in God's name we Trust

January 1997.

It began with the sound of drills and the smell of cement. Outside every Al-Riyaz madrasa, a rectangular slab of foundation was being poured. Some thought it was for wudu areas. Others assumed it was an expansion. But by the end of the week, aluminum shutters rolled down, shelves were installed, and glass fridges hummed to life. Not for prayer. For purchase.

Canteens.

But not just any canteens—temples of temptation, shrines of sugar. Wrapped wafers. Foiled biscuits. Cheap gum that burst like chemical fire in your mouth. Chips with chili warnings in red. All branded. All stamped with a round logo: a boy's silhouette in prayer, backlit with divine light.

Arslan's silhouette.

He never appeared in person. That was the rule. He was the miracle mascot, the silent saint, the angel child whose face now blessed every wrapper. Somewhere between messiah and marketing.

The madrasa teachers said nothing. How could they? They were now getting monthly "donations" and quarterly "funds for religious supplies" and bi-annual "equipment grants." Their blackboards were upgraded. Their rooms insulated. Their clerical power reinforced by snacks that sold better after Friday sermons.

The real estate came next.

Every dusty road bought in 1993 was now a blossoming corridor of commerce. Corner plots built into depots. Midpoints became distribution stalls. Roadside pauses transformed into "blessed refreshment" stalls. The branding was holy. The taste was unholy. Children bought three at a time. Men bit into them like regret. Women slipped them into dupattas for later.

All roads led to appetite. And all appetite, now, led to Al-Mut'amim.

Warehouses bloomed like fungus. South Bahawalpur. Near Uch Sharif. A second in Lodhran. A discreet one in Sanghar. Skeletons of future godowns being filled with early batches. Laborers paid in cash. Inspectors silenced before they even thought of inspecting. A strange unity of whispers kept the system running. As if everyone knew this was dangerous, but delicious.

From Lahore, Arslan began acquiring dying factories. The kind where cotton went to get its color, and where workers went to forget time. He didn't care for the cotton. He wanted the color. Industrial-grade dye. Not for fabric—for packaging.

He wanted reds that slapped the eyes. Blues that licked your skull. Greens that screamed wealth and freshness, even if the snack inside was three chemicals away from rat poison. From Karachi, he acquired printing equipment. Not new—Japanese surplus. Beautiful and precise and ancient. The kind of machines built before the world forgot how to build machines.

The workforce came from Hyderpur. Sons of farmers. Brothers of clerics. Men who had never held a packet of ketchup before, now standing under billboards with slogans written in half-Urdu, half-ayahs, fully hypnotic.

Riyaz moved like a godfather now. He said little, nodded often, signed everything. His face was the guarantee. The one who had God's dream-child for a grandson. Politicians began calling him again. District officers attended his mosque. The police saluted him before asking questions.

And Arslan?

He watched it all from the garden.

Lying on a charpai, nibbling on a slice of mango, body wrapped in a shawl, a book on Western marketing philosophy open on his lap. He'd underlined the words "desire is memory disguised as hunger."

He was eleven.

A lawyer entered the verandah and handed him documents. Approval for a shop cluster in Rahim Yar Khan. Confirmation of bulk sugar purchases from Faisalabad. Letters from a molvi in Karachi wanting a cut from every canteen.

Arslan didn't flinch. He smiled.

Outside, in the garden, two squirrels fought over a guava.

Inside, the next phase of addiction was being written in cursive.

Only the soda plan was behind. Carbonation required time. Consistency. Chemistry. He had the formulas. He had the names. "Ruh-e-Lemon," "Jannati Cola," "Jazba Orange." But for now, they sat in folders, waiting. The water plants were not ready. Bottling required more precision than he liked. That would come next.

This chapter was only the birth.

And every birth needed blood.

The madrasa in Khairpur caught fire just after Maghrib.

It wasn't large—three rooms, two dozen children, a tuck shop run by a one-eyed man who claimed he'd seen jinn steal sugar at midnight. But the blaze took less than fifteen minutes to chew through the wood-beamed roof. People screamed. Water was thrown. Arslan watched the report two days later in silence, the newspaper trembling slightly in the hands of the courier.

Riyaz didn't ask. He stood by the charpai, hands behind his back, waiting.

"They said it was electrical," Arslan finally spoke. "There is no electricity in Khairpur."

The newspaper was set aside.

"There were no deaths," Riyaz offered.

"Doesn't matter," Arslan replied. "The myth cracked."

He rose, shawl falling off his shoulders. A bruise-colored sky hung above the orchard. The squirrels were gone. The guavas half-rotted. Somewhere in the house, the whiteboard still hummed with the ideas of a child playing god.

"Reopen the madrasa in three days," he ordered. "Double the salary of every teacher. Send blankets. Send sugar. Send prayer beads dipped in saffron. And send a whisper."

Riyaz waited.

"That the angel cried when the roof fell."

That night, Arslan wrote a new dream. This one with mud and smoke. No Mountain Dew. No Cornetto. Just silence. And a child in a burnt kurta kneeling before a broken wall, reciting Surah Al-Fajr backwards.

He released the dream the next day. A molvi in Sukkur claimed he had it first. The news traveled. Faith, like infection, spread quickly when given warmth and blood.

Two weeks later, Arslan sat in the veranda, listening to reports.

The madrasa had reopened.

Children were back.

And across the province, five more madrasas reported dreams of divine sorrow.

Riyaz smiled faintly. "Even grief is currency."

Arslan didn't return the smile. He picked up a mango slice, squeezed it till the juice ran down his fingers.

"We need a new division," he said. "A department of grief."

"For what?"

"For control," Arslan said. "For every crack in the myth, we must invent a scar more sacred. Suffering must be ours too."

"And what will they call it?"

Arslan wiped his hands on the hem of his kurta. "Isharat. Department of Signs."

He stood. The garden light turned copper. The wind smelt of smoke.

"Start selecting the first group. Five men. Two must be orphans. One must stutter. All must believe in me more than God."

"And if they don't?"

"Then we'll make them believe," Arslan said.

By the time April ended, five men arrived in Bahawalpur. All had cried at least once during the interview. All swore they had seen dreams. All were given a small room in the haveli, notebooks of empty lines, and instructions to remember everything they felt at night.

Their job wasn't to lie. It was to remember lies so vividly they became truth.

They became dreamsmiths.

And Arslan? He kept waking at odd hours, pretending visions. Sometimes he'd walk barefoot in the orchard, whispering half-verses into the dark, like coaxing jinn out of the branches.

And when the next madrasa caught fire—this time from a child's accident with kerosene—the Isharat men had the next dream ready before the embers cooled.

Faith was not about belief anymore.

It was infrastructure.

May 1997.

The air in Bahawalpur thickened with heat and secrecy. Dust didn't rise anymore—it settled, like ash on a civilization too weary to resist. Across Pakistan, hundreds of buildings now bore a single logo: a boy's silhouette in prayer, backlit by divine light, haloed in red and saffron like a low-budget miracle.

Nobody knew who owned them.

The clerics were paid.

The teachers were silent.

And the workers were loyal.

Arslan spent most mornings beneath the jamun tree in the southern orchard, barefoot, a slate in one hand, a glass of salted lassi in the other. His toes drew equations in the soil. Not mathematical—but moral. He was designing the next phase of obedience. Not through fear. Not through awe. Through saturation.

Control wasn't a crown. It was humidity. You didn't wear it. You breathed it.

He had crossed 10,000 employees now. Not officially, of course. No records bore that number. But Riyaz had signed 10,041 envelopes that month. All sealed. All thick. Cash only. Most of them went to names that didn't exist on any government database.

A woman named Rani in Tharparkar now managed forty female packers in a godown camouflaged as a shrine maintenance warehouse.

A man in Dera Ghazi Khan ran the night shift of wafer sorting, his job title listed as "Spiritual Hygiene Officer."

None of them knew each other.

But all of them knew Him.

Not his name. Never his name. Just the idea.

The boy who dreamed.

The boy who brought rizq.

The boy who'd never been seen but who had already been mourned in more than one fake dream.

That was Arslan's greatest victory. Not the snacks. Not the land. Not even the canteens outside madrasas. It was the whispers.

You cannot kill a whisper.

They had started in 1993, weak, fragmented, broken up by logic. But now they were full sentences. Passages. Some villages had chapters. Every major town had at least one molvi who swore he had once seen the boy cry, and that his tears tasted like milk and honey.

Even the Ministry of Religious Affairs had begun to take notice. But nothing stuck. No case could be filed against a ghost.

And yet, behind the myths and metaphors, the machine throbbed like an ancient deity—slow, massive, and patient.

There was now a department just for monitoring government eyes. Arslan called it "Sifr." Zero.

Its job was not to engage, only to erase. If a clerk noticed too much, he was given a promotion. If a judge sniffed around, his brother was hired as a regional accountant. If a journalist grew curious, his child was offered a scholarship to a madrasa where every meal came with dessert and an envelope at term's end.

Riyaz oversaw it all, with the quiet fatigue of a retired general who had learned long ago that noise was for the powerless.

He attended every Friday meeting like ritual. No notes. Just silence. Arslan would speak. Lawyers would present. Managers would panic. And Riyaz would nod, once, and things would happen.

He had become a legend of his own—The Sheikh of Bahawalpur, some said. The White-Haired Emir. The Old Hand of God. They thought him a billionaire from the Gulf, an exiled prince from Syria, even the lost brother of a Saudi royal.

No one guessed the truth: he was just a man with one surviving grandson. A boy who should've died in a fire. A boy who, instead, came back with maps in his dreams and blood in his hands.

---

One evening in late May, the sky broke open over Lodhran. Thunder like war drums. Rain like regret. A warehouse roof collapsed under water weight. Three men were injured. One broke his hip.

The news didn't make it to any newspaper. It didn't need to. By dawn, three things had happened:

– The injured man's wife received a cow and twelve thousand rupees.

– The warehouse was repaired overnight by workers brought in from Bahawalnagar.

– And a dream began circulating that same week: a boy, haloed in blue lightning, shielding workers under his arms as rain fell like knives.

The workers began calling the warehouse "Barkat ka Ghar."

By the next Friday, sales had tripled in the region.

---

Arslan didn't blink when told.

He was studying Urdu calligraphy that week, designing the next snack brand: "Shauq"—The Desire.

It was to be a wafer layered with artificial hazelnut and powdered date flavoring, sold in a wrapper designed like a prayer mat. The campaign would involve a molvi in Multan claiming it had cured his child's stutter.

The slogan?

"Har bite mein rehmat."

A blessing in every bite.

Arslan had laughed when he wrote it. Then immediately went silent, as if ashamed of the sound.

The room was quiet after. Only Riyaz, seated across, sipping green tea.

"Too much?" Arslan finally asked.

"No," Riyaz replied. "You're speaking their language."

"They'll call me mad one day."

"They already do."

"Do you?"

"I call you necessary."

---

By June 1st, Arslan's empire spanned thirty-nine cities and 118 towns. Over 200 madrasas, 8 factories, 15 godowns, 900+ tuck shops, and more than 11,000 employees. His check-and-balance department now had six sub-divisions. Isharat was a self-sustaining myth-engine. Sifr had intercepted and erased fourteen threats. And he hadn't even reached puberty.

The only thing that lagged was the soda line.

Arslan was furious about it. Not because of profit. He didn't care for that. But because carbonated sugar was the final lock. The last mouthpiece.

"Liquid desire," he called it.

"We can control thirst," he whispered one day, alone on the roof with Riyaz.

"But carbonation," Riyaz began.

"I know," Arslan snapped. "It needs calibration. Pressure. The bottles explode. It needs plants we don't have. Water treatment we can't fake."

He kicked a stool. It fell noiselessly on the thick roof rug.

"Buy a bottling plant," he said at last. "Use an angel investor from Karachi. And don't call it soda."

Riyaz raised an eyebrow.

"We'll call it 'Ruhani Sharbat'. Spiritual syrup. Tie it to Hadith about sweet drinks. Say it cures inner heat. Design the bottle like a Sufi's cane."

"You're not afraid of blasphemy anymore?"

"I am," Arslan whispered. "But I'm also its biggest customer."

He didn't sleep that night. He paced. He scribbled in chalk on the courtyard floor. Diagrams of sugar supply chains. Water routes. Molasses pricing. And in the middle, one word, written over and over:

"Obedience."

He had come back to this world with memories. Now he wanted to leave fingerprints on every molecule of the next.

No logo could hold him.

But every tongue in Pakistan soon would.