They came in a mixed procession a few days later: men from Chak Panj and Chak Bawan, beards stiff with soot; women with red eyes and children hanging off their shawls; a boy who carried, as carefully as if it were a sleeping child, a cloth-wrapped object in both hands.
The yard in front of Sandalbar HQ had seen contractors, cultivators, tax petitioners, even a few cautious zamindars come and go. This group did not look like petitioners. They looked like people who had already lost the argument with the world and were here simply to enter the loss into the record.
Inside the estate hall, long tables had been pushed together. Evelyn and Mary sat to one side, listening; Ahmed and two Farabis stood at the back, arms folded, uniforms stiff in the heat.
Jinnah took his seat at the head of the table—not on a dais, just at the far end, where he could see every face.
The headman of Chak Panj spoke first. He was not old, but the grey in his beard had spread like frost in the last months.
"Sir," he began formally, "you gave us work. You told us: 'Put your looms in order. We will pay you on time. We will protect your families.' We believed you."
He swallowed.
"Before, when bandits came, they took what they could carry and beat us if we refused. We ran from lane to lane, from one neighbour's house to another. No one knew where to go."
His eyes flicked toward the Farabi uniforms at the back.
"Then you built these posts," he said. "You told us, if danger comes, run there. So we ran there."
He spread his hands, empty.
"And now they burn what we leave behind."
The boy stepped forward and unwrapped the bundle he held. Inside lay a burnt loom shuttle: blackened, cracked, one end almost eaten through by fire.
"This made cloth for three generations," the headman said. "It belonged to my grandfather, then my father, then me. Now it is like this."
Another man, from Chak Bawan, took over.
"In our village," he said, voice tight, "they did not even shout for us to come out. They waited until we went in—into the post, like you told us—then they burned the sheds nearest the fields. They dragged our sacks into the lane and set fire to them."
His throat worked.
"They took… they took Shazia."
A woman lifted her veil just enough to speak. Her eyes were dry in a way that was worse than tears.
"She went to draw water," the woman said. "She did not even have her dupatta properly on her head. They took her as if she was a bundle of sticks."
She looked straight at Jinnah.
"The Farabis bhai did their duty," she said. "They opened the door, they put us inside, they did not run. But when we came out, there was nothing left to come out to."
Her voice did not rise. It did not need to.
"My daughters ask me," she went on, "why we sit by the loom at all. They say, 'When Abba cuts cane as a labourer, nobody sets the fields on fire to punish him. When we weave, they burn our house. So what work has honour now?'"
Silence settled over the room like dust.
They are not only afraid, a dry, familiar voice in the back of Jinnah's mind observed. They are doing cost–benefit. Your system versus the jungle's system. And right now, the jungle pays in fire, but at least it is honest about it.
"You are saying," Jinnah said slowly, "that the very fact of working in our system paints a target on your door."
"Yes, Janab," the headman said. "We are not asking for gifts. We are only telling you: if this goes on, we cannot keep going."
He hesitated, and when he spoke again his voice had the dull weight of something already decided in many kitchens.
"Some men already say, 'Break the looms. Go back to day wages. Go back to smuggling, to carrying other people's stolen goods—at least they do not burn you for it.'"
He looked down at his hands.
"And some say," he added quietly, "that maybe the old ways were better. At least then the dacoit took once and left; he did not come back every fortnight to make a lesson of you."
There it is, the inner voice said. Not rebellion. Loss of faith. Once they decide 'development' brings more risk than safety, they'll walk away and never look back.
Jinnah sat very straight, hands folded on the table. He could have recited a list of gains—the clinic, fairer grain prices, safe childbirths, cholera caught early because someone now knew what cholera was.
He did not.
"If you walk away from honest work because the State cannot protect you," he said quietly, "the failure is not yours. It is mine. And it is the Government's."
He turned his head slightly, looking at Ahmed.
"When we created the Farabi posts," he went on, "we changed the shape of the board. For a while the enemy moved where we expected. Now they have learned to move where we are not."
Ahmed grimaced. "They never attack the posts," he said. "They never test our rifles. They treat the strongholds as simple walls to go around. They're not contesting our force; they're contesting our promise."
Correct, the voice in Jinnah's head agreed. They've accepted that your walls are real. Now they are attacking the space between the walls and the looms. The gap is where their profit lies.
Jinnah's gaze dropped to the burnt shuttle on the table. The blackened wood felt oddly warm in his palm, as if it still held some memory of fire.
"In my mind," he said, surprising even himself by voicing it, "there is another time coming, years from now, when every rumour of a stolen girl or a burned house or a looted shop is answered by another rumour somewhere else. The police will say they are neutral. The Government will say it is doing its best. And villages will decide they must protect themselves, each in their own way."
He looked around the table.
"That," he finished, "is how people stop seeing themselves as part of one system. They start seeing themselves as separate camps—ours, theirs, and the ones who look away."
The elders did not understand all his references, but they understood enough: if this continued, everyone would look after only their own, and no one would trust anyone else's law.
"A war before the flag even changes," he murmured, low enough that only the closest might have heard.
Then his voice hardened.
"We cannot promise you that nothing bad will ever happen," he said. "No man can promise that honestly. But we can change how we respond."
He looked at Ahmed.
"From today," he said, "the mobile column changes its role. No more arriving only to write reports and pat heads. I want patrols on the canal roads at night, irregular timings. Let the bandits feel that any raid could run headfirst into a lorry full of rifles."
"That will stretch us thin," Ahmed warned. "We are already watching bridges and the HQ line."
"If the villages empty," Jinnah replied, "there will be no one left to guard the bridges for. We protect the people who keep the canal alive, or the canal becomes a moat around an empty estate."
Ahmed nodded slowly. "All right. I'll reorganise rotations."
Good, the inner voice said. You can't protect concrete and let humans burn. But you also can't just add more guns. You need eyes.
"Second," Jinnah continued, "right now, everyone runs inward—into the post. That keeps you alive, but it leaves your looms alone. We will not ask you to fight; that would be murder. But we will ask you to help us see faster."
He gestured, and a clerk unrolled the estate map on a side table.
"We will pick two or three men in each village—not heroes, just men who can run," Jinnah said. "When trouble comes, their job is not to attack anyone. It is to grab a signal lamp and a whistle and get to an agreed spot—by the big neem tree, on the raised field bund, wherever gives a view. They do not stand still. They do not go close. They move, and they make noise. That gives the Farabi post something to aim eyes at, not bullets."
"That is still dangerous," the headman objected.
"It is," Jinnah agreed. "Less dangerous than trying to pull a man with a gun off your neighbour's door in the dark. And you will choose the men yourselves. If you refuse, we will not force you.
"But understand this: as long as the bandits can treat your village like a stage and us like an audience locked in a fort, they will keep performing."
You just put my thought into barrister language, the inner voice noted, approving. Good.
"And third," Jinnah went on, "we will tie your looms into Sandalbar's backbone on paper. I will write to the Commissioner and make it clear: these sheds are part of estate infrastructure under Crown-sanctioned contracts. Attacks on them will be treated like sabotage, not petty theft. That gives us a heavier stick in court when we catch them."
The woman who had spoken of Shazia lifted her chin.
"And my daughter?" she asked. The room narrowed to that single question.
Jinnah did not pretend certainty.
"We have eyes on the roads now," he said. "Canal guards, mule drivers, a few men who travel in half-shadows and owe me favours. We will spread the word quietly that Sandalbar is looking—and that there is a softer hand for anyone who returns a girl unharmed than for anyone we find still holding her."
His voice, usually cool, roughened slightly.
"I cannot promise to bring her back," he said. "But I can promise that if we find the men who took her and did not return her, they will not be forgotten in some dusty file."
She bowed her head once, accepting honesty over comfort.
When the delegation had gone, taking the burnt shuttle and their fear back with them, the hall felt strangely larger and emptier at the same time.