in God's name we Trust

The house smelled of rosewood and roasted garlic. Somewhere deep in the kitchen halls, a goat was being slow-cooked in its own fat. Cinnamon sticks had been dropped into the pot like divine intervention, and cloves hissed against the metal. Arslan sat shirtless on the polished teak floor of the eastern verandah, stretching in silence, his legs wide in a split, arms locked above his head like he was saluting an invisible emperor.

The morning sun glazed the top of the wrought-iron railing, casting leafy shadows from the grape vines climbing its curls. A sparrow jumped across the tiles. Arslan ignored it. He had bigger concerns: symmetry, flexibility, and protein intake.

He'd spent weeks consulting old fitness books, reading Soviet-era training manuals, and referencing old sports science journals long before fitness influencers sold snake oil in Nike shorts. He didn't want biceps that made him look like a demon child. He wanted function. Form. Quiet strength. The kind you couldn't see until it knocked your teeth in.

His diet was perfect: meat, fruit, honey, milk, ghee. Dates for sugar, lemon for cleansing, roasted almonds soaked in rose water. No protein powder. No raw eggs like idiots in Hollywood. Just actual food cooked by women who whispered blessings into every bite.

He drank a glass of warm turmeric milk, followed by a handful of pistachios he cracked himself with a silver nutcracker shaped like a Persian lion. Everything he did was slow, calculated, designed. He had time now. And a body that hadn't yet betrayed him.

"Beta, breakfast?" one of the maids called.

"Tell Haji Saleem to bring it to the garden," Arslan said, adjusting the shawl around his waist. "And extra lemon in the keema."

He wandered through the estate barefoot. The Victorian house still smelled like linseed oil from the last polishing. The fruit garden outside shimmered with life—guavas plump and yellow, jamun trees heavy with stainful berries, oranges that would sweeten fully in three weeks, and mangoes now off-season but still valuable for pulp processing.

Profit. Always profit. No tree was just for shade. Every leaf was monetized.

He walked into his makeshift training courtyard, formerly a horse stable now lined with clay tiles. The walls bore old maps of human anatomy in Latin. A pull-up bar made from iron plumbing. A punching bag stitched from camel hide. Kettlebells shaped like ancient Hindu idols. He trained alone. Trainers were inefficient. They made noise and needed salaries.

He'd designed the routine himself. Resistance bands. Bodyweight mastery. Gymnastics rings hung from a neem tree. He could hold an L-sit longer than most gymnasts his age. He could climb a rope upside down and descend without a sound. He wasn't trying to look strong. He was becoming it. Quietly.

Breakfast was served on a marble slab table in the shade. Lamb liver with coriander. Parathas crisped with desi ghee. Watermelon cubes with black salt. Dates from Iran. Pomegranate juice served in a silver goblet Arslan claimed belonged to a Mughal prince. Probably didn't. But it made the juice taste better.

As he ate, he read Marcus Aurelius in translation. Flipped to Ghazali's Ihya. Paused midway to write a verse in Arabic on his notebook, not out of faith, but for the aesthetics of contradiction.

He was ten.

Ten years old with more money than the state could trace. Ten years old with an estate larger than any minister's. Ten years old with lungs trained by ritual and a stomach filled with organic power. Ten years old and utterly free.

And the funniest part?

He still hadn't hit puberty.

He wiped his mouth with a linen napkin.

"Tell the gardener," he said to the servant, "plant another five rows of lemons. If I ever run out of citrus, I will declare war."

Then he smiled like a holy boy with pure thoughts.

And asked for dessert.

The masjid courtyard buzzed with Friday anticipation. Sunlight pressed through the latticework like divine geometry, cutting gold across the stone. The fan above didn't spin—there was no power. But no one noticed. They were too busy watching him.

Arslan sat on the prayer rug with his small hands folded in his lap. The white kurta pressed, the skullcap pure cotton, and the slippers simple. He looked like a painting someone forgot to hang. And when he stood, the murmurs stopped.

He walked up the wooden steps of the mimbar like he'd done it for years, even though he'd only delivered three khutbahs before. The old men leaned forward. The youth sat straighter. The molvies watched with smiling eyes and clenched jaws. Everyone called him Baba Ji's Noor, the boy touched by God. Some called him Shehzada-e-Haq, the Prince of Truth.

He called himself Arslan, and that was enough.

"Alhamdulillahi Rabbil 'Aalameen," he began, voice like a reed flute in still water.

The silence that followed was not emptiness. It was weight.

"In a world where noise grows louder," he said in soft, careful Urdu, "Allah sends silence through children."

He paused, let them feel the cleverness, the poetry. It worked. An old man in the front row whispered "SubhanAllah."

"I am not a scholar," Arslan continued, now quoting half in Arabic, half in English, half in nonsense. "I'm just a boy who tries to remember that which people forget."

Another pause.

"People forget," he said, turning to the crowd, "that food is rizq, not a right. That daughters are amanah, not shame. That power is imtihaan, not inheritance."

The molvies smiled, fake and sweet, some of them nodding with gusto, forgetting they'd married off their daughters to cousins for dowry just last month.

"I read yesterday," he said in English, "that the West is losing souls to comfort. And I remembered a line from Imam Ghazali: 'If you cannot detach from dunya, the dunya will detach you from Allah.'"

He hadn't read that line. He made it up. But the cadence was right. And someone in the back muttered "MashAllah" loud enough to be heard.

"Do you know why we lose barakah?" he asked the crowd, voice growing more delicate, nearly trembling with sacred passion. "Because we lie to ourselves in the name of truth. We turn blessings into burdens and call it modernity. We kill the old ways and blame time."

He stepped down after a few more flourishes. Three Hadiths. Two ayahs. One long silence. Enough to make everyone think they'd witnessed a miracle. Enough to make sure no one suspected the truth: it was all a script, and they were playing their parts perfectly.

---

Later that evening, under the neem tree beside the well, Arslan sat with Malik Riyaz. The tea had gone cold. Papers lay spread before them like offerings to a bureaucratic god. Land documents. Mining claims. Madrasa registrations. Letters from politicians. Receipts with fake names.

"You did good work while I was away," Arslan said, fingers brushing over a wax seal. "Balochistan will feed them all one day. Just not yet. Let it rot a little longer."

Riyaz nodded. "Sindh's Syeds are asking for another shrine. Want us to fund the dome this time."

"Fund the dome," Arslan said, watching a squirrel climb the mango tree. "And quietly buy the land around it. In ten years, it'll be worth ten times. In twenty, it'll be holy."

"You sound like a banker pretending to be a pir."

"I'm a pir pretending not to be a banker."

Riyaz laughed. A rare thing. Then fell silent, eyes scanning the estate. "You happy here?"

"Happiness is a peasant's word," Arslan replied. "But I'm content."

A breeze ran through the garden. Somewhere, a bird sang a note like a fading memory.

"You talk like a philosopher," Riyaz muttered.

"I read Plato under candlelight," Arslan said with a grin. "God must be amused."

And as stars blinked above, as lanterns were lit without wires, as the 10-year-old boy who'd outlived time finished his sherbet and turned another page of Aristotle—he whispered a line only God could hear.

"Your world was poorly designed. I'm just fixing it in installments."

Multan in October had the smell of drying roses and slow death. The heat hadn't left, but the sun was gentler, as if embarrassed to linger. The estate here wasn't as poetic as Bahawalpur. No Victorian bones or colonial sorrow carved into beams. Just flat courtyards, silent fountains, and bougainvillea that climbed like unwanted memories—always blooming, always unwanted.

Arslan walked the length of the compound barefoot, his toes collecting dust and thoughts.

There were no meetings today. No land audits, no delivery ledgers, no Friday sermons to chant through. Even Malik Riyaz had stayed in Bahawalpur. And that was dangerous.

Because silence had one loyal friend—memory.

He sat beneath a dying tree that bore no fruit and hadn't for years. No one had cut it. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they thought it was sacred. Or maybe it reminded them that some things continue to stand even when they've stopped growing.

He pressed his back to the bark and closed his eyes.

In his past life, silence was a luxury. Something earned after pain. But now, silence was a threat. Because now he had everything. Safety. Money. Obedience. And yet…

He wasn't free.

He had mastered the language of saints, puppeteered faith into an empire, turned dreams into economics, and men into pawns. But the one thing he couldn't manipulate—the one truth that sat like a rusted coin at the bottom of his soul—was himself.

Not the self that smiled for newspapers. Not the self that recited Qur'an with tears and sincerity. Not the child with perfect Urdu, soft Arabic, and philosophical English.

The other self.

The one that never aged. That stayed lodged in a corner of his brain, watching everything with a quiet, almost cruel detachment.

He never said the word. Never even thought it in the local tongue. That would make it real. And reality was far too dangerous. Not just in Pakistan. Not just in 1996. But in the way his mind worked.

Because this wasn't shame.

It was grief.

Not grief for who he was—but for the knowledge that he could never be that man here. Not safely. Not truly. Not ever.

He wasn't afraid of mobs or laws. He could buy those. Twist them. Rewrite them. He had done it already.

He feared the look in the mirror. The moment when the armor of power cracked and revealed someone who had never been held without conditions. Someone who learned to speak like a prophet just to avoid ever being seen as a person.

So he worked. He strategized. He constructed.

He built estates, schools, legacies. He bought oil fields and prayer rugs. He hired forty men to carry thirty bricks. He rewrote village history by planting trees and renaming canals.

All just to stay too busy to remember.

The birds overhead chirped like they knew something.

He stared at them with the kind of envy that made philosophers write books and children cry in corners. He wondered what it felt like to wake up without pretending. To not fear who you might love. Or not love. Or what label might cling to your skin in a land where skin was already a liability.

A servant appeared in the distance, but Arslan waved him away.

He needed nothing.

Not food. Not water. Not prayer. Just time.

To bury the thought again.

To seal it beneath paperwork and land deals.

To crush it with strategy and ambition.

Because if he ever allowed that self to breathe too loudly, everything he had built might collapse—not from scandal, but from knowing that none of it could ever give him what he truly needed.

Not in this country.

Not in this body.

Not yet.

He stood up, brushed the dust from his clothes, and walked back to the house.

The dead tree behind him stood still.

And so did the silence inside him.

December 1996.

Heaven was a tuck shop. His dead relatives were devouring cream rolls and slapping ketchup on everything. The angel of death sat with a Mountain Dew in one hand and a Cornetto in the other. Even the chicken blinked when Arslan asked if he wanted salted or masala. It was absurd. It was divine. It was prophecy.

Arslan woke up and dreamt it not asleep he just needed an excuse for his future knowledge .

Riyaz entered the room to find the boy already dressed in a dark wool kurta, black waistcoat, and his favorite leather sandals. On the wall was a large whiteboard that had replaced the family portrait months ago. On it were crude diagrams of supply chains, warehouse maps, flavor combinations, arbi-urdu verses that sounded real, and something that looked like a circle of hell built out of sugar.

"Sit down," Arslan said, smacking the board with a stick like a possessed schoolmaster. "We have a world to rot."

Riyaz sat.

The old haveli in Bahawalpur was cold, its walls breathing the fog of winter. Outside, gardeners swept fallen leaves off gravel. Inside, the future of Pakistan's taste buds was being drawn in chalk and fury.

"We're entering phase three," Arslan began, voice sharp, finger stabbing the board. "Power, we have. Land, we own. Faith, we manufacture. Now—pleasure."

Riyaz blinked. "Pleasure?"

"Snacks," Arslan clarified, with the glee of a devil. "Soda. Wafers. Jellies. Colored liquids with promises. Biscuits that dissolve like dreams. Chips that cut tongues and build addictions. We are going to build the empire of artificial taste."

Riyaz frowned, but said nothing. He had long ago stopped questioning dreams.

"Pakistan is not ready," Arslan continued, pacing. "Not yet. The concept of branding barely exists. Everything tastes like cardboard or wedding leftovers. No mascots. No marketing. No artificial soul. That's where we come in."

He picked up a marker. Wrote in red: Flavor is Power.

"We will design packaging so loud it can be heard before it's seen. Colors so violent they hypnotize toddlers. Names that sound like they were invented by jinns with marketing degrees. CrunchWich, Zazo Bites, Nimko Nuke, Goli Goli Gum. I want chemicals that melt plastic and sell innocence."

Riyaz coughed.

"I want every village boy chewing gum with our logo. Every school tuck shop pushing our sugar with prayers. Every grocery shop wall painted with our syrup-drenched false promises. They'll eat it and want more. And we'll keep feeding them."

A long pause.

Arslan took a sip of tea. "It's not about profit. It's about control. Addicted stomachs obey. Especially when their fathers are broke and their mothers are tired. We'll become the silence between a slap and a sob."

"Factories?" Riyaz asked finally.

"Already being planned in Sindh," Arslan said. "One near Nawabshah. Another near Mirpur Khas. Cheap labor. Easier permits. Bribed inspectors. We'll import used machinery from Japan. I've already selected the flavors based on future data—paprika, synthetic cheese, lychee cola. They'll think it's magic."

"And the name?"

Arslan smiled like a messiah on a sugar high. "Al-Mut'amim. The Nourisher. Holy enough to disarm suspicion. Modern enough to infiltrate desire. We'll wrap consumerism in divine names. Just like they do with martyrdom."

Riyaz didn't speak. He watched the boy twirl the marker like a dagger and walk to the window.

Outside, the fruit garden stood solemn. Mango trees like witnesses. Orange trees ripening in silence.

"I hate this country," Arslan whispered. "But I love how easy it is to seduce."

Then louder, over his shoulder: "Tell the legal team to start registering shell companies. One in Multan. Two in Karachi. Get someone from Lahore to pretend to be an angel investor. And start working on the mascots. I want something cursed and cute. A lemon in a turban. A chili in prayer."

"And the slogan?" Riyaz asked, half-smiling now.

Arslan's eyes gleamed.

" taste taqwa ka ."