The Nutrition Pharmacy ran like clockwork; the egg and ghee baskets went out and came back by train; the Farabi quarters were no longer a construction site but a lived-in street: hens scratching, goats tugging at ropes, children chasing each other between water pots.
For the first time since he had written the first ruinous cheques, Jinnah could look at the estate ledger and not feel it was bleeding to death.
"It breathes now," he murmured, closing the account book. "In and out. Not just out."
In his head, Bilal nodded.
Good. Now that the patient is off life support, we can talk about… upgrades.
"Upgrades?" Jinnah said, already suspicious.
Not more bees, Bilal promised. Industry.
"You already have me selling eggs by the basket," Jinnah said. "What more do you want, a steel mill on the canal?"
No, Bilal said. Factories without chimneys.
The Proposal: Villages as Domestic Plants
That evening, the two of them – man and voice – stood at the edge of the Canal Bungalow compound, looking out toward the faint cluster of lamps that marked the station colony and the further, softer glow where Bhagatpur and Chak 17-M sat under the winter sky.
"In your world," Jinnah said inwardly, "factories are things with smoke and noise."
Yes, Bilal replied. Big buildings. Time clocks. Workers going in and out like a human tide. But they don't have to look like that. You want something else here: domestic factories.
"Meaning?"
Take each village, Bilal said, and give it a speciality.
He sketched, in Jinnah's mind, invisible circles around the settlements.
The station colony near the halt: that becomes your butchery and packing hub. Goat and quail meat, clean and inspected, processed there and sent straight onto trains.
Bhagatpur and Chak 17-M: there we go from wheat and gossip to cotton and cloth. Ginning and spinning at a small central shed on the edge of the village, handlooms inside the houses.
Jinnah folded his arms.
"You want me," he said dryly, "to become an industrialist Gandhi? Handlooms in every hut? Shall I also walk around bare-kneed in homespun?"
Bilal snorted.
Absolutely not. Gandhi's khaddar is a protest symbol: simple, rough, anti-machine. I'm talking about premium khaddar – high-quality cloth, good twist, consistent weave – with machines doing the dirty prep and people doing the final, skilled part.
He sharpened the idea.
Look at the global picture, Sir. The Depression is here. Lancashire is hurting. Mills in Bombay and Ahmedabad are running below capacity. Cotton prices are in the gutter. Raw lint is dirt cheap. Machinery is being sold off for scrap.
That's bad for the Empire. It's good for a man with some cash and no fear of grease.
"You want me to buy broken mills," Jinnah said.
You buy small ginning and spinning units from depressed mills that are downsizing, Bilal corrected. You don't need city monsters. A modest ginning plant to clean cotton. A modest spinning frame to turn it into good yarn.
After that, we send yarn into the houses. There, the work is only weaving on handlooms. No lungful's of dust, no children licking cotton fluff from their lips. Just warp, weft, and skill.
He showed a simple chain:
Cheap cotton → ginning & spinning shed → clean yarn → home handlooms → premium khaddar → steady cash.
"Handlooms in every courtyard," Jinnah said slowly. "But not as a sermon. As an industry prototype."
Exactly, Bilal said. You're not preaching austerity. You're paying for quality. Gandhi uses khaddar to say "no" to Empire. You use khaddar to say "yes" to self-respect and export.
Jinnah's mouth twitched.
"I suppose you will tell me," he said, "that even this has a modern name."
Local value-add, Bilal replied. Distributed manufacturing. But we can call it "decent work".
Ahmed and the Cotton Map
The next morning, Jinnah had Ahmed in the office, the big Sandalbar map unrolled on the table.
"Show me," he said, "from where we can get cotton, and at what prices now."
Ahmed's eyes lit; he had already been thinking about it.
"South-west, Sir," he said, tapping the map. "Beyond Montgomery, toward the older canal villages. There are growers who used to sell to the big ginning firms. This year, they complain the buyers pay pennies."
He pulled a notebook from his satchel.
"I spoke to a man at the station," Ahmed went on. "His brother works in a ginnery near Multan. They have machines sitting idle. The big firms want to sell equipment before it rusts. Depression, they say. No demand. If we offer cash, they will listen."
"And transport?" Jinnah asked.
"By train to Montgomery, by cart from there," Ahmed said. "The heaviest parts will be a trouble, but not impossible. We have good bullocks. And men who like the idea of machines that eat cotton instead of men who eat their rent."
Jinnah raised an eyebrow.
"And the skills to run these machines? Ginning and spinning are not as simple as turning a handle."
Ahmed had already thought of that too.
"There are men from the villages," he said, "who have worked in mills in Lyallpur, even in Bombay. They went for a season, for wages, came back when work dried. We can call them. Give them better pay to teach others. All spinning stays in the shed. For the homes, we keep only handlooms. Women, older boys, old men… the people who cannot dig, but can sit and count threads."
Bilal murmured approval.
He's got the right idea. Factory core, domestic shell.
Jinnah tapped the map near Bhagatpur.
"Very well," he said. "We start here. One modest ginning and spinning unit between Bhagatpur and the canal. Out of earshot of the clinic, within easy cart distance of the station."
"And the butchery, Sir?" Ahmed asked.
"We will come to that," Jinnah replied. "One industry at a time. I will not have goat carcasses and fever patients sharing air."
The Industrialist Who Was Not Gandhi
That evening, on the verandah, as the light thinned and the first smells of cooking rose from the Farabi quarters, Jinnah sat with a cigarette unlit between his fingers, turning the idea over.
"So," he said inwardly, "I am to purchase machines with blood on their bolts."
Cotton mills in my time, Bilal said, are not gentle places either. But think about scale. You're not building a monster mill that eats ten thousand workers and spits them out at forty. You're building a prototype district where machines do the heavy cleaning and spinning, and families control the last mile: weaving.
He softened his tone.
You are not Gandhi, Sir. You will never be Gandhi. You don't like theatre, you don't like hunger strikes, you don't like slogans. But here, in this little patch, you can take one of his better instincts – local cloth, dignity in work – and connect it to a system that actually pays properly and doesn't despise comfort.
"You make me sound," Jinnah said, "like a tailor with delusions of statecraft."
You're a barrister running bees, goats, a wireless network, and a paramilitary clinic, Bilal pointed out. A few looms won't ruin your dignity.
Jinnah looked at the darkening fields.
"And this cotton," he said. "We will be accused of undercutting Lancashire if we succeed."
Lancashire already hates your existence, Bilal answered. One little estate weaving cloth won't kill the mills. But it will keep your people from wearing rags when the railways pay them in small change.
He added:
Also, this helps with your long game. When the big riots come later, the anger in cloth towns comes partly from unemployment and hunger. In Sandalbar, if we do this right, people will have multiple hooks into the economy: eggs, milk, silk, cloth. If one stream dries, another is still there.
"So the root," Jinnah murmured, "goes under the looms as well."
Exactly.
Buying Broken Giants
Getting the machines was less romantic than either of them would have liked. It was letters, not speeches.
Jinnah wrote to a Bombay solicitor he knew from his early practice days: a man with more ledgers than scruples and more clients than principles.
Dear S—,
I understand several of your mill clients are disposing of surplus ginning and spinning equipment in view of the current downturn. I require modest, functioning units suitable for estate-level use in the Montgomery district…
Back and forth the correspondence went: descriptions of used gins, small ring-frames, their horsepower and condition; prices scribbled and bargained down; questions about spare parts, belts, lubrication.
More than once, the Bombay man wrote baffled lines such as:
Most landholders prefer to buy cars or town houses in this climate, not second-hand gin stands. What are you building out there, my friend? A cotton kingdom?
To which Jinnah replied, in his neat hand:
Not a kingdom. A refuge that pays its own bills.
In the end, two small ginning units and one modest spinning frame were identified, bought at a price that would have seemed impossible five years earlier. Depression numbers.
Ahmed travelled once to inspect them himself.
He returned with dust on his clothes, oil on his hands, and a kind of breathless excitement.
"They are old," he reported, "but not dead. The bearings need love. The belts need replacing. But they turn. We brought a mechanic's boy with us; he says they'll run if we feed them well."
"And the cotton?" Jinnah asked.
"Three villages," Ahmed said. "All willing to supply us direct at rates better than the city middlemen, because we pay in cash and on time. Cotton is cheap now, Sir. Everyone is desperate. We can choose the cleanest, the longest staple."
Training the Weavers
Once the machines were on their way by rail and bullock cart, the human side had to be arranged.
In Bhagatpur, the word went out: any family with an extra corner in the courtyard and patient fingers could come to a meeting under the banyan tree.
They came: women with babies on hips, old men with thin wrists, boys too young for the plough but too restless for school. Ahmed stood on a borrowed charpai; beside him, a retired mill worker from Lyallpur, his moustache as fierce as his opinions. Behind them, under a cloth, sat a simple wooden handloom, newly built by the estate carpenters.
"This," Ahmed said, pulling the cloth away, "is not just a frame. It is wages."
The Lyallpur man took over, explaining in simple Punjabi:
"The ginning and spinning will happen in the new shed," he said. "There, the machines will clean the cotton and spin the yarn. You will not be asked to breathe cotton dust all day, or spin until your fingers bleed."
He held up a neat hank of yarn.
"You come to the shed with your share of cotton, or later with just your request," he went on. "They weigh, they spin. You go home with ready yarn. On this"—he slapped the loom frame—"you stretch it for warp, and you throw it for weft. You weave. Good tight weave, not the loose rags they sell in the bazaar."
He ran his hand over a sample strip they had already woven for demonstration: firm, dense, with a faint sheen from good staple.
"This looks simple," he said, "but it is money. You weave, you bring the cloth back. They measure. You get paid by the yard. If the cloth is good, they pay more. If the cloth is poor, they pay less. No one here will force you to sell at a loss. But no one will pay for holes."
Women in the crowd looked at the loom as if it were an extra child—trouble, but also potential.
One widow raised her hand.
"And if my hands shake?" she asked. "My sons are in the city. I am alone. Can I manage?"
Ahmed answered gently.
"We can arrange easier work for you," he said. "If you cannot manage the whole loom, you can help with warping, with winding bobbins, with checking for broken threads. Not every task must be done by the same person. Cloth is teamwork, even inside one house."
In the following weeks, courtyards transformed.
Where once there had been only charpais and stacks of firewood, there were now handlooms set up under shade, their frames wedged into corners; women sitting at them in the afternoons, pressing the pedals, throwing shuttles; old men leaning close to check for missed threads; children winding yarn onto wooden bobbins under orders not to tangle anything.
The huts did not look like mills. They looked like homes with ambition.
The Butchery at the Halt
At the station colony, the plan was cruder but no less necessary.
"You want me to turn this place into a slaughter yard," said the Sikh foreman who had once run a small meat stall near the old cantonment.
"I want you," Jinnah said, "to turn it into a clean slaughter and packing yard."
Goats and quails arrived from the Farabi families and nearby villages on fixed days, not whenever it suited a trader. Each animal was booked in, inspected, and assigned. The slaughter area was built away from the wells and houses, with drains graded properly, lime kept in sacks, and a strict line where only workers could cross.
"If we are to send meat to Lahore or Montgomery," Jinnah told the man, "it will not be wrapped in yesterday's newspaper, smelling like a drain. It will be clean, packed in straw, and carried in proper crates. I am not interested in volume. I am interested in reputation."
"But meat spoils, Sir," the man pointed out. "Eggs and cloth can wait. Meat rots."
"Then we do not send carelessly," Jinnah said. "We start with small contracts. Cantonment messes near enough that the train run is short. Everything tied to the timetable."
He glanced down the track where the day's train would arrive.
"And if we cannot guarantee freshness," he added, "we do not send that day. I will waste an animal before I poison a mess."
Bilal nodded approval.
You're building trust currency now. Later, when you ask for bigger contracts, they'll remember you never cheated them with bad meat.
Jinnah's Quiet Realisation
One night, after the gins and the small spinning frame had been test-run for the first time—belts wobbling slightly, villagers cheering as raw cotton went in and clean yarn came out—Jinnah walked alone between the Farabi quarters and the path to Bhagatpur.
From one side, he heard hens settling; from another, the low, rhythmic clack of a loom still working; in the distance, faintly, the whistle of a locomotive.
"This is no longer just an estate," he said inwardly.
No, Bilal agreed. It's a prototype industrial district. A version of what a whole region could look like if someone designed it instead of letting it grow like a weed.
He added, almost gently:
And you're not doing this alone anymore. Ahmed understands numbers. The Farabis understand drills. The villagers understand that this strange contraption called Sandalbar feeds them when the prices in the bazaar go mad.
Jinnah stopped, listening: a goat bleated once, somewhere a loom rattled, and, inside the clinic, a child laughed at something Mary had said.
"You realise," he murmured, "that if this continues, I will have no time for politics."
Bilal's answer was dry.
If you make this work, Sir, politics will eventually come to you. But that is later. For now… cotton, cloth, meat, eggs. Domestic factories.
"Factories without chimneys," Jinnah repeated.
He looked at his own hands—lawyer's fingers, long and precise, now ink-stained from ledgers and smelling faintly of oil from machine parts he had inspected.
"Very well," he said softly. "Let us weave."
And in the darkness of Sandalbar, in courtyards lit by faint lamps and under roofs patched with new tiles bought with egg money, looms clacked, goats settled, and hens quietened, as an estate quietly transformed itself into something that could survive storms by making, not just enduring.