The year was 2005.
D-20.
Twenty years left.
Twenty years until Arslan's future knowledge ran out like the last grain in an hourglass. He had lived them once—every crisis, every riot, every rise, every crash. Every treaty signed in a language the common man never heard. He knew when power would shift hands, when cities would burn, when systems would collapse. And for twenty more years, he had absolute certainty.
That was more than enough.
At just nineteen, Arslan now commanded a shadow empire so vast that it wrapped around the spine of Pakistan like a second nervous system. An alternate bloodstream. An ecosystem of commerce, religion, finance, food, and culture. And still—not a single title attached to his name. Not a single signature in public. Just the quiet, sweet, pious grandson of Malik Riyaz, retired army man and national treasure.
But underneath Riyaz's prayer cap and behind Arslan's childlike smile—a billion dollars in liquid assets, gold vaults beyond arithmetic, and the most complex social monopoly the country had ever seen.
---
The Land Now Bore Fruit.
What was once dust, thornbush, and emptiness was now a living monument. Trees from Niger, Mali, and Sudan—imported by Arslan's orders back in 1995—now stood tall, thick-trunked and wide-shaded, stretching their shadows over thousands of acres of land. The arid plots around Uch Sharif, Liaqatpur, Rahim Yar Khan, Bahawalpur, and Ahmedpur East—once seen as worthless—had bloomed into groves.
Kikkar, baobab, moringa, neem, and date palms now held the land like ancient guardians.
Between them, fruit borders grew as Arslan had instructed—mango, jamun, guava, lemon, and grape vines lined the perimeters of each fertile acre. These "fruit fences" were not just symbolic—they became Al-Riyaz's primary fruit supply, feeding over 11,000 fruit stalls across Pakistan.
And behind each stall was not a single owner—but a rotation of local employees, trained and paid by Al-Riyaz, ensuring compliance, hygiene, price stability, and loyalty.
The vegetable farms attached to each major madrasa complex—especially in Sindh and central Punjab—were now in full swing. Carrots, onions, tomatoes, spinach, chilies, and garlic grown not for export, but for Al-Riyaz kitchens, cafeterias, canteens, and public Ramadan drives.
Even the rice paddies, once experimental, now produced thousands of tons—only sold through branded, double-stitched Al-Riyaz bags, sealed with green wax.
---
The Cards Had Become Currency.
The snack packaging had always included collectible cartoon cards for children—characters like Fazlu the Farmer, Sherbaz the Brave, Lali the Lantern Girl, and Ustaad Aloo, a potato-themed wisdom-giver. Each series had holographics, specials, and ultra-rares. They came with free education trivia, hadhrat quotes, and sometimes, a dua printed on the back.
At first, they were just fun.
But slowly, they became something else.
By early 2005, entire informal economies had sprung up around them. Kids traded them for food. Teenagers used them for bets and dares. And adults—especially those with no access to proper banks or savings—began treating rare cards as pseudo-currency, exchanging them for phone top-ups, rickshaw rides, even sacks of rice in village stalls.
To Arslan, it was a genius accident. He didn't invent the card culture, but he let it evolve, feeding into it:
Special stalls now let you exchange ten wrappers + one rare card for a branded schoolbag.
Ramadan lotteries allowed the use of "faith cards" collected from books, snacks, and soaps.
Weddings featured card-based games, with gold coin prizes.
Friday sermons subtly encouraged kids to collect cards with Qur'anic verses—not for gambling, but learning.
And in some towns, "card value boards" were hung beside price boards.
People believed in the system. And that was all Arslan ever needed.
---
Maximum Efficiency.
Everything Arslan touched—he bent to fit a broader purpose.
No product was just one thing.
No shop was just a shop.
No madrasa was just a madrasa.
A shoe factory had its second floor turned into a girls' stitching workshop.
A rice warehouse had a night school built on its roof.
A fruit stall outside a mosque offered free first aid under its umbrella.
A tuck shop in Jhelum had three blind employees trained to sort snack wrappers by touch.
Nothing was wasted.
No space left idle.
No building useless.
Every Friday, each district's report was faxed and filed—number of meals served, cards redeemed, trees watered, donations received, phones sold, sermons delivered. Nothing was forgotten. Nothing assumed.
The phone business had scaled to madness.
3 million Al-Riyaz 3000 phones sold.
900,000 Al-Riyaz 3001 phones in circulation.
Daily 10,000 orders processed via branch distribution alone.
Phone repairs? Now done in over 1,200 local shops—most trained under Arslan's "Mobile Mistri" initiative.
Monthly phone lotteries, sermons with top-up cards hidden under prayer mats, and even a "Buy 1 Phone, Get 3 Goats" Eid Offer for rural districts.
Every scheme wrapped in religious dignity, civic pride, and economic opportunity.
---
And the Gold?
The gold no one dared calculate.
The gold in silk-lined safes beneath Lahore, Sukkur, Quetta, and Rawalpindi.
The gold of dowries returned, of loans settled, of dreams pawned and redeemed.
The Olympic pool comparison wasn't even accurate anymore.
Arslan's gold—circulating, secured, silently expanding—could now pay off Pakistan's external debt three times over.
And he never touched it.
---
The Future Remained His Alone.
Only Arslan knew what was coming.
What would collapse.
Which politicians would fall.
Which banks would die.
Which currencies would fail.
Which roads would matter.
Which seeds would feed 2020.
And which areas would turn to fire.
He still had twenty years.
D-20.
And he had just begun turning the engines on.
December 2005.
Fifteen years of laying stone after invisible stone now came to this—signatures. Not of inheritance, but of recognition.
Arslan stood silently in the Lahore head branch, a ceremonial office that looked more like the inner sanctum of an empire than a building for paperwork. No microphones, no crowds, no speeches. Just ink, silence, and the presence of men who had seen war, built nations, broken laws, and bent systems. They all came now to witness the formalization of what had always been true.
He was no longer the sweet-faced orphan behind Malik Riyaz. He was not the mascot anymore. He was not the soul of the empire.
He was the empire.
---
Fifteen Years.
Fifteen years of buying forgotten bones of cities—plots too sandy, too cursed, too far from roads. The kind of land even beggars spat on. Bought for rupees per square yard. Fenced, watered, mapped, and marked. Turned into green lungs. Into reserves. Into plazas, into madrasa grounds, into shaded gardens and public spaces.
Fifteen years of seeds planted in dirt and men alike.
Kikkar, neem, moringa.
Boys trained as molvis.
Girls hired in workshops.
Engineers hidden in madrasa accounts.
Army veterans gifted lands and loyalty.
Thieves turned district-level logistics heads.
Every weed trimmed, every flowered talent pruned into place.
Fifteen years of building without needing permission.
Factories rose with no inaugural plaque.
Warehouses multiplied in alleyways and ports.
Markets bloomed behind madrasa kitchens.
Bakery chains disguised as charity.
Banks inside remittance desks.
Shoes, soaps, phones, pens, and playgrounds—all bearing the Al-Riyaz stamp, all profitable, all public, and all Arslan's in silence.
Fifteen years of reinvestment without reward.
Every rupee went back.
Every gold coin borrowed circled the network again.
Every product's margin crushed and poured into infrastructure.
No profit ever claimed. No salary. No luxury.
The riches grew wild.
And Arslan let them.
---
This December was different.
Paperwork moved like military operations.
2274 land deeds in Arslan's name in Rahim Yar Khan district.
1511 commercial rental agreements from Peshawar to Nawabshah, now under his legal authority.
4,102 shops, 122 plazas, and 33 malls.
Over 17,000 pieces of land tagged for fruit, gold loan offices, or housing projects.
1882 registered Al-Riyaz education + madrasa centres.
92 active factories for food, fabric, plastic, and steel.
Over 11,000 unregistered branch stalls now labeled in internal system as "Level-3 footprint zones."
And the gold—
the gold in 9 cities, across 22 safes, buried, walled, guarded by prayers and passwords—was now, line by line, being moved under his legal signature.
No flags. No cameras. Only Riyaz.
Old, proud, tired.
"Tu samajhta hai kis cheez ka bojh le raha hai?" Riyaz asked in a whisper one night, watching the flames in the drawing room stove.
Arslan, face half in light, said nothing. He didn't need to. Riyaz already knew the answer.
---
Every major MPA and MNA who had previously received Al-Riyaz campaign funds, favors, goats, wedding halls, free phone distributions or school donations, were contacted this month.
Quiet envelopes.
Blank cheques.
Subtle warnings.
They now all understood who the system really belonged to.
---
The new ID card bore only a name.
The face was clean-shaven. The fingers soft. The signature elegant.
Muhammad Arslan Ali
Now 20.
Now free.
Now crowned—not with garlands or flags—but with networks, cement, trade routes, and roots ten years deep.
By the first of January 2006, every proxy—man, molvi, munshi, and manager—had passed their legal power back to Arslan.
And Pakistan never noticed.
Because the mascot still smiled.
And Malik Riyaz still stood in front.
But the world had already shifted.
The pomegranate juice was cold—icy in his hand, staining the sides of the tall glass a deep red as it slid along the surface of the garden table. Islamabad's early winter made the air sharp and clean. The manicured lawns of the Al-Riyaz estate stretched endlessly before him, studded with trees that had grown tall and strong over a decade of careful planting. The neem trees swayed lazily above, whispering blessings in a language only the wind could read.
Arslan sat back, his long legs crossed at the ankle, his crisp white kurta pressed to perfection. The sun hit his face at just the right angle, lighting up the sharp cut of his cheekbones, the glint in his eyes. There was nothing childlike left in him now. The boy was long dead, buried under ten million bricks and signatures. What remained was the architect.
The man.
A monarch with no throne, a name with no ego, a smile that meant ten different things depending on who was watching.
Malik Riyaz was speaking but he wasn't just speaking—he was fishing, measuring, probing. He had always been Arslan's sword and shield, the perfect grandfather for the public, but inside, he had always known Arslan wasn't like other children. Too silent. Too precise. Too patient. And now, watching him talk about expanding Al-Riyaz into Europe and Africa like one talks about buying new shoes, Riyaz knew something fundamental had shifted. Something irreversible.
"Foreign expansion is not... necessary," Riyaz said slowly. "We've planted roots here, the tree is large enough."
Arslan turned to him with that same impossible calm. "And the tree will shade the earth."
Riyaz said nothing. Arslan took another sip of juice and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
The air sat thick for a few seconds. Then Arslan leaned forward, placing the glass down gently. "You know the infrastructure is complete. You built it. And you know I didn't waste a single paisa. You can see the food we eat, the houses we own, the people we feed, the boys we trained, the jobs we created, the roots we've sewn deep into the dirt of this country. Everything, every fiber of this nation—touches us."
Riyaz didn't interrupt.
"But this land isn't enough. Not for what comes next."
"What comes next?" the old man asked.
Arslan smiled, and for once it wasn't calculated. It wasn't performative. It wasn't a mask.
"Freedom," he said.
---
In his past life, freedom had been a lie.
He remembered the plastic chair with a broken leg in a two-room rented house with flaking paint. He remembered crying not from sorrow, but because hunger had torn holes into the rhythm of his breathing. He remembered the taunts. The rent notices. The public schools with teachers who never arrived. The religion that only seemed to comfort the rich and threaten the poor. The slogans that meant nothing. The hopes that felt like cancer.
He remembered paying off his father's debts, watching his mother count coins for onions, burying himself in books and failing to learn anything that mattered.
He remembered dying cold and bitter in a hospital that didn't bother checking his pulse for two hours.
He remembered—
—and he remembered waking up in 1990, five years old, alone, and somehow free.
And then the fire.
The fire that took everything except the one person who would build the skeleton of a future empire.
His grandfather.
Malik Riyaz, the man whose prayers were stronger than bloodlines, whose discipline was forged in iron and gunpowder, who saw Pakistan not as a land to worship but a place to conquer silently.
Together, they became destiny.
---
And now, in December 2005, Arslan was planning his first expansion outside of Pakistan.
He didn't speak of being gay. That wasn't necessary. He didn't speak of needing to leave to breathe. That was too personal. He didn't say he had to go somewhere no one knew the cost of his survival. That was weakness.
Instead, he spoke of London, of Birmingham, of entire boroughs in the UK where Pakistanis lived like broken echoes, waiting for something greater.
He spoke of Libya, of ports and shipyards, and how Al-Riyaz logistics could change the face of trade in Northern Africa.
He spoke of Dubai, of migrant workers, of meat processing and how every prayer mat there could be shipped from his Bahawalpur looms.
He spoke of toy factories in Malaysia, fruit exports to island nations, halal-certified packaged food chains in Australia, and Al-Riyaz schools with integrated Quran + English + Technology curriculum in New York.
Everything already mapped.
Everything already costed.
Everything a future he already knew.
Riyaz listened, his eyes narrowing slightly. "And when do we leave?"
Arslan's smile returned. Not the real one. The mask again. Charming, humble, soft. The smile that made even ministers think they were in control.
"January. We'll leave just after the schools reopen."
"Have the teams been informed?"
"They've been preparing since August."
"You already bought the land?"
"I've been buying since 1999."
"Currency?"
"In seven countries."
"And the foreign office? Visas?"
Arslan reached into his coat pocket, pulled out an envelope, and handed it to him.
All done.
---
That night, alone in his private quarters built into the highest floor of the Bahawalpur estate, Arslan stood shirtless before the mirror.
He was no longer skinny. His muscles were lean, elegant, balanced. His skin pale as milk but not soft—there was sun on his face, wind in his breath. His arms bore the history of fifteen years of work. His stomach flat, his chest broad, his back lined like the roads he had built.
He stared into his reflection. No one watching. No one to impress.
No one to hide from.
This was the body he built like a temple.
Not to be worshipped—but to be obeyed.
This was not vanity.
This was the only protest he had left. The only rebellion he'd allow himself.
He wasn't straight. He wasn't married. He wasn't anyone's son anymore.
He was Arslan.
And finally, finally—
He belonged to himself.