The monsoon clouds finally broke formation and drifted away like an exhausted army.
For days they had hung low over Sandalbar, pressing the light flat, turning every sound muddied and distant. Now, for the first time in what felt like weeks, the sky showed patches of clear, hard blue. The wind shifted, no longer thick with rain but carrying the raw, open smell of earth that had drunk more than it could bear.
All around the estate, water that had pooled in hollows slowly surrendered, seeping back into the thirsty soil. The larger sheets shrank, leaving behind rings of silt, flattened grasses, and the occasional stranded fish that village boys raced to snatch up.
The land looked bruised, but not defeated.
Where a visitor might have expected chaos—tents scattered at random, debris caught in bushes, livestock roaming wherever ropes allowed—there was instead an austere, deliberate order.
From the roof of the main lodge, the camp looked like a map someone had carefully drawn after the storm:
Shelters laid out in rows instead of clumps.
Pathways marked in white lime, forming corridors between tents.
Latrines positioned at the far western edge, clearly away from the wells.
Drainage channels running like veins, carrying any remaining runoff into soakage pits.
The flood had come as a test. Somehow, Sandalbar had answered with geometry.
By midmorning, the air held a faint sweetness—wet soil, cattle, boiled water, woodsmoke. The usual thick, rotting smell that followed standing water in Punjab was missing. Anyone who had seen other floods would have noticed immediately.
Most people had not.
They were too busy surviving to compare.
The quiet of late morning broke with the unmistakable sound of a motor-lorry on a kachcha(dirt) road—an odd, foreign growl that did not belong to bullocks or carts.
Parp–Parp.
The horn honked twice in the clipped, confident British style. Dust rose in golden spirals behind the vehicle, catching sunlight like flecks of metal.
Children ran toward the boundary, only to be turned back by a Farabi with a sharp whistle and a raised hand.
"Back, back," he called. "This is not a tamasha. Let it pass."
The lorry turned into the estate track and rolled to a stop near the new main gate, where two Farabis in neat, if patched, uniforms stood with rifles at ease. One stepped forward and saluted.
The back of the lorry opened.
First came two Indian dressers in white coats that had seen too many wards and too many washings. Their collars were frayed, their shoes dusty, but they had the brisk, guarded expressions of men who had worked through epidemics before and knew better than to trust any camp's appearance from the outside.
Behind them climbed down a Eurasian nurse—dark hair tucked under a stiff cap, face drawn but alert. She took one look at the sun, the camp, and adjusted her cap with a small, economical tug.
Last came a tall, thin British medical officer—Dr. Edward Sterling—spectacles already fogging slightly in the humidity. In one hand he held a clipboard. In the other, a folded handkerchief hovered near his nose, ready for the stench that always accompanied flood relief.
He inhaled, cautiously.
He did not need the handkerchief.
The smell that reached him was… not pleasant, exactly, but it lacked the heavy, sour rot he expected—no raw stench of human waste in puddles, no overwhelming cloud of flies.
Behind the medical team stepped two more men in khaki shorts, shirts neatly tucked, pith helmets set at the approved angle. Each carried a satchel, but their eyes did not linger on the sick; they moved in slow, looping arcs, watching layout, guards, pathways.
District office clerks on paper.
Intelligence observers in reality.
The Governor's eyes and ears.
They had been sent to assess not only disease, but Sandalbar itself.
The team had seen flood camps before.
They expected the familiar refrain:
Villagers huddled in damp, reeking heaps.
Bedding soaked and never properly dried.
Children squatting where they pleased.
Cows tethered next to cooking fires.
Flies thick on every surface.
They expected to see chaos: shouting, jostling, open sewage mixed with rainwater in shallow, oily pools.
Instead, they stepped forward and stopped, almost in unison.
To the west, aligned with almost military precision, two rows of latrine huts stood under the shade of a few scattered trees. They were simple—rough wooden frames, cloth screens, packed earth—but each had a lantern hanging over the entrance like a small sentinel.
A Farabi paced between the rows at a respectful distance, not close enough to discomfort the women entering, but near enough that any mischief-minded man would think twice. He redirected a child with a gentle hand on the shoulder, reminded an old man to use the ash bowl, and did it all without shouting or swagger.
Dr. Sterling watched a scene unfold that, in his experience, simply did not belong to rural Punjab.
A boy of about six stepped out of one of the huts, bare feet dusty, shirt half untucked. Instead of running straight back to play, he stopped by a low, wide bowl of grey ash, squatted, took a handful, and scrubbed his hands carefully—palms, between fingers, backs of thumbs. Then he poured a mug of clear water over them from a nearby earthen pot, shook them dry, and only then sprinted away.
No one had prompted him. No one had yelled at him.
He simply did it.
"This…" Sterling murmured, lowering his unused handkerchief, "this is unheard of."
One of his Indian assistants leaned in, equally taken aback.
"Sahib," he whispered, "Bombay station latrines are dirtier than this. And those have signs."
Sterling's gaze swept further.
The ground between tents was dry, swept clear of obvious rubbish. Tiny channels, no wider than a hand-span, ran along the paths, carrying leftover water into deeper soakage pits. He saw patches of darker, freshly turned soil in places where contamination must once have been—now neatly covered.
A woman carrying water stepped around a drainage line without needing to be told. A Farabi with a twig broom methodically swept leaves and stray straw out of the path so they would not clog the runnels.
No piles of garbage. No dead animals left bloating in corners. Nothing left to rot where people walked or slept.
The two supposed clerks—the Governor's spies—exchanged a glance.
Their training had prepared them to pick out hidden rifles, illicit pamphlets, seditious slogans scrawled in corners. They were less prepared for the shock of seeing precisely what the Empire claimed it wanted from its subjects:
Order.
Here, in a flood-ravaged corner of Montgomery district, order existed where experience insisted it should not.