The rough map of Sandalbar lay open on the bedspread, lit only by the single lamp on the bedside table. Canals were inked in blue like veins; roads were sketched like bones. Villages were drawn as small, precise circles.
Around them, in a darker, heavier pencil, Bilal had sketched additional rings.
All right, Bilal said, his voice crisp in the quiet of Jinnah's mind. While the ladies eat all your biscuits in the other room, we talk strategy.
"We already have a strategy," Jinnah muttered, loosening his tie but not removing it. "Farabis. Stronghouses. Clinics. Wireless. Water filters. Bee-keeping. My table groans under the weight of your strategy."
Those are the organs, Bilal countered. We still need nerves. Right now, we react when trouble arrives at our door. We need to hear it when it starts walking down the road.
In Jinnah's mind, Bilal highlighted the outer edge of the estate on the mental map—the scrubland, the ravines, the places where the canal water didn't reach.
Think of the land as a board. The canals and main paths are the visible lines. Each stronghouse is a node. What we lack is an outer ring that hears the first whisper of trouble, and an inner ring that responds.
"We have ordered three wireless sets," Jinnah argued, pacing the small room. "One at the Bungalow, one at Bhagatpur, one at Chak 17-M. That is already more communication infrastructure than most districts possess."
Insufficient, Bilal replied instantly. They cover the core. Bandits don't attack the core first. They probe the edges. Your enemies—the Zaildars, the gangs, anyone who resents this experiment—will start with whispers, threats, and 'accidents' on the road. We need ears on the periphery. And we don't have infinite men to spare.
The voice in his head paused, the tone shifting from analytical to grim.
Which brings us to the ugly part: the bandits.
Jinnah stopped pacing. His jaw tightened.
"I will not legitimize thieves by putting them on my payroll," he said, his voice low and hard. "I have no desire to become a warlord."
I knew you'd say that, Bilal said calmly. And you're half right. We don't touch the predators. We don't touch the men who enjoy cruelty. We go after the ones Krishan described—men pushed into crime because the system left them no other way to feed their families.
"That does not erase their acts," Jinnah said. "A man who robs at knife-point does not become a saint simply because a Zaildar cheated him first."
No, Bilal agreed. But leaving him in the scrub with a half-criminal gang does not improve his soul either. It just leaves him available for your enemies to recruit. I'm not talking about amnesty. I'm talking about a conditional path out.
He let the idea take shape slowly, projecting the image of a different kind of recruit.
Picture this, Bilal said. You have a gang you've identified—through Krishan, through your own guards, through whispers. Some in that gang are vicious; some are desperate. The desperate ones have wives, children, sick parents. They hate what they've become but see no other road.
You send a message through someone they trust: 'Bring your family out. Lay down the knife. We give you a roof, rations, basic wages, and medicine. In return, you stop preying on the road and start watching it. You become my scouts instead of someone else's animals.'
"And what," Jinnah asked, "do I tell Harrington when he asks why former highwaymen are living in my villages?"
You tell him these are displaced families, and I've hired their men as buffalo keepers," Bilal said. "They know the jungle, Ahmed has every name written down, and instead of desperate men doing desperate things, they'll be helping me turn this jungle into revenue.
"Root," Jinnah repeated, testing the word. "You used that word before. Not 'Farabis'?"
No, Bilal said instantly. The Farabis are above ground: drilled, uniformed, seen. They are your visible shield, your 'estate guards', your auxiliary constabulary on Harrington's ledger. The Root is below: men no one connects with you, whose faces are not saluted at the bungalow. They know every goat track in the canal belt, every old well and ravine, because they used to hide there.
"And this term—'Root'—comes to you from where?" Jinnah asked suspiciously.
From a story in my time, Bilal admitted, a hint of amusement in his tone. About a village that trains warriors. On the surface, it has official defenders, bound by rules. Underneath, a smaller hidden branch exists, called Root: anonymous, uncredited, doing the dirty, quiet work that keeps the village alive. It is not a manual of ethics, he added quickly, but the structural idea is sound.
"So," Jinnah said slowly, moving back to the map, "you propose that on my estate the visible guards are constrained by law, paperwork, and Harrington's reports… and this Root handles the threats the law cannot see clearly?"
Exactly, Bilal said. With rules of its own. They would answer directly to you—perhaps via farabis for day-to-day matters, but ultimately to you. Their main weapon is knowledge, not bullets. They listen in tea-shops. They walk among laborers. They know which Zaildar's steward has started buying extra grain to feed extra men. If a Zaildar sends thugs to intimidate a village that leans toward your clinics, your Root knows three days earlier and has people there first—quiet, calm, eyes open.
"And if they abuse this power?" Jinnah asked sharply. "If they begin to extort, to threaten, to settle their own scores under cover of my name? I will not create a second set of bullies with my own money."
That's where the guardrails come in, Bilal said. Small numbers to start with—half a dozen men at most. All taken from cases Krishan vouches for: men he says were ruined by stamps and seals, not born to banditry. They move into the light with their families, under your eye. They do not carry rifles. At most, a stick or an old shotgun for night work. Their job is to watch and warn. If they ever raise a hand to a villager for their own profit, they are out—and the police can have them.
"And you assume," Jinnah said, skeptical, "that fear of losing this second chance will keep them honest?"
Not by itself, Bilal said. Fear, plus structure. You keep them separated from each other's command; no one man controls all the Root. You cross-check their stories with the Farabis, with Krishan. And you never tell them everything. Root listens; Farabis act in the open. If Root starts to rot, you cut away the infected piece before it takes the tree.
Jinnah looked down at the map. In his mind's eye, he saw men slipping through sugarcane and scrub, listening at tea-stalls, then coming at dusk to some quiet corner of a stronghouse courtyard.
"Fatima," he said quietly, "would be appalled."
Fatima, Bilal replied gently, would be appalled if you died in a ditch because some gang you could have broken chose the wrong day. She doesn't have to know the details. The question is: can you live with it?
Jinnah's fingers rested on the penciled circle marking Bhagatpur.
"If I do nothing," he said slowly, "the Zaildars continue to feed these gangs. The gangs continue to feed on my tenants. Harrington fights fires he cannot see, with policemen who sometimes drink in the same courtyards as the criminals. The law remains thin paint. If I do what you suggest, I thicken it in one place—but I also accept responsibility for men whose hands are not clean."
He thought of Krishan in his worn collar, saying quietly: Some of the worst crimes are committed with stamps, not with knives.
And of those children, Bilal reminded him. Razia and Baldev. The gangs didn't kill them. Fever did. But if, five years from now, one of those gangs burns a village and there is no one on your side in the scrub to see it coming, how will you weigh that?
Silence stretched in the room, heavy and absolute.
"At most," Jinnah said at last, "I will explore it. No more. If Krishan can identify such men—men pushed into crime by injustice rather than drawn to it by taste—I will have Ahmed look into them quietly. Case by case. For each man we consider, I will know his story, his victims, his present behavior. I will offer no blank pardons. And if this Root ever begins to act like the very gangs we wish to undercut, I will end it myself."
That, Bilal said, satisfied, is more than half a yes.
"Do not become excited," Jinnah replied dryly. "Roots can rot. And when they do, the tree falls. I will not let my estate stand on a rotten foundation merely because some Japanese storyteller in your time found drama in such arrangements."
Fair, Bilal said. Then we do it your way: slow, small, supervised. Root below, law above. If one fails, the other might hold.
"And what," Jinnah asked, "do we tell Harrington when this comes to his attention? Because it will. He is neither blind nor stupid."
You tell him, Bilal said, that you are taking men who would otherwise be someone else's thugs and turning them into eyes and ears for order. You emphasize that they do not carry government rifles. That Ahmed knows their names. That you are thinning the jungles for him.
"That," Jinnah murmured, "he might accept. He is tired. He prefers bad stability to dangerous justice—but he is not indifferent. If I show him that this improves his reports and lowers his bandit numbers, he will swallow his scruples and call it a 'local arrangement.'"
He closed the folder with a snap.
"And Mary?" Bilal asked softly. "What will you tell her, if she ever asks how you know so much about the gangs?"
"I will tell her," Jinnah said, "that sometimes, to keep people alive, one must do uncomfortable things in the correct location. I will not ask her to approve the details. She has already given enough blood to this experiment."
From the drawing room came the sound of laughter: Mary's quick, indignant protest about something; Evelyn's dry rejoinder; the bearer's chuckle quickly swallowed when he remembered his place.
Jinnah stood, smoothed his waistcoat, and straightened his tie in the mirror.
"Very well," he said inwardly. "We have Farabis above, perhaps a Root below, Harrington on one side, Krishan on the other, and two women in my drawing room determined to keep me alive whether I like it or not. For one experiment on one scrap of land, that is already too many moving parts."
That's how real systems look, Bilal replied. Messy. Layered. Human.
Jinnah opened the door and stepped back into the lamplight, where his unlikely household waited. In the map inside his head, new, faint circles glowed along the edges of Sandalbar—places where, one day, a man who might have become a bandit would instead stand still in the dark and listen for danger, not for prey.