Three months of Punjab sun had turned Sandalbar from a sketch into something that hummed on its own.
Under the neem trees behind the Farabi quarters, the bee boxes were thick with life. Wooden supers, built to Bilal's fussy "blueprint" and Ahmed's muttered complaints about "yet another contraption," now thrummed with a steady, contented roar.
Jinnah stood at a cautious distance, hands clasped behind his back, watching Varun and two other Farabis work in veiled hats and improvised mesh nets. One of them lifted a frame: dense, regular rows of capped comb, like tiny wax tiles.
"Liquid gold," Evelyn said beside him.
She held up a small glass jar from the first pressing. The honey inside was a dark amber, almost red where it caught the light, flecked with specks of canal-belt pollen.
"It is certainly… sticky," Jinnah observed.
"It is concentrated food," Evelyn corrected, turning the jar slowly. "I've been reading the Indian Medical Gazette. For the pregnant women in your villages—the ones living on bread, salt, and worry—this is energy they can actually absorb. I suggest we reserve a portion of each harvest for the antenatal days. A jar a month per mother is better than half the rubbish they sell in tonic bottles in Montgomery bazaar."
Perfect buff item, Bilal said approvingly. Give it to the fragile units first.
"And the rest?" Jinnah asked aloud.
"Sell it," Evelyn said promptly. "Or trade it. I'm a doctor, not a saint. Clinics run on money as much as on good intentions."
"Not just the honey," Bilal added quietly in the back of Jinnah's mind. "The wax. Don't ignore the wax."
"Explain," Jinnah said inwardly.
Beeswax, Bilal said. In your time it's cheaper than in mine, but still valuable. We can use it to seal the joints of the wireless huts against rain, to waterproof ledger bindings, to coat the insides of grain chests. And once the yield grows, you can sell surplus to the cantonment for their canvas and leather gear. The sugar is nice; the wax is infrastructure.
"We shall do both," Jinnah said. "Doctor, set aside a fixed proportion of each pressing for the antenatal clinic. The rest we shall divide between estate needs and commerce."
He tapped his cane lightly on the hard-packed earth.
"I intend," he went on, half to Evelyn, half to the murmuring skull he lived with, "to send a small consignment to Lahore Cantonment. The garrison quartermaster is always hunting for reliable non-perishable supplies. If Sandalbar can place honey on the officers' tables and beeswax in their stores, the estate becomes a supplier. Less dependence on my savings. More on our own production."
"And one jar," he added, "goes to the Commissioner's dinner table this evening. The clearest comb, the finest strain. If we must live under an Empire, it may as well acquire a taste for our exports."
Good, Bilal said. Diplomacy with dessert.
He hesitated, then nudged again.
While we're looking at this yard… those Farabi wives are still mostly idle. They cook, they sweep, they wait. That's dangerous long-term. Bored households ferment trouble.
Jinnah's eyes drifted toward the neat line of Farabi houses—the two-room units with shared courtyards that Ahmed had badgered into existence. Women were visible in the doorways now: sweeping, gossiping quietly, watching the children chase each other along the shaded path.
What do you propose this time? he asked inwardly. Tigers? Ostriches?
Chickens, Bilal said. And later, quail. Small coop behind the quarters. We're already losing grain dust and chaff at the mills. Turn it into eggs. Eggs into protein for clinic patients and Farabi children. The wives can run it. Low cost, short cycle, immediate morale boost.
"I suppose," Jinnah said dryly, "that once a man has invested in bees, chickens are merely a further indignity."
"Sorry?" Evelyn asked.
"Nothing," he replied. "Inform Ahmed I want a plan for poultry—simple, near the Farabi quarters, run by the women. We will buy the feed at a fair rate from our own waste. If I must become a farmer, I at least insist on elegant accounting."
"You are a farmer already," Evelyn said, amused. "You simply refuse to wear the correct hat."
"I have a hat," he said. "It cost good money in Bombay. It will do."
He looked once more at the bee frames, oozing slow amber into the waiting bucket.
"Very well," he said. "Let us see whether the Empire has a palate."
Dinner at the Commissioner's
The Commissioner's bungalow in Montgomery was everything the Canal Bungalow was not: polished mahogany, silent servants, lamps with green shades casting a club-like glow over gleaming silver.
Harrington sat at the head of the dining table, Margaret at his right. Jinnah was opposite him, Evelyn to his own right—a curious quartet that would have baffled most of the district officers had they been invited.
"I must confess, Mr. Jinnah," Harrington said as the bearer carved roast mutton with military precision, "when you first wrote to me about arming estate guards and installing wireless sets among the canal villages, I prepared myself for headlines. 'Barrister raises private army. District in uproar.' That sort of thing."
He took a measured sip of claret.
"Instead, Ahmed's reports are… singular. The bandit incidents near your tract have dropped. The zaildars have grown, as he puts it, 'unusually polite.' And your wireless sets—scrap from the War, sold at auction as useless—are now apparently coordinating grain shipments and clinic days."
"That is their current employment," Jinnah said mildly.
"You've taken machinery built for artillery spotting," Harrington went on, "and turned it into a civil service network. It runs with military discipline, but it serves villages. It is, I must admit, not what I expected from a retired Bombay pleader."
"Retired from Bombay," Jinnah corrected. "Not from thinking."
Margaret smiled, glancing between the two men. "It sounds, Edward," she said, "as if Mr. Jinnah is doing your work for you on that canal belt."
"Sometimes," Harrington admitted, "it does feel that way."
Jinnah set down his knife and fork and folded his hands, courtroom-habit creeping in.
"I should like to suggest," he said, "that there is nothing miraculous about Sandalbar."
"Oh?" Harrington raised an eyebrow. "I was under the impression that turning a bandit strip into a quiet zone in three months was at least moderately miraculous."
"It is merely the logical application," Jinnah replied, "of the very principles your administration likes to cite in dispatches."
Harrington leaned back. "Go on."
"What do you see at Sandalbar?" Jinnah asked. "A British-educated barrister at the head. A British-qualified surgeon"—he inclined his head toward Evelyn—"running the medical side. Guards who learned their drill under His Majesty's colours in France and Mesopotamia. Wireless sets manufactured in Birmingham, operated by Anglo-Indian technicians trained by your own railways. An Indian Civil Service officer as liaison, keeping the ledgers and sending you reports."
He lifted his water glass, letting the lamplight pick out the details.
"I have not raised a tribal banner, Commissioner. I have taken the tools of your Empire—the discipline, the hardware, the communication methods—and removed the petty theft, the idleness, the feudal blackmail that clogs them in most districts. That is all."
"You argue," Harrington said slowly, "that your estate is more British, in method, than some of our own departments."
"I argue," Jinnah said, "that efficiency has no nationality. If Sandalbar looks oddly competent, do not look to some secret Eastern wisdom. Look to the pile of war-surplus and underutilised men your system left lying about. I merely collected them."
Margaret laughed softly. "Edward, he has you there."
Harrington regarded Jinnah over the rim of his glass. For a moment, something like weariness passed over his features—a man seeing an uncomfortable mirror.
"You do realise," Harrington said, "that if every landed gentleman in Punjab behaved like you, the Indian Civil Service would become largely ornamental."
"That," Jinnah replied, "would be an interesting experiment."
He nodded to the bearer, who had been hovering with a small wrapped parcel on a salver.
"Speaking of experiments," he said. "I brought a sample of what happens when those tools are allowed to function."
The bearer stepped forward. Jinnah unwrapped a glass jar. The honey inside caught the lamplight: a clear, complex amber, thicker than the bazaar syrup, with tiny trapped air bubbles glinting like dust motes.
"From the apiaries of Sandalbar," he said. "The first pressing. If Mrs. Harrington would be so kind as to judge it, we shall know whether it is fit for civilised tongues."
Margaret's face lit up with unfeigned curiosity. She signalled for a fresh spoon, had the jar opened, and let a small spoonful fall onto her dessert plate, where fruit and cream had just been set.
She tasted it, and her eyebrows shot up in genuine surprise.
"Oh," she breathed. "Edward—this is extraordinary."
She turned to Jinnah.
"It isn't like that awful thick syrup one buys from shopkeepers who water it down with sugar water," she said. "One can taste the flowers in it. The canal banks. It's clean. Sharp, but not harsh. This is the best honey I've tasted since we left Surrey."
"That," Jinnah said, "is what happens when no one dilutes the work. No adulteration. No middlemen. Just the result."
Harrington took his own spoonful, more out of duty than expectation. The taste made him pause. It was sweet, of course—but not dead; there was a particular edge to it that was neither English nor wholly Indian. Something of the acacia wind and irrigated heat.
Across the table, he saw not just the label: "SANDALBAR ESTATE – HONEY," which Jinnah had the audacity to stencil in black ink, but the chain behind it. Guards on night duty. A doctor enforcing soap. A wireless mast tapping in the dark. A barrister who refused to smoke in wards. Bees moving from mustard flower to mustard flower under a hot sky, blind to Empire, concerned only with the hive.
If every prince and Nawab, Harrington thought, had ten per cent of this man's ruthless competence, we would not feel like men hanging on by our fingernails in someone else's storm. We might, God help us, have been partners in something better than this polite occupation.
He raised his wine glass instead of saying any of that aloud.
"To Sandalbar," he said. "And to efficiency used in the service of something other than personal comfort."
"To efficiency," Jinnah replied, touching his water glass lightly to the Commissioner's.
In the back of his mind, Bilal allowed himself a small, satisfied nod.
Natural twenty, he said. Quartermaster, wife, and Commissioner, all charmed by a jar. Now we just need to teach your chickens to lay on schedule.
"Not during dinner," Jinnah told him inwardly, maintaining his polite expression. "We shall discuss poultry when there is no claret on the table."
Margaret was already speaking to Evelyn about antenatal clinics and honey rations for expectant mothers. Harrington was asking careful, technical questions about the storage life, the extraction method, whether the wax could indeed be turned to canvas treatment.
By the time coffee arrived, "SANDALBAR HONEY" had moved from curiosity to provisional supply item in the Commissioner's mental inventory.
And somewhere between the mahogany sideboard and the polished silver, a strip of once-lawless canal country had quietly stepped closer to being not just a fortress, but a supplier—an engine linked, subtly and profitably, into the larger machine it still professed to obey.