By afternoon, the men and women's efforts converged.
The old foul strip was being slowly tamed by shovels. The new latrine ground, on a higher, drier patch, was ready for its true work.
Havildar Singh organized the pit-digging like a small military exercise.
"You," he pointed to a group of young men with strong arms and guilty faces, "will dig the first four pits for the men's side. You," he indicated another group, "for the women's side. Wide, deep, sloping. Not like a grave; like a well that no one falls into."
He marked rectangles with the butt of his rifle, then stepped back to supervise, barking corrections when enthusiasm threatened to outpace sense.
Jinnah visited once, briefly.
He stood at the edge, taking in the rows of screens, the men digging, the women directing where extra cloth was needed for corners that felt too exposed.
"It is ugly," he said quietly to Bilal.
It is civilization, Bilal answered. At its most thankless. They will not sing songs about this. But if it works, they will live to sing other songs.
Jinnah nodded once and moved on. He had other crises to juggle, reports to send, numbers to track. But he understood that this, too, was part of that abstract thing he kept chasing: order.
As the pits deepened, Mary and Evelyn worked on the details.
"Every entrance gets a bowl of ash," Evelyn instructed. "One for men, one for women. We will teach them to scrub their hands with it after they are done. It is not perfect, but it is better than nothing."
"And water," Mary added. "Not from the pump. We'll set a separate barrel and refill it with boiled water as often as we can manage. At least for the first days, while we scare them into habits."
"You're turning into quite the tyrant, Nurse Mary," Evelyn said with a faint smile.
"I learned from the best," Mary answered.
By late afternoon, the first pits were complete, their rims reinforced with packed earth, their fronts shielded by the screens the women had insisted on. There were still more to dig, more improvements to make. But something had shifted.
The estate smelled a little less like a neglected drain, a little more like a place where someone cared what happened to the ground.
By night, Sandalbar felt different again.
Lanterns had been hung along the path to the latrine area—low, steady flames in glass, swinging gently with the breeze. The crude corridor of screens now cast soft shadows that turned the route into a narrow, sheltered passage.
The first to test it were the women.
They went in pairs, as women everywhere did when going anywhere that felt even slightly unsafe. A mother and daughter. Two widows. A trio of younger wives whispering nervously, giggling to cover their discomfort.
On the way, they passed the Farabi patrol.
Two men stood at the edge of the lamplight, rifles slung, eyes turned outward. Not facing the screens. Not leaning. Not loitering. One of them stepped politely aside as the women approached, looking at the ground.
"Go, Bibi," he said. "We are here only to stop dogs and idiots, not to watch you."
One woman paused.
"And who stops you?" she asked sharply.
He straightened. "The Havildar," he said. "And Jinnah Sahib. And perhaps Doctor Evelyn, if I am foolish. That is enough."
She studied his face for a moment, then nodded.
Inside the corridor, the air felt cooler.
They could hear others moving behind the cloth, but only as shadows, silhouettes blocked by the double layers. The pits themselves were simple holes in the earth, but they were dry, properly dug, with a sense of boundary that had been missing before.
For the first time since the flood, many of the women did not feel the need to scan every bush for hidden eyes.
They did what they had come to do, cleaned their hands with the ash bowl at the exit under Mary's hawk-like supervision, then returned to their tents with an odd lightness in their steps.
Later, when some of the men tried the new arrangement, there were jokes, of course. Men stuffed awkwardness into humour as naturally as they stuffed fear into anger.
"What next?" one said, half-laughing. "Sahib will tell us which side to sleep on in the bed?"
"If it keeps you from waking up in a pool of your own mistakes, perhaps," Rahim shot back.
But even they, grudgingly, used the pits.
The path, the lamps, the clear structure—all of it whispered a message that cut across habit and pride:
This is how it is done here.
Later that night, as the estate settled into its new rhythm, a group of women sat near one of the tents, mending clothes by lantern light.
They had all used the new latrines already at least once.
"What do you think?" one asked, voice low.
"About what?" another replied.
"About this… arrangement. This 'Sandalbar way'."
The stout Sikh woman who had spoken up earlier in the assembly tugged her shawl tighter.
"I do not miss tripping over men in the dark," she said. "Or wondering if some idiot is lurking behind a tree. At home, we went in groups too. Fields, canals. There was always the fear."
"And here?" a younger woman asked.
She hesitated.
"Here," she admitted, "I feel… less afraid. The Farabis keep distance. The screens are high. The path is lit. If someone tries something, there are too many eyes—their eyes—for him to pretend later it was just a mistake."
There were murmurs of agreement.
"I heard one of the English memsahibs say," a third woman put in, "that if we can keep the children from falling sick in this filth, we will live to see them in school clothes instead of burial cloth. That is worth a little walking."
"And all this," another added quietly, "because one Englishwoman and one Christian nurse decided they would not stand the smell."
She smiled crookedly.
"Men think power is in rifles and speeches. Sometimes it is in who refuses to wash their hands in dirty water."
They laughed softly at that, careful not to wake the children snoring nearby.
Up on the verandah, Jinnah watched the lamplit line to the latrine ground.
It glowed faintly against the dark, like a second, smaller canal—this one carrying not water but something equally vital.
You see? Bilal said gently. It took only a day. Resistance in the morning, routine by night. Tomorrow it will be habit. Next month they will complain if someone tries to take it away.
"Perhaps," Jinnah said. "Or perhaps they will forget as soon as the water recedes."
Even if they do, Bilal replied, you have proven something to yourself. And to them. That rules can protect, not just oppress. That an order shouted from a crate can mean fewer graves, not more.
Down below, a woman emerged from the screen corridor, adjusted her shawl, and walked back toward the tents. She did not glance over her shoulder once.
For the first time since the flood, the night at Sandalbar felt a little less like an emergency and a little more like a rough draft of what dignity could look like when it was built from mud, cloth, and stubbornness.
The estate still stank, in patches. The floodwaters still glimmered at the boundary. Disease was not magically banished.
But somewhere between the shovels and the screens, between Mary's barked orders and Evelyn's clinical warnings, a line had been drawn:
Here, we do not live like that.
And for one fragile night, at least, Sandalbar held.