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By the end of 1991, Arslan had delivered eight more dreams. His dead aunts, his father, his mother again, even a cousin he never met—each arriving in the darkness of night to whisper winning numbers in divine clarity. And the last one? A Chinese old man with a beard like white cotton and eyes that blinked in Morse code. The absurdity of it nearly made Arslan laugh mid-recitations. But no one questioned divine architecture in Pakistan. Certainly not from the mouth of a five-year-old who spoke in Qur'anic rhythm and moved with solemnity.
After the Chinese dream, Arslan called it quits. Not out of fear of being caught—there was none—but out of artistic exhaustion. One can only create so many ghosts before the room feels crowded. And besides, he didn't need them anymore. The numbers had done their job. His winnings sat at 30 million rupees. His spending at 22 million.
And what a spend it was.
Land.
Plots all across Punjab, desert stretches, fallow fields, canal-fed veins of future wealth. Wherever the government would reach, he already stood. Wherever the realtors hadn't yet lied, he already owned. He had mapped the future like a cartographer of time, hiding secrets under sand.
Gold.
Enough to weigh down donkeys. And they tried—three of them buckled and fell delivering bricks of it to Riyaz's haveli. Each brick wrapped in cloth, hidden in grain sacks, delivered in silence. No declarations. No banks. Only possession.
Silver.
A literal ton. Stacked under beds, in cupboards, beneath floorboards. Some melted into utensils. Some left raw, elemental. Riyaz once joked, "If lightning strikes this house, it'll think we're a mine."
Copper.
Unwanted by men but adored by value. Heaps of it, collected quietly. The future would need wires. Pakistan would discover electricity eventually.
Livestock came next—buffalo, goats, camels even. Mostly as a front. No one trusted wealth without noise in the village. Animals made noise. And they ate rumors. Good trade.
And gardens. Everywhere. Not just in Hyderpur, but in five surrounding towns. Hedges hiding ownership. Orchards hiding intent. Every leaf a mask.
And people?
People began talking. Of course they did. Pakistanis love myths more than they love meals.
"Malik Riyaz has oil under his land."
"He has a British wife hidden in the city."
"He found a djinn in the jungle."
"They say he drinks goat blood."
None of it mattered.
Because the real myth walked in tiny leather sandals and whispered As-Salaamu Alaikum to every elder with a smile that could pause thunder. Arslan, now known across the tehsil as the boy who brought God's mercy. The angel-child. The miracle grandson.
He never contradicted them.
He just recited verses.
Like armor.
"Wa maa tashaa'oona illaaa any yashaa' Allah." You do not will unless Allah wills.
He whispered that when men begged Riyaz to reveal his secret.
"Fa inna ma'al usri yusra." Indeed, with hardship comes ease.
He spoke that when the poor cried about prices.
"Afa laa ta'qiloon?" Will you not reason?
He dropped that like a dagger into conversations about wealth and fate and blame.
Arslan used the Qur'an like a general used maps. To plan. To strike. To guide.
He hated Pakistan once. Hated its dust, its filth, its dishonesty, its addiction to prayer and absence of action. But that was before he understood how the gears turned.
Now, he loved it.
Because in a place where no one cared to remember, he could invent the future daily.
And Malik Riyaz?
He worked like a machine. Sleep reduced to snatches of hours. Hands ink-stained from stamps. Voice hoarse from land agents, tax fools, and greedy villagers. But he didn't complain. He had finally found someone worthy of his legacy. Someone who made power a prayer.
Riyaz now owned 8000 acres. Farms. Fields. Cursed lands turned sacred. He had so much gold it was measured by furniture. His silver had to be weighed by truck. His copper made electricians visit just to ask where he found it all. And in the center of it stood the haveli in Hyderpur.
With jasmine bushes curling up the walls.
And inside it, a boy.
Not playing. Not laughing. Not weeping.
Just sitting. Reading.
Verses. Again and again. Like incantations. Like weapons. Like contracts.
Because Arslan wasn't just living.
He was preparing.
1992 settled over Bahawalpur like a silk sheet on a tired body. The city was slower than Karachi, drier than Lahore, but it was quiet—and that's what Arslan needed. Hyderpur had too many eyes. Too many memories. Too much history. In Bahawalpur, people minded their own damn business. That's how cities in Pakistan functioned—if you didn't owe anyone money or respect, they didn't owe you attention.
It was perfect.
He spent most of his time there, more than he did in Hyderpur. It wasn't just distance—it was design. Cities respected distance. Nobody said salam unless they knew you. Nobody asked questions unless they wanted something. Like the Rolex system. You can't buy it unless you already belong to the club. Pakistan had the same disease. To get anything, you already had to be someone. A closed loop of legacy and lies.
But Arslan? He adored closed loops.
Because he could open any of them with cash.
He picked a house that reflected his taste for contradiction—British bones, Pakistani dust. A two-kanal Victorian-era relic, built before the British ran back to their island and left behind concrete ruins and cultural leftovers. The structure still stood, ornate woodwork, iron balconies, old British stone tiles imported back when shipping costs weren't measured. It wasn't broken, just tired.
Arslan told Malik Riyaz to buy it immediately. Not to live. To preserve. "We're going to repair it like it was built yesterday," he said in his sweet tongue, with verses folded around the command like a napkin around a knife.
And so they did.
The old craftsmen were still alive—bent, half-deaf, and nicotine-stained—but their hands still remembered. They fixed the beams, the rusted railings, the brittle bricks, and turned it all back to silk. Arslan asked for it to be treated four times over—waterproofed, whitewashed, polished—because he knew time would beat it again in thirty years. But not this one.
Now the house gleamed like a rich widow: aged but untouchable.
Arslan didn't care for cars, but indulgence is a right once you've escaped hell. So he asked Riyaz to buy a 1991 Toyota Crown. White. Leather seats. Something rich people in Pakistani movies used to die inside. It was beautiful. It smelled like Japan. He never drove it. He just liked knowing it was parked outside like a tame beast.
The driver was an old man named Haji Saleem. Loyal. Illiterate. God-fearing. Perfect.
He asked for a cook too, and two maids—because "one can't do everything, and two can't blame each other." He phrased it gently, in the language of Qur'anic metaphors and prophetic examples. His voice soft, respectful. But behind it was structure. This wasn't a child playing palace. This was a general moving in silence.
And Bahawalpur gave him peace.
He lived close enough to his garden to visit it daily. Mangoes in summer. Oranges in winter. Grapes when he needed joy. Dates when he needed memory. And jamun, always jamun, for the bitterness he no longer tasted.
He told Riyaz to buy more land. And livestock. And more men to manage both. Whatever money trickled in from earlier lotteries or forgotten gold was turned back into permanence. If time was his weapon, land was his shield.
In the afternoons, he recited the Qur'an—not out of guilt, but gratitude. The words that once burned him now clothed him. Every verse he had once been beaten with became a tool. His lips moved slowly over syllables that had once been screamed at him. Now he owned them.
He read with rhythm. He read with charm. He read with power.
They say money can't buy happiness.
They say money can't heal trauma.
They say money can't buy love.
Arslan used to believe them.
But now, sitting in his cool marble verandah, sunlight kissing the vines of jasmine growing on the wrought iron, sipping sherbet from a silver cup handed to him by a servant who feared God and feared Arslan just a bit more—he felt happy. He felt healed. He felt loved.
Loved by God.
Because God never loved him in poverty.
In hell, He was silent.
Now, He smiled through profit margins and property deeds.
So Arslan whispered:
"Wa man yattaqillaha yaj'al lahu makhraja, wa yarzuqhu min haythu la yahtasib."
And whoever fears Allah—He will make for him a way out, and provide for him from where he does not expect.
Arslan didn't expect this. But he took it.
With both hands.
By the time 1993 cast its quiet shadow over Bahawalpur, Arslan was eight years old and already a veteran of time itself.
Two years in the past. Thirty-five years of memories in his skull. A five-year-old body stretched now into eight, still childlike but sharpened with purpose. The world around him creaked at a pace that felt prehistoric. And only now did he understand—truly understand—how absurdly fast the future had become.
No phones. No notifications. No buzzes or beeps. No timelines to scroll through. No content to consume. No images to compare lives against. Just the slow, heavy rhythm of silence, of dirt roads and creaking fans, and men who spoke only when something needed to be said.
He realized how long a single day really was.
Twenty-four hours. Actual hours. Without distraction. Without distortion. He could feel every minute. And it made him restless at first—shaking like a smoker denied his cigarette. Because in his past life, even grief was managed by distraction. Even misery was coated in memes and fifteen-second dopamine hits. But here? You sat with yourself. You lived your time. You were naked before the ticking clock.
And in that nudity, Arslan discovered something even more terrifying than his past trauma:
He missed it.
He missed the internet.
That, more than anything, disgusted him.
He hated how easily he had depended on that synthetic pacifier. How willingly he had sacrificed his attention to the gods of algorithm. He remembered it clearly—he remembered doomscrolling while his the world burned, swiping while his body was half asleep, watching videos while his own life collapsed like an empty house in a flood. He remembered it all. And now, it was gone. Irreplaceable. No amount of cash, no amount of cunning could recreate a smartphone in 1993 Pakistan.
It was liberation through deprivation.
So he read.
He began ordering books. Imported them quietly. Sometimes from Europe. Sometimes from India through backchannels. Books no child in Pakistan would ever read. Kafka. Hegel. Camus. Ghazali. Nietzsche. Kierkegaard. Qur'anic tafsir. Shi'a polemics. Sunni apologetics. Hadith compilations.
He devoured them with the calm intensity of a man who knew time owed him now.
He had time to think. To doubt. To construct. To scheme.
He began seeing clearly now how the cancer of hypocrisy in Pakistan was never an isolated disease—it was simply camouflaged better with technology. Before the internet, hypocrisy was crude, loud, and smelled like stale masjid rugs. But the internet had made it elegant. Repackaged. Polished. Everyone was righteous in reels and rotten in reality. Men who beat their wives posted Qur'anic quotes about patience. Women who cursed their daughters-in-law danced to Bollywood songs about motherhood. Everyone was a goddamn cleric, actor, philosopher, and thief—depending on who was watching.
Now, in 1993, Arslan was outside that cyclone. And it felt like watching a snake you no longer feared.
He wasn't clean. But he was clear.
And clarity is more dangerous than purity.
Malik Riyaz came to visit often, though less than before. He had become something of a myth in Hyderpur now—an old soldier turned spiritual patriarch, known for his wealth, his gardens, his silence. People whispered stories. That his grandson was chosen by God. That dreams brought him wealth. That Malik Riyaz had taken a vow of silence and spent his days managing a holy boy's empire.
The truth was less romantic. Riyaz was just tired.
And the boy, well, the boy didn't need managing.
Riyaz had stopped going to Hyderpur entirely. Too many eyes. Too many questions. He spent his time in Bahawalpur now, handling land documents, livestock trade, construction contracts, quietly moving the pieces that Arslan had placed on the board years in advance.
And Arslan?
He lived like a prince no one suspected.
He dressed modestly, spoke politely, smiled easily, quoted Hadiths, and never raised his voice. He was not feared. He was not worshipped. He was respected.
He had everything—except desire.
Because nothing tempted him anymore.
He had cheated death. Owned time. Burned hell. Built heaven. Gamed God's name. Memorized sin and virtue and wore them both like shoes.
So when Riyaz came that winter morning, bundled in wool, his eyes tired but his posture still erect, Arslan met him with tea and a verse:
"Wa tilkal ayyāmu nudāwiluhā bayna an-nās..."
"These are the days We alternate among the people..." (Qur'an 3:140)
Riyaz nodded slowly.
"Days change," Arslan added with a child's smile, "but the smart ones buy land while the fools write poetry."
And they both laughed.
The sun that day was lazy. The garden outside smelled of rose and fertilizer. A new shipment of books had just arrived—French thinkers this time. He would read them slowly. He had time now.
And no notifications.