The dream came just as falsely as the last one, but this time with more theater, more trembling lips, more invented pauses. It began with his mother standing on a white hill of salt, crying and barefoot, pointing to a map drawn into the earth by God Himself. Arslan's voice broke when he described her hands trembling, her face veiled in gold light, and her exact words, "Tell my father not to bury me in soil that doesn't feed his grandson."
He said this with such solemnity, such piety, and such absurd gravity that Malik Riyaz didn't just believe it—he dissolved into it. The kind of crying that looks less like sadness and more like regret leaking out of old bones. A grown man, battle-hardened, profit-chiseled, made of land and steel and numbers, now reduced to a prayer mat, his turban undone, his voice whispering astaghfirullah over and over like an alarm clock that forgot to shut off.
And the map. The map.
It was drawn by tiny fingers on a piece of cardboard from an old biscuit box. Sketched in pencil, softened by water, rough like the future. But Arslan knew what he was doing. He pointed like a bookie who knew exactly what God would do next. And in a way, he did. He remembered every road that had not yet been built, every construction project still locked in future budgets, every ghost town that would become a junction, every sewer dump that would be filled with houses.
Uch Sharif, 1990. They called it cursed. Dusty. Cracked. Ghost-haunted. Land that even the devil passed on. That's where Arslan pointed.
"We buy here."
Riyaz blinked. "This... sewage land?"
"Canals bring water. Water brings people. People bring God. And God brings value."
Riyaz looked again.
"Then this?"
"A road will cut through it."
"This too?"
"The government will build a college. They will need space."
"And this whole patch?"
"It gives the highest yield."
It wasn't just confidence. It was the quiet conviction of a boy possessed not by spirits but by spreadsheets—written across decades of memory, scribed in the ink of trauma. He knew. He knew exactly where the world was going, and for once, the world would carry his name beneath it.
Riyaz nodded and began to write. By candlelight. No electricity. No calculator. Just the grooved muscle memory of a man who made profit from bullets and blood in another era.
200 acres in Uch Sharif's south border, canal-side wasteland, 50,000 rupees.
100 acres of sewage-adjacent land where the village's waste lines breathed poison into the mud—30,000 rupees.
50 acres on the dirt road to Ahmedpur, 20,000.
50 to Tranda, 20,000.
50 to Alipur, another 20.
Total: 500,000.
Paid cash. No names. No receipts. No questions.
Then came the metals.
"Gold," Arslan said plainly. "Half a million."
Riyaz raised an eyebrow.
"Gold," the boy repeated. "God likes gold. Ask your molvi if you're unsure."
Riyaz didn't.
"Silver?" he added.
"100,000. Easy to move. Holds value."
"And copper?" Riyaz asked finally, humoring the child.
"Because no one ever steals copper. It's too cheap. It just sits there. But one day it'll be worth more than all their lies."
That line stayed with Riyaz. He didn't even ask what it meant.
He just wrote it all down, and like a loyal soldier—one who now served a child with Qur'anic precision—he began to move money like a drug dealer laundering God's will.
It was only noon when Arslan declared the planning complete.
"No more decisions today," he said with the voice of someone who had run empires and slaughtered kings. "We let the prayers settle first. Action comes after."
And so he went to the prayer room again. Alone.
And Malik Riyaz sat outside, staring at the biscuit-box map, still wet from the boy's fingers, thinking about his dead daughter. He didn't see manipulation. He saw devotion. And so, as far as he knew, the boy had only honored her wishes.
The village moved on. The money moved in silence. And the map was real.
The dream wasn't. But that was irrelevant.
Because now, the dirt that the world spat on was owned by a child who knew how to speak in God's voice.
---
The best thing about dead land was that it was exactly like the people who had mocked Arslan's silence in the last life—useless, ignored, and priced far beneath its worth. Dust and superstition had a smell. And the land reeked of it. But superstition was a form of fertilizer in a country like this. All it needed was a little water and a Qur'anic verse.
Malik Riyaz moved through the land deeds like a man possessed. Every handshake was greeted with fake grief and veiled pride. "It's for my daughter's son," he'd say. "A miracle child." The word miracle went further than money. It justified every absurd buy. Who questions grief when it's religious? Who dares to argue with a grandfather investing in dua?
The sellers didn't argue. Why would they? To them, it was a joke. Sewage canals. Thorn fields. Roads that didn't exist. Let this pious fool waste his money. They signed away history like it was dead livestock.
And behind it all, Arslan just smiled. He wore a simple white shalwar qameez, one button missing, standing there with soft eyes and palms folded as if his hands were always halfway into a prayer. "Assalamu Alaikum," he'd whisper to every elder. "JazakAllah," he'd say after every sale. His voice, so gentle, so pure, so rehearsed, that even hardened land brokers felt like they were in the presence of something holy.
He didn't care what they thought. Let them feel holy. Let them touch God in his tone. It cost him nothing.
The purchases took exactly two weeks. No hiccups. No delays. Not when Malik Riyaz was involved. The man who had bulldozed his way through war now brokered peace with villagers in sandals and turbans, exchanging dusty documents under banyan trees. They gave him chai, and he gave them blessings and bundles of rupees. Everything was sealed with a handshake and a shared sense of tribal fatalism.
And then came the next dream.
Of course it didn't happen. Nothing divine ever had.
But Arslan, sitting on the edge of his rolled-up prayer mat, his little toes barely touching the floor, looked up at his grandfather with that same blank, glassy stare and said, "They came to me."
"Who?" Riyaz asked, halfway through counting the silver coins he'd stacked by weight.
"auntie and Choti auntie," Arslan said. "They were both there. In white. Their voices were echoes. They were holding hands and crying, but happy."
Malik Riyaz's hand froze. Those were his daughters. The same ones burned into silence. His fingers trembled slightly, but he composed himself.
"What did they say?"
Arslan paused just the right amount of time. Enough to show reverence. Enough to fake sincerity.
"They gave me numbers," he whispered. "They said Allah is generous."
He said it the way clerics say "Judgment Day."
Riyaz didn't answer. He just stared.
"And they said," Arslan continued, this time adding an extra touch of moisture in his voice, "don't let Abba lose his faith."
That sealed it.
Riyaz didn't believe in dreams. But he believed in messages. And more importantly, he believed in outcomes. And the boy had already delivered once.
So he didn't ask again. He just exhaled, leaned back, and rubbed his forehead. "Say the verse again," he muttered.
Arslan, with eyes like pools of sacred ambiguity, closed them and recited softly:
> "Say, never will we be struck except by what Allah has decreed for us; He is our protector."
(Qur'an 9:51)
A verse for war. A verse for fate. A verse that worked just as well when gambling became divine advice.
"i will Place the bet," Riyaz said.
By sunset, they were back at the tea stall. The same man who once rolled his eyes at the first story now kissed Riyaz's hand when he gave the numbers. Not because he believed—because now he wanted in.
"Do it quietly," Riyaz ordered. "Don't mention my name. But make sure the ticket is ours."
"God speaks to whom He wills," Riyaz answered. "You have your role. He has his."
Arslan didn't say a word. He just looked up at the moonless sky, the stars blurred behind winter fog, and waited. Three more days. Another divine lie. Another payout.
He knew exactly how the world would bend when you framed your greed as taqwa.
---
The numbers hit again. Clean. Exact. Undeniable. 3 days had passed, and the radio crackled the digits with its usual static hesitation. But Malik Riyaz had already known. He had the ticket. He had the boy. He had the dream. The second one.
2.5 million rupees in total. Enough to be a king in a village and a shadow prince in a city. Enough to silence questions. Enough to grow.
1991 had arrived like a hushed dawn. No fireworks. No celebrations. Just frost, smoke from chimneys, and a child sitting in the courtyard counting jasmine petals between his fingers.
Arslan knew it was time.
He asked for a garden.
Not toys. Not food. Not forgiveness. A garden.
"A garden of Eden," he whispered one evening, as Riyaz sat oiling his rifle on the veranda. "Where sinners can rest without sin. Where thorns bloom."
Riyaz didn't reply. He just looked at the child and then at the moon. Then he nodded once. And that was enough.
Ahmedpur was no Eden. Dusty, sleepy, and haunted by trucks that hadn't been invented yet. But Arslan wasn't interested in now. He was interested in after. After the petrol station. After the urbanization. After everyone had missed the train and the only person who showed up early was a five-year-old.
He bought 200 acres. Two blocks of fifty on either side of the barely visible road. Before the railway line and after it. People called it the middle of nowhere. But to Arslan, it was already a landmark. They just hadn't built it yet.
The cost? A mere 500,000 rupees. Land was cheap when belief was expensive.
And belief was what Arslan had in excess.
They cleared it first—bushes, thorn trees, carcasses of forgotten fields. Laborers were hired through silence. Money talked. Religion blessed. The boy sat in a shawl and watched. A cup of hot milk in his hands. The workers never asked why a child watched them for hours. They just assumed the story was too big to fit in their understanding.
Then came the plants.
Not seeds. Not dreams. Living, semi-grown things. Bought from farmlands near Multan and orchards past Lodhran. Mango saplings that had already seen five summers. Guava trees that had begun to bulge. Pomegranate stems with bark like cracked leather.
A circle was drawn. Literally.
Fifty jamun trees placed in an arc. Beneath them, jasmine bushes, like white smoke frozen midair. The borders were lined with kikar trees—brutal, thorned, the guardians. And neem trees, wise and sharp-scented. Roses, red and scattered, like spilled secrets across the green.
It wasn't a garden. It was a philosophy in dirt.
And then he did something that even Riyaz didn't expect.
He pointed at the land they lived on—the Hyderpur house—and said, "There too."
"A garden here?" Riyaz blinked. "Why?"
"To remind me," Arslan said. "Where I came from. And where they went."
Riyaz didn't ask who "they" were. He had learned not to.
So they planted in Hyderpur too. Smaller, more personal. A grove, not an orchard. Where the roses grew redder, and the jasmine smelled stronger, and no one knew that under every tree lay a buried verse, metaphorical or otherwise.
By the time the last plant was patted down, the money was gone. Every rupee, spoken for. No savings. No vaults. Just roots.
And Riyaz, sitting one night with a misbaha in hand, looked over to the boy sketching on the back of a receipt and asked, "What now?"
Arslan didn't look up.
"Now I wait for the rain."