He had handled many distasteful matters in his career. He had confronted political hypocrisy, communal hatred, legal scandals. But this—this was squalor in its most elemental form, the sort of thing respectable men pretended did not exist.
"What do you propose?" he asked quietly.
"Latrines," she said, without hesitation. "Proper ones. Pits dug at a safe distance from the living quarters and water sources. Privacy screens. Sludge covers. A schedule. Rules. And hand-washing—ash if they cannot spare soap. We need to build, teach, and enforce, all at once."
Ahmed frowned, pinching his nose.
"With respect, Doctor," he said, "do you think they will listen? Many of these people have never used a latrine in their lives. They relieve themselves where they please, wash in the same canal, and consider the subject unfit for polite conversation."
"Polite conversation," Evelyn snapped, "is how these things fester. They are quite happy to be impolite in practice."
Rahim, who had drifted closer, snorted. "She is not wrong, Sahib. Half the men laugh when we tell them to use one corner only. They say this is how their fathers did, and their grandfathers, and who are we to tell them otherwise?"
Jinnah looked back toward the camp.
From this vantage point, the estate still looked almost orderly. Tents in lines, queues at the ration tent, children chasing each other around the periphery under the wary gaze of Farabi patrols. If you did not breathe too deeply, you could almost pretend it was some sort of bureaucratic miracle.
The smell would not allow that illusion.
This is the other side of state-building, Bilal said quietly. Not flags and speeches. Not wireless sets and wheat stacks. This. Drainage. Pits. Buckets. If you ignore it, you will have a revolt—not of slogans, but of bacteria.
Jinnah's mouth tightened.
"These are good people," he said slowly. "Hard-working. Loyal enough to haul their wheat to my gates on my word alone. Yet this—this lack of basic hygiene… it is baffling."
It is not instinct, Bilal replied. It is education. If no one has ever taught them, how should they know?
Aloud, Jinnah said, "Doctor, you will draw up exactly what is required—locations, number of pits, materials. Ahmed, you will provide labour and tools. Havildar, your men will enforce usage, with warnings first and punishments later if we must."
Ahmed grimaced. "Sir, with respect—"
"We have given them food, shelter, seed," Jinnah cut in. "Now we will give them this, whether they like the lesson or not. Order is not only about queues and rifles. It is also about where they do what all humans must do."
Evelyn exhaled, some of the tension leaving her shoulders.
"Thank you," she said. "But we must move quickly. Once cholera is inside the camp, all the latrines in Punjab will not pull it back out."
"We will move," Jinnah said. "And we will speak."
He turned back toward the main yard.
"Ahmed, ring the bell," he said. "Again. I will address them."
Ahmed hesitated, then nodded. "As you wish, Sir. But I still say I did not sign up to run a—"
"Exactly," Jinnah said grimly. "You signed up to run an estate. This," he waved a hand at the stink, "is now part of it."
The bell rang again, three solemn strokes that had already begun to mean "assembly" in the new language of Sandalbar.
The people came reluctantly this time, dragging their feet. They had already been summoned once that day for rules and ration cards. Many were tired, some sullen. A few whispered jokes—had the Sahib decided to change the price of wheat already?
Farabis moved through the crowd, nudging stragglers forward.
Jinnah mounted the same crate as before.
The air was heavy with the mixed smells of cooked lentils, wet cloth, cattle, and that other, sharper taint from the scrub belt.
He did not waste time.
"This morning," he began, "I told you that while you are on Sandalbar land, we are responsible for your food, your fodder, and your basic health. That promise remains. But I must now speak of something most of you prefer not to speak of at all."
A ripple went through the crowd—uneasy laughter, coughs, someone hissing "sharam karo" under their breath.
"Shame does not kill cholera," Jinnah said flatly.
That silenced them.
"You have begun to use the scrub land behind the tents as your—" He searched for a word that would be understood and still bearable in public. "—your place for relieving the body. Men, women, children. Without order, without distance, without burying properly. Every time it rains, that filth moves. It moves toward where your children play. It moves toward the pumps where you drink."
He saw heads turn, eyes flicking toward the handpumps.
"If disease comes from that," he went on, voice sharpening, "it will not ask who is Muslim or Hindu. It will not care which village you came from. It will only take the smallest—your children—and the weakest, first. I have seen it. So has Doctor Evelyn."
He gestured to Evelyn, who stood at the side, face pale but steady.
"Cholera," he said, letting the terrible word land. "You have heard of it. Some of you have buried people from it. It comes when water is foul and the ground is treated like a rubbish pit. If it enters this camp, we will not have enough sheets to wrap your dead."
A woman in the front row clutched her scarf tighter. A boy shuffled closer to his mother.
"So," Jinnah continued, modulating his tone slightly, "we will do things differently here."
He pointed toward the high, dry corner beyond the far sheep enclosure.
"From tomorrow, the Farabis will dig latrine pits there. Separate areas for men and for women. There will be screens for privacy. There will be ash and water for cleaning. These will be the only places where you will relieve yourselves. Anyone found doing so elsewhere—in the scrub, near the water, behind the tents—will lose their ration for the day and be made to help dig more pits until they learn."
A murmur of protest rose—"But Sahib—", "Where is the shame—", "We cannot go so far in the night—"
He raised a hand.
"Shame is burying your child because you would not walk ten extra steps," he said crisply. "As for the night—we will post lamps. Two Farabis will patrol close enough for safety, far enough for modesty. No man is to harass any woman going there. If he does, the Farabis and I will deal with him personally."
That, more than the talk of disease, sobered the men.
"In your villages," Jinnah said more quietly, "you were scattered. Here, you are packed close together. Your 'always' will not work here. Sandalbar is not 'always'. It is something new. That is why you came."
He let that sink in.
You are pushing hard, Bilal murmured. But you must. They will not move for a gentle suggestion.
"I know," Jinnah thought back.
Aloud, he said, "I have already taken the responsibility for buying your crops, for feeding you now, for seeding your next sowing without interest. I will not take responsibility for your stubbornness in this. That will be on your own heads. If you wish to keep your children alive, you will learn new habits."
Silence, thick and resentful in places, but not disobedient.
Evelyn stepped forward unexpectedly.
"Some of you have already come to me," she said, her voice carrying in a different way, gentler but no less firm. "You ask for medicine, for clean bandages, for help when your child coughs all night. I am asking you for something in return. Help me keep the sickness away before it comes. Use the pits when they are made. Wash your hands with ash before you touch your children or your food. These things are as important as any tablet I can give you."
A woman near the front—a sturdy Sikh with a baby on her hip—nodded slowly.
"If it keeps the little ones from that cursed vomiting," she said, half to herself, "I will walk where you say."
Others glanced at her, then back at the verandah.
Jinnah saw the shift. Small, tentative, but there.
He stepped down from the crate.
"Ahmed," he said, "mark the ground tonight. Start digging at dawn. Havildar, assign men. Mary, Doctor—teach them what they must know. We begin with those who are willing. The rest will follow when they see who stays healthy."
Ahmed sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Yes, Sir," he said. "But if you had told me last year that my career as an estate manager would include supervising latrine pits, I would have asked for hazard pay."
Jinnah's mouth twitched.
"You wanted to build a new kind of place," he said. "There is nothing new about our people needing to relieve themselves. The new part is that we choose not to die of it."
And that, Bilal said quietly, is how a revolution sometimes smells.
Jinnah did not answer, but as he walked back toward the lodge, the stench from the scrub seemed a fraction less overwhelming—not because it had lessened, but because, for the first time that day, it felt like something that could be faced and managed, not just endured.
Sandalbar had acquired yet another problem.
It had also, uncomfortably and unmistakably, taken one more step toward being something that looked suspiciously like a state.