Night had settled over Sandalbar like a closed book.
The HQ was quiet; even the Farabis outside had dropped their voices. Jinnah sat alone in his study, the lamp pulling a circle of yellow over papers that had nothing to do with canals or wheat: old cuttings from The Tribune, a few notes in his own neat hand, and on top a single line in pencil:
Lahore Conspiracy Case — summer 1930: trial continues.
Bilal's presence uncurled in the back of his mind, the way it did when his thoughts had begun circling the same point for too long.
You're not really looking at Sandalbar tonight, Bilal murmured. You're looking at Lahore.
Jinnah tapped the pencil once against the margin.
"Lahore has a way of intruding," he said quietly.
Tell me about him, Bilal said. Bhagat Singh. I know dates and headlines. I want to hear how you see him.
Jinnah leaned back, eyes half-closed, letting the lamp blur.
"A gem of a man," he said at last. "Hard, bright, and nothing accidental about the way he cuts."
He spoke slowly, not as if delivering a speech, but as if turning over a stone he had already inspected many times.
"Punjab has always produced its share of hot blood," he went on. "Men who would rather die dramatically than live sensibly. But Bhagat Singh is not just heat. He reads. He thinks. He writes. He can quote poetry and Marx and the Gita and European anarchists in the same page and somehow make it sound like one argument instead of four."
And you like that, Bilal said. The coherence.
"I like that he represents a certain kind of youth," Jinnah replied. "Not the slogan-shouting crowds that follow whoever is loudest this week, but the ones who read pamphlets in dim light, who feel that the whole world is moving while their own feet are nailed to the floor."
He opened his eyes again, looking not at the paper but at some point beyond it.
"You know he shaved his beard," he said. "Gave up the old Sikh look. Put on a hat, grew a little moustache. Turned himself into a modern symbol on purpose. He has been building this role for years."
And then he threw a bomb in Parliament, Bilal said bluntly. Why? Walk me through it like I'm not from here.
Jinnah's mouth tightened.
"He and Batukeshwar Dutt," he said. "They went into the Central Legislative Assembly with two small devices. Intentionally weak charges, filled with more noise and smoke than metal. They chose a time when the House would be almost empty—debating the Trade Disputes Bill and Public Safety Bill, of all things, those charming little attempts to gag unions and get rid of 'subversives.'"
He gave a small, humourless huff.
"They did not aim to kill," he said. "They aimed to be heard. They threw the bombs away from people. One member got a slight injury. The real weapon was the leaflet."
'To make the deaf hear', Bilal said, recalling the line.
"Just so," Jinnah nodded. "They shouted 'Inquilab Zindabad'—long live the revolution—and then, most importantly, they did not run. They stood there and let themselves be arrested."
He looked down at his hands.
"It was theatre with handcuffs as the final act," he said. "A staged crime designed to produce a trial as a platform."
Does it work? Bilal asked. The theatre?
"On youth?" Jinnah said. "Yes. No doubt. They see courage, defiance, a man who uses his neck as punctuation. On the British?" He shrugged. "It triggers exactly the reflex you would expect from an imperial nervous system: crush the infection, make an example, prove the state's monopoly on violence."
So where do you stand? Bilal asked. You admired his mind. You think his method is foolish. That sounds like you want to stand in three places at once.
"I stand where I have always stood," Jinnah said. "I do not believe in bombs. I believe in law. But I also believe that if you claim to be a civilized government, you cannot respond to one theatrical explosion with a farce of justice."
His gaze hardened.
"You cannot torture men in Lahore Fort and call it rule of law," he said. "You cannot set up special tribunals, change procedure mid-stream, curtail appeals, and then give lectures on Magna Carta. You do not cure the disease of political violence by infecting the courts."
Tell me about your speech, Bilal said. In the Assembly. You almost smiled when you mentioned it.
Jinnah allowed himself a thin, wry smile now.
"I did not defend bombing," he said. "I made that plain. I said no government can tolerate attacks on its institutions. But then I asked them: if you are so confident in your strength, why are you so afraid of these men that you must abandon your own standards to punish them?"
He raised an invisible argument in the air with his hand, as if the benches of the House were suddenly before him.
"I told them," he went on, "that you cannot have it both ways: you cannot say 'we are here to teach you constitutionalism' and then, at the first sign of a young man who takes you at your word and challenges you, throw constitutionalism out of the window. They call him a terrorist; I asked them to at least have the decency to treat him as a political offender."
And how did they take that? Bilal asked.
"As you would expect," Jinnah said dryly. "Some were genuinely uneasy; some were angry; some pretended not to hear me at all. The bureaucracy wants quiet. Youthful martyrs make bad precedents."
He paused.
"As for Bhagat Singh," he added more softly, "I said in the House that he was no ordinary criminal. That if Britain had produced him, they would be proud to call him a patriot misled by passion. That here they simply choose the convenient word—'terrorist'—and hope that will erase the fact that he is sincere, brave, and guided by what he, at least, believes to be the good of his country."
So in your ledger, Bilal said, he's a wrong-way arrow with a perfect point.
"Exactly," Jinnah said.
Silence stretched for a moment, filled with the quiet scratch of tree branches against the window.
What about Gandhi? Bilal asked. Where does he land on this? I've heard the slogans. I want the man, not the caricature.
Jinnah's jaw worked once, then relaxed.
"Gandhi is an intelligent man," he said. "Ruthlessly so, in a moral sense. He understands the power of symbols as well as any revolutionary. But his entire strategy rests on one fragile pillar: non-violence as a weapon."
He tapped the table with his pencil again.
"Bhagat Singh is a rival symbol," he went on. "A young man who says, 'No, the world does not listen to petitions and marches; it listens to noise and danger.' Gandhi knows that if Congress openly embraces him, the British will have exactly the excuse they want to crush the movement, call it Bolshevism in khadi, and bring the full machinery of repression."
So he sacrifices one symbol to protect the millions behind him, Bilal said.
"Yes," Jinnah said quietly. "He condemns the act, praises the courage, and refuses to pull the lever either way. He will not call for hanging; he will not march to save him at any cost. He is trying to prevent a chain reaction: one bomb, then mass arrests, then blood in the streets."
Bilal was silent for a moment.
You don't hate him for that, he said.
"No," Jinnah replied. "I disagree with him often. I think his sentimentalism misleads him, and his methods will not build a modern state. But I cannot deny that his arithmetic is brutal in its own way. He is trying to save millions of nameless lives by allowing one very famous young man to die. It is a cold calculus behind warm words."
He sighed.
"That is why I told you once: never mistake Gandhi for a harmless saint. He is a strategist. His non-violence is not softness; it is a weapon with rules."
And Nehru? Bilal asked. Where does he sit in all this?
Jinnah's expression shifted—less hard, more complicated.
"Nehru is closer to Bhagat Singh in temperament," he said. "He feels the romance of rebellion. He likes the idea of the young intellectual with a bomb and a library card. He has visited him in jail. He has seen the kind of clarity that comes to someone who has already accepted the gallows."
Jinnah's voice dropped.
"But Nehru is also a party man," he continued. "He cannot drag Congress into open endorsement of violence, not when its president and its most powerful figure insist otherwise. His father is a cautious lawyer. The British are watchful. Moscow sends pamphlets and money and agents; London sees Bolsheviks behind every student meeting. If Nehru leans too far towards Bhagat Singh, he risks dragging the entire Congress into a category the British have already decided must be crushed without mercy."
So he feels with Bhagat Singh and moves with Gandhi, Bilal summarised.
"Precisely," Jinnah said. "He gives speeches that drip with admiration for youthful sacrifice, tears in his eyes, and then returns to resolutions and committees. I do not mock him for that. It is a difficult place to stand: one foot in the romance of revolution, one in the mud of practical politics."
And the British? Bilal asked. Why are they so fixed on hanging him? They could commute it, make him rot quietly, deny him the martyrdom. They're not stupid; they know how symbolism works too.
Jinnah's eyes went cold.
"They see him as the tip of a spear," he said. "And they fear the hand behind it more than the tip. Since the War they have watched Ireland burn, Russia fall to Bolsheviks, Egypt riot, their own soldiers come home radicalised. India is their jewel and their powder magazine."
He folded his hands.
"From their point of view," he continued, "if they show softness to a man who throws a bomb in the central legislature, they send a message to every hot-blooded youth from Peshawar to Madras: 'Do this, and you will be famous and spared.' They cannot allow that. So they choose the opposite message: 'Do this, and we will hang you even if you are brave, even if you are clever, even if your trial stinks of haste.' They think deterrence will work."
Will it? Bilal asked.
"For some," Jinnah said. "Fear always works on some. But for others, the gallows are not a deterrent; they are a magnet. Bhagat Singh knows exactly what martyrdom means in a country that worships sacrifice. The British are educated enough to know their own history—how they lionise Cromwell, or old rebels—yet they pretend that hanging a man erases his story."
He shook his head.
"It is hypocrisy of a particular imperial flavour," he said. "They admire rebels in their past, condemn them in ours. They speak of the sanctity of Parliament, but forget that there was a time when Englishmen themselves put soldiers at its door."
And you? Bilal pressed gently. You stand up in a House built by them, paid by them, and tell them they're hypocrites. Why? You could keep quiet, keep your influence, keep your invitations to the Viceroy's garden parties.
Jinnah gave a short, humourless laugh.
"My influence that comes from silence is not worth very much," he said. "I took an oath to serve as a representative, not as a piece of furniture. If I cannot speak when a man like Bhagat Singh is being denied even the form of justice, then I have no right to ask these villagers to trust my law over their jungle."
He gestured vaguely in the direction of the sleeping estate.
"You asked me once," he said, "why I keep insisting on courts and constitutions when the world clearly prefers guns and rumours. This is why. If we abandon the idea that even our enemies deserve fair trial, then everything becomes a private feud. Then Hayat Khan and Ratan Singh and Madhu and the British officer and the Farabi havildar are all the same: men with weapons, no rules, only grievances."
He fell quiet for a moment.
You're not blind to the cost, Bilal said softly. You know he will probably hang.
"Yes," Jinnah said. "Unless something changes very quickly, they will hang him. Gandhi will negotiate and fast and ask and perhaps secure some concessions elsewhere. Nehru will write moving tributes. The youth will shout his name and wear his hat. The British will pat themselves on the back for firmness. And the law will have taken another step away from being believable."
He stared at the file one last time, then closed it gently.
"But I will know," he said, "that I stood up in their own House and said, 'This is wrong. Even by your standards, this is wrong.' Sometimes that is all a lawyer can do: put a clear sentence on the record for history to read later."
And for boys in hidden rooms to read, Bilal added. The ones with pamphlets and stolen pistols.
"Yes," Jinnah agreed quietly. "Them too. They must know there is at least one path that does not require them to throw their lives away to say a sentence."
He reached for another file—this one with Sandalbar maps, patrol reports, grain tallies—but the mood of Lahore lingered at the edge of his thoughts.
You see the same pattern here, Bilal said. Young men who think no one hears them. A system that answers late, badly, or not at all. Bhagat Singh is just a sharper version of Madhu with better books.
Jinnah's hand paused on the map.
"That," he said, "is what frightens me more than the British."
He looked out into the dark beyond the window, where the canal lay like a black line and the villages like faint smudges of lamplight.
"If we do not build a state that can listen before the bomb," he said, "we will be building memorials after every one."
Bilal did not answer.
He did not need to.
The lamp flickered once, then steadied, and Jinnah bent over his Sandalbar papers again, carrying Bhagat Singh somewhere in the back of his thoughts like a sharp, unfinished sentence.