The rains had slowed, but the land had not yet remembered how to be clean.
Around the Sandalbar Estate Headquarters, pools of brown water shimmered in the late afternoon sun like broken mirrors, each reflecting a warped slice of sky—and the people who now lived around them. Flood-displaced villagers had spread their makeshift shelters over the high ground: bamboo poles, borrowed canvas, quilts that looked as if they had already survived three monsoons.
With nowhere else to go, they had begun to use the surrounding open areas for something else as well.
It started quietly, as most serious problems do.
Then the smell arrived.
At first it was only a faint sourness on the air, something that could be blamed on wet cattle or a kitchen drain. But as the sun burned higher and the puddles shrank, the odour thickened and settled, clinging to the nostrils like oil.
Mary was the first to give it a name.
She stepped out of the clinic tent with a basin of boiled instruments, stopped, sniffed, and made a face.
"By all the saints," she muttered, pulling the end of her dupatta over her nose. "What is that?"
A Farabi passing by—Balvinder Singh, tall, turban slightly askew—grimaced.
"You don't want to know, Sister," he said. "I think the whole canal has… come to visit us."
Mary put the basin down carefully and walked to the edge of the cleared yard. Beyond the neat lines of tents and ration queues, the ground fell away into a strip of scrub: bushes, a few small trees, the sort of half-wild fringe people avoided in normal times.
Now, here and there among the shrubs, she saw scraps of cloth, disturbed earth, flies rising in little black clouds whenever someone walked too close.
Her jaw tightened.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, wonderful. So that's where they're going."
Balvinder shrugged helplessly. "There is no place else, Sister. The women go there before dawn, the men wherever they please. In their villages it is the same."
"In their villages," Mary snapped, "they are not jammed together on my doorstep with muck washing back toward the drinking water every time it rains."
She turned on her heel and strode back toward the main building, basin rattling in her hands.
Evelyn found out half an hour later.
She was standing outside the storage shed, arguing with a contractor about the number of lanterns requisitioned versus the number actually delivered, when the wind shifted.
The argument died.
The contractor coughed, embarrassed. "There must be a dead cow somewhere, Doctor Sahib."
"There are many things 'somewhere'," Evelyn said. "This is rather closer than I like."
She followed her nose.
At the edge of the scrub belt, she stopped and swallowed, once, very deliberately. Crisis work had trained her not to flinch in front of patients. It had not prepared her for this particular battlefield.
The ground was a patchwork of damp earth and carelessly covered heaps, some so shallowly buried that flies rose in a lazy, contented halo. Women in bright shawls were moving away in little groups, giggling or scolding each other, bare feet squelching. Two boys chased each other between bushes, splashing through small puddles.
One of them ran straight back into the main yard and, with the fearless efficiency of a child, went to drink from the handpump before his mother could catch him.
Evelyn watched the arc of water fall noisily into his metal cup. Her stomach lurched—not from disgust, but from a calculation completed too clearly in her mind.
Distance from improvised latrine area: too short.Number of people using it: unknown, likely "everyone."Rainfall forecast: scattered showers. Enough to carry filth sideways, not enough to wash it away.Number of latrines: zero.Number of buckets and soap bars: insufficient.Number of children already teetering on the edge of malnutrition: far too many.
She saw it: not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but soon. Vomiting, rice-water stool, sunken eyes, skin that lost its elasticity. Lines at the clinic tent, not for cuts or fevers, but for something that spread faster than she could carry clean water.
"Cholera," she said aloud.
The word felt like a stone dropped into a shallow pool.
Balvinder, who had followed at a cautious distance, shifted uneasily. "Doctor Sahib?"
She turned to him sharply.
"Call Ahmed," she said. "And I want Jinnah Sahib informed at once. Use your wireless or your whistle codes or just your legs, but get him. This"—she gestured at the stinking fringe—"is a time bomb."
Balvinder hesitated. "The people… they have always done like this, Doctor Sahib. Even before flood. Their villages on canal embankments, fields, roadsides—"
"I know how they have always done it," Evelyn cut in. "We are no longer in 'always'. We have two thousand people packed into a space that was built for a quarter of that. Their 'always' will kill them—and us—if we let it continue."
Balvinder swallowed. "Yes, Doctor Sahib. I will find Ahmed."
He jogged away, muttering under his breath in Punjabi about strange duties for a man who had once drilled under artillery fire.
The Farabis' dissatisfaction had been building all day.
They were not cowards, these men. Many had seen worse things in war. They had dug latrines for sepoy lines before, carried wounded comrades past more than one unclean trench. But somehow, dealing with the bodily habits of their own people—their villagers, not faceless soldiers—felt different.
At the north end of the camp, two Farabis stood on morning watch, rifles slung, eyes scanning the periphery. One of them, a wiry Pathan named Rahim, wrinkled his nose.
"If this is what being 'estate force' means," he muttered, "I prefer the Frontier. At least there, when someone makes a mess, it is because they are dead or shot, not because they cannot be bothered to move five more steps."
His partner, a quiet man from Amritsar, shrugged. "They don't know better."
"They know enough to ask for extra rations," Rahim snapped. "They know enough to fight over queue positions. But they do not know enough not to… decorate the bushes like this?"
He spat into the dust, more in frustration than anything else.
"I did not sign up for this," he added under his breath, echoing a sentiment that, by evening, would be shared by more than one Sandalbar staff member.
Ahmed found Jinnah first.
He was in his temporary office—a cleared room on the ground floor—reviewing ration tallies, pen moving steadily across the paper.
"The wheat stacks are holding," he said without looking up as Ahmed entered. "We can maintain full rations for ten days, half rations for another ten if no fresh supplies arrive. What is it?"
Ahmed shifted, visibly uncomfortable.
"Sir," he began, "Doctor Evelyn demands your presence. She says it is urgent."
Jinnah put down his pen.
"She 'demands'?"
Ahmed's mouth twitched despite himself. "Her word, Sir, not mine. She says if we do not address this today, we will be dealing with it in the mortuary tomorrow."
Jinnah rose at once.
"Then we attend to it," he said. "Lead the way."
As they stepped out of the building, the afternoon heat pressed down like a hand. The smell hit them halfway to the scrub belt.
Jinnah's nostrils flared.
"What in God's name—"
"Exactly," Ahmed muttered. "I told you, Sir. I did not sign up to live in a… I do not even have a polite word for this."
You wanted people, Bilal said mildly in Jinnah's mind. People come with bodies. Bodies come with needs. The law courts mercifully do not smell like this, but the real world does.
"Helpful," Jinnah thought back dryly.
Evelyn stood at the edge of the contaminated strip, arms folded so tightly her knuckles were white.
As Jinnah approached, she turned. Her face was calm, but there was a hardness in her eyes he had not seen since she had described the worst of the influenza years.
"Doctor," he said. "Ahmed says we have a problem."
"Ahmed understates," she replied. "We have a disaster in the making."
She pointed toward the scrub. "They are using this entire fringe as their… conveniences. Men, women, children. No pits, no distance, no control. Every rainfall will wash this closer to the pumps and the drainage channels. With this density of people, one cholera case and we will have fifty. You saw the flood; you do not want to see the kind of flood this will bring."
Jinnah's gaze swept the area. The evidence was plain enough, even without details.