On the verandah outside, the canal fields lay under a gentle evening light. From this distance, Sandalbar looked like a neat experiment again: straight lines, whitewashed walls, thin new trees tying the estate to the horizon.
"It looks peaceful from here," Jinnah said quietly, more to himself than to anyone else.
Storms usually do, the inner voice answered.
He rested his hands on the railing, eyes tracing the distributary.
"Bandits we can fight," he said. "We can hunt them, trap them, bargain with them, hang them if we must. What I fear more is what I described in there—that people will decide there is no such thing as a neutral door to run to. Only 'our' side and 'their' side."
Then prove that Sandalbar is still a third thing, Bilal replied. Not Delhi. Not jungle. Something that actually keeps its word most of the time.
Ahmed stepped out onto the verandah, saluted briefly, and gave a brisk summary of how he meant to reshuffle patrols. Jinnah listened, asked three precise questions, approved two ideas, redirected the third, and finally dismissed him with instructions to send up a draft plan by morning.
When Ahmed had gone, the verandah fell quiet again. The estate lamps flickered on one by one; somewhere near the staff quarters, someone began humming a half-tired folk tune.
Now, the Bilal said. While it's just us.
Jinnah's jaw tightened slightly. He knew what was coming; the thought had been circling all through the meeting, waiting for the room to empty.
You remember "men in half-shadows who owe you favours", the voice went on. Let's stop being vague. You have a line, however thin, to Root. Use it.
Madhu's face rose in his memory: not as the bandit in police reports, but as the exhausted father outside the clinic door, hands shaking while Evelyn fought for his son's life.
"That line is not to Root," Jinnah murmured under his breath. "It is to one desperate man."
One desperate man with a name, a crew, and a reputation, the Bilal countered. Madhu. You did not buy his boy's life; you earned something far older and more stubborn: obligation. That is a currency in this province. Stop pretending it is not.
Jinnah exhaled slowly.
"And how exactly do you propose that I redeem this 'obligation'?" he asked, half aloud, half inward.
Through Varun, the voice said at once. Your Farabi. Forest belt. He grew up near those people. He knows which shrine they swear on, which trees they won't cut. He has already been your bridge whether Ahmed likes it or not.
Images arranged themselves in Jinnah's mind despite himself: Varun in his Farabi khaki; Madhu slipping between sugarcane rows; the scorched loom sheds.
"You are suggesting," Jinnah said softly, "that I ask a serving Farabi to open a back channel to a wanted criminal."
I am suggesting, the Bilal replied, that you acknowledge the map as it is, not as the Government prints it. On paper, all those men are just "dacoits". In reality, they are networks. Let make Root is one of the bigger ones. They hate certain rivals. They fear certain officers. They respect certain lines.
A pause, then:
Right now, all bandits are one dark blur to your people. But they are not one blur to each other. If you can talk to one blur, you can make that blur work as surveillance for your villages—or at least stop setting them on fire to prove a point.
"That sounds," Jinnah said dryly, "remarkably close to bargaining with bandits."
You are not promising them amnesty, the voice said. You are drawing a line. "If you cross this, I will personally help hang you. If you stay on this side, I will not go out of my way to hunt you beyond the Government's usual enthusiasm."
It hesitated, then added:
And you do all of this quietly. No uniforms. No Ahmed in the room. A midnight meeting in your library. One guard outside who knows how to forget what he hears. If Madhu refuses, nothing changes.
The thought of Madhu in his library made Jinnah's stomach knot. The room was his sanctuary: books, maps, the quiet order of shelves. Inviting a man like that inside felt like inviting the canal itself to flood his study.
"And if it leaks?" he asked.
Then you will have the pleasure of explaining it to the Governor yourself, the voice said. You are, after all, already the most dangerous sort of Indian in their eyes: a lawyer who reads everything and loses very few arguments.
Jinnah's mouth twitched despite himself.
"You are a bad influence," he said under his breath.
I am the part of you that already knows the answer and is annoyed you are taking so long, the voice replied. This estate has always been a negotiation with reality: canal engineers, zaildars, villagers, British officers, and now bandits. You made the Farabis by admitting the police could not or would not act. This is the same logic, pushed into the trees.
He stared out at the dark line of the forest beyond the fields.
"Varun, then," he said finally. "I send for Varun. I tell him this is not an order, only a request. If he refuses, it ends there."
Good, the voice said. If he agrees, you tell him to arrange a meeting. No promises, no money, no guns. Just words and a reminder that his son still breathes because Sandalbar exists.
Jinnah straightened.
"Three days," he said quietly to himself. "We give this three days to ripen. Then I will know whether I am a fool, or merely reckless."
You are both, the inner voice replied. But better a reckless fool who tries than a careful wise man standing over another burnt loom.
He almost smiled at that.
Then he turned away from the verandah and walked back into the lodge, already framing in his mind the exact phrases he would use with Varun: how much to say, how much to leave unsaid, how to make clear this was a path that led neither to easy glory nor to guaranteed safety.
Outside, the estate settled into its new night rhythm: patrol routes redrawn, metalworkers hammering out crude whistles, Farabi posts testing their wireless sets. Somewhere beyond the canal, in the countryside that no map ever quite captured, a man named Madhu still believed that the world remembered him only as a shadow in the police register.
Sandalbar was about to tap that shadow on the shoulder.
Whether it would turn and listen, or turn and bite, was a question that now lived not in a file, but in Jinnah's own quiet, crowded library.