Sachin Arora has been collecting currency notes for nearly 15 years and now many Muslim clerics have offered up to Rs.50,000 to possess just one of them. The collection is no ordinary one — all the notes bear the number 786, an important religious symbol in Islam.

A resident of Shamli town in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, Arora has a fetish for the number 786, the numerical expression of the Quranic verse Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim (In the name of god, the most gracious, the most merciful).