Al-Riyaz Yaateem Khidmat Markaz — In Trust of the Forgotten.
Inside, wealth beyond imagination.
In November, the Karachi vaults received an Ottoman incense box carved from gold and rubies. It had been found inside a sealed chimney in an Uch haveli. A note was wrapped around it in Persian:
"For the one whose hands are not greedy, and whose eyes see beyond kings."
Arslan smiled when he read it.
He sat alone that night in the underground archive, fingering the handle of the incense box, surrounded by glass cases filled with the past.
He did not believe in omens. But he believed in arrangements. In rehearsals of fate.
"What they buried in fear," he murmured, "I will raise in silence."
And then he stood, slipped the incense box into a drawer labeled Haul 11D, and whispered:
"Let the archaeologists keep their bones. I'll keep the power."
The sun burned softly over Bahawalpur as spring melted into summer, and with it, the air around the Al-Riyaz headquarters thrummed with quiet, invisible revolution. Nothing was loud. Nothing was advertised. But everywhere—between village whispers and city papers, railway announcements and mosque sermons—one name repeated like a prayer grafted into the nation's breath:
Al-Riyaz.
By 2004, it was no longer a brand. It was a blood type.
The Al-Riyaz Banking System—once just a remittance table and fax machine in a madrasa storeroom—was now formally acknowledged by the Pakistani government. Not as a full-fledged bank, no. Not yet. But the formal paperwork, the authorizations, the handshakes and headlines—all ensured one simple thing:
No other bank wanted to open a branch where Al-Riyaz already operated.
The reason was plain. Al-Riyaz gave loans in gold—interest-free. The kind of gold you could feel between your fingers, cold and heavy, wrapped in muslin cloth and prayer. For weddings. For dowries. For shop openings. For building roofs and digging graves. The kind of gold your grandfather whispered about and your grandmother wore in her sleep.
And it always came with one condition: return gold, as gold.
Arslan had made the system airtight. Foolproof. Brutal in its simplicity. Weekly repayments were accepted in any Al-Riyaz branch. A rotating clerical team travelled across cities with ledgers bound in camel leather, receipts watermarked with Arslan's silhouette in prayer. Every transaction was copied by hand and faxed to headquarters. No interest. No penalties. Only loss of face.
The result?
A tidal wave of trust. And behind that trust—dominion.
In early 2004, the banking system transitioned into formal buildings. Not just madrasas anymore, but newly constructed bank-like structures across over 200 cities and towns. Marble counters. Separate rooms for men and women. Air conditioning in the managers' office. Telephones in every corner. Fax machines now upgraded to bulky Dell desktops running Windows 98. Even if they only knew how to press Enter.
To staff them, Arslan hired 10,000 new full-time employees—accountants, clerks, guards, gold assessors, cash runners, tea boys. They were given uniforms: simple white shalwar kameez with the Al-Riyaz crescent stitched in green on the breast pocket. They were trained in batches. In every major city. Supervised by Riyaz's army men. Watched by Arslan's rotating auditors. Quiet. Disciplined. Compliant.
That brought the full-time staff to 40,000. Not counting the half a million part-time, contract, and weekly paid workers. Not counting the imams and molvies on renewable teaching contracts. Not counting the artists, the writers, the puppet performers, the truck drivers, the warehouse lifters, the seed planters, or the women sewing uniforms from cotton grown on Al-Riyaz lands.
In truth, no one knew how big the system had become.
Not even Riyaz.
They only knew what they saw: mosques turned into marketplaces, schools humming with cassette radios, village women holding Al-Riyaz bank receipts like passports to a better future. Every city had its own distribution manager. Every district its own procurement team. Every quarter had an underground vault for emergency gold.
The gold.
In silence, Arslan had begun melting the relics.
Not the ancient coins. Not the inscribed ones. Those were catalogued, photographed, hidden.
But the lesser ones. The generic British coins. The private merchant stamps. The gold trinkets with rusted clasps and broken chains. All of them melted into new bars. Stamped with Al-Riyaz insignia and serial numbers. Numbered. Vaulted. Circulated.
200 kilograms of clean gold.
Added quietly into the gold loan ecosystem. Enough to fund 9,000 new microloans. Enough to fill a thousand dowry trays. Enough to fund twenty years of Al-Riyaz weddings, orphan support, and Ramadan packages without ever touching the core vaults.
And yet it was just a drop.
Because the money never stopped coming. Because Arslan never took any of it out.
Every rupee, every tola, every kilogram was reinvested into deeper expansion, broader networks, more suffocating presence.
Even the phones.
Al-Riyaz 3000—sold over a million units since 2002. Manufactured in Guangdong under private contract. Packed in bright green boxes with the Al-Riyaz silhouette and the tagline:
"Amaanat, Hamesha Saath."
(A trust, always with you.)
Now came Al-Riyaz 3001—a sleeker version with a stronger torch, a louder ringtone, two SIM slots, and still no camera. Because people didn't need distractions. They needed connection. And connection meant control.
By mid-2004, Arslan's empire was present in over 180,000 shops. From Karachi to Gwadar. From Bahawalnagar to Bannu. Selling everything from bananas to bolt cutters, from coriander to cough syrup.
Over 140,000 of those shops were owned or leased by Al-Riyaz.
They didn't look alike. They didn't share signage. But they all paid rent to the same system. And they all carried at least five Al-Riyaz products: soap, flour, salt, snacks, or school supplies. It was the rule. Break it, and the lease dissolved.
Behind them stood factories. Hundreds of them.
Snacks and candies: Multan, Sahiwal, Sukkur.
Stationery and school books: Lahore, Hyderabad.
Recycling and plastic processing: Rawalpindi outskirts.
Clothing and fabric units: Faisalabad, Bahawalpur, and Quetta.
Matchsticks and detergent: Vehari and D.G. Khan.
Petrol stations: 180 running, 70 under construction.
Printing presses: One in each province. Constantly running. Producing books, receipts, posters, stickers, manuals, and the now-famous Al-Riyaz children's comic book series.
The characters from the comics—tiny brave boys and girls in cartoon turbans—now came in candy toy forms. Eaten. Loved. Collected. The top ten rarest toys became status symbols in schoolyards. Rich kids traded them for storybooks. Poor kids traded them for snacks.
And still Arslan didn't stop.
He was planting new seeds now.
In the dirt.
In the minds.
In the code.
Riyaz, his grandfather, stood over a railway station construction site near Sialkot, watching green Al-Riyaz banners being nailed into the wooden frame of a tuckshop. The mosque beside it had just been whitewashed and given a new mic.
Inside the prayer hall, a fax machine buzzed.
Another remittance received.
Another child educated.
Another prayer counted.
And far away in Karachi, in the underground vault of relics, Arslan sat on the cold stone floor, cross-legged, writing plans for 2005–2010 in a green notebook with gold-trimmed pages.
He wasn't building a company.
He was laying the bones of a country.