The spies moved separately, then converged, weaving through Sandalbar like men browsing a bazaar.
They checked the grain stores first.
They expected to find sacks hidden under straw, unrecorded baskets of wheat, some private hoard that would reveal profiteering. Instead, they found neat stacks, each marked in chalk with weight and date. A ledger hung from a nail nearby, a reed pen tied to it with string. One of the assistants flipped through it.
Lines of figures. Names. Amounts issued. Balances remaining.
No obvious discrepancies.
They checked the water points.
They expected green film, wriggling larvae, cups shared between twenty mouths. Instead, they saw earthen tanks with lids, ropes changed out when frayed, cups hanging from nails so they did not fall in. When the lid of the largest tank was lifted, a faint, sharp scent met their noses.
"Chlorine?" one spy asked, surprised.
"Yes, babu," the boy managing the tank said proudly. "Doctor memsahib puts medicine in the big barrel. We can't drink straight from canal now. Only from this."
The spy noted it down, brow furrowed.
They walked the living rows.
They expected quarrels over space, men sprawled in the middle of pathways, cattle tied to tent poles. Instead, each shelter had a small marked boundary. Cooking was done in a designated lane where ash pits had been dug for coals. Livestock were tethered beyond the main living area, near a fenced patch where fodder had been stacked under a tarpaulin.
A woman scolded a child for dragging a dirty rag into the sleeping area. "Outside," she snapped. "Mary baji said no filth where we sleep."
"Who is this Mary baji?" one spy asked casually of a passing man.
"The nurse," he replied. "The one who shouts and saves children. First she mends our bodies, then our habits."
The spy wrote that down too.
No one hid from them. No one whispered conspiratorially. Most people were too busy following routines: lining up for food, carrying water, cleaning around their own tents.
If this was a secret training ground for sedition, it was disguised remarkably well as a place where people were simply living better than they had before the flood.
Which, in the Raj's eyes, might be its own kind of sedition.
The Classrooms Beneath the Neem
The spies' path took them to a large neem tree near the lesser outbuilding. Here, their steps slowed again.
Some bright mind had strung a length of rope between two poles to create a makeshift division, and hung a faded sheet over part of it. Left and right, the same roof, different worlds.
On the right side, seated on mats made of stitched-together old sacks, a group of women listened intently to Mary.
Her hair was tied tightly back, sleeves rolled above the elbow, a small slate board in her hands. She drew rough pictures with chalk: a hand under a stream of water, a pot on a fire, a circle with a cross through it over a puddle near a house.
"When you come back from the latrine," Mary said, pointing to the chalked hand, "you do this."
She rubbed the chalk-hand with lines that represented ash.
"With this. Ash is not just for stoves, it is for cleaning. Scrub your hands. Here, here, and here." She tapped different fingers. "If there is soap, use soap. But if there isn't, ash and water is still better than nothing."
One of the older women raised a hand hesitantly.
"Baji," she said, "we never did like this in our village. We just washed in the canal."
"And did you ever see cholera there?" Mary asked gently.
A silence. A few women shifted.
"Yes," another admitted. "Last year, in Sawan. Two children and one old man. They said it was God's will."
Mary smiled, but there was nothing mocking in it.
"God's will is not that you drink filth," she said. "He gave you hands to keep it away. Use them."
A murmur of agreement ran through the group, small but real.
On the other side of the rope, under the same roof, a very different lesson played out.
A Farabi—barefoot, wearing a faded kurta but standing with unmistakable parade-ground posture—clapped his hands in rhythm.
"One!" he called. "Do!"
"Two—!" the children chorused, some in Punjabi accents, some in Urdu, a few in broken Hindi.
"Three!"
"Teen!"
He grinned. "Good! Again. This time, you in the back row also shout, not just the front."
Beside the children, a handful of men, mostly younger, repeated the numbers under their breath, disguising their own illiteracy as encouragement for the little ones.
One of the spies frowned, watching.
"This looks like… a school," he said.
"It is two schools," the other replied quietly. "One for hands. One for heads."
He scribbled words in his notebook: basic hygiene instruction; numeracy; communal teaching; high compliance; no visible opposition.
It read more like an internal note on a successful government program than on a potentially subversive estate.
That in itself was unsettling.
The Doctor's Report
Dr. Sterling had moved on to the medical side of his task.
A girl lay on a charpoy, eyes half closed, skin hot to the touch. He pressed cool fingers to her wrist, then to her neck.
"How long has the fever been like this?" he asked.
"Since last evening, Sahib," her mother answered. "She shook all night. We brought her to the memsahib in the morning."
Mary stepped closer, list already in hand.
"She had chills at dawn," Mary said. "Pulse was racing, then dropped. No vomiting. No diarrhoea. Spleen felt enlarged on palpation." She pointed to a column in her notebook. "We've kept her under the net. Gave her cooled cloths and water from the boiled barrel, small sips."
Sterling examined the girl's eyes, her tongue.
"Malarial fever," he pronounced. "The pattern fits. You've done the right things so far. We'll add quinine and keep her under observation."
He straightened, then looked around, genuinely puzzled.
"How many cholera cases?" he asked.
"Four," Mary said. "All in the first two days after the flood. Isolated in the disused shed behind the lodge. We boiled everything. Dr. Cartwright started saline drips as soon as he arrived. No new cases in two days."
Sterling blinked.
"None?" he pressed.
"None," she repeated. "We panicked early, not late."
"And dysentery?"
"A few, but contained. We separated their utensils and latrine use. The worst of it was in the first week. Since then, less."
He walked a few paces, scanning the camp again with a professional eye sharpened by years of epidemic work.
Drainage channels. Covered pits. Clean water points. Ash bowls. Rows of sleeping areas clearly separated from cooking and waste zones.
Flies existed—they always did—but they did not swarm in clouds over open excrement or rotting heaps. The ratio of buzzing to bodies was, by Indian flood standards, almost civilized.
"This is extraordinary," he said under his breath. "I've seen camps in Burma, Orissa, Bengal… none of them like this. Not even ones we ran ourselves."
One of the Indian assistants nodded grimly.
"Usually," he said, "we arrive to find bodies already under sheets. Here, we arrive to find lists, pits, and rules."
Sterling looked at Mary again, then made a small note on his own clipboard.
Under "Overall Assessment," he wrote:
Conditions unusually sanitary.Local administration (non-official) effective.Immediate risk: malaria, not cholera.
The spies, standing just close enough to overhear, did not like the direction of those comments.
Order meant competence. Competence meant influence. Influence, if left unchecked, meant power.
And power that did not begin in the Government Gazette made officials nervous.
The Spies' Quiet Conclusion
As the sun climbed higher, the medical team moved deeper into the camp to examine more patients, check mosquito-breeding spots, and advise on quinine distribution.
The spies drifted toward the periphery again, comparing notes in low tones.
"Well?" one asked. "Have you seen a single rifle that was not declared?"
"No."
"Hidden godowns? Secret markings? Pamphlets of the Congress or Muslim League?"
"None I could find," the other admitted. "Only grain properly stacked and papers properly written."
"Drilling? Illegal assemblies?"
"Only latrine queues and counting lessons."
They walked in silence for a few moments.
"It looks," the first spy said slowly, "like a refugee camp."
"No," the second corrected him, closing his notebook. "It looks like what our reports always say a refugee camp should look like, but never does."
They both fell quiet at that.
A woman walked past them carrying two clay pots, her gait balanced and confident. As she passed, they heard her murmur to her companion:
"Did you see the doctor sahib's face? Like he stepped into a British cantonment."
Her friend laughed quietly.
"Not British," she said. "This is Sandalbar. Here, they shout at us to wash, not just to pay tax."
They disappeared into the rows of tents, leaving the two spies with their satchels and their unease.
They had been sent to uncover sedition and conspiracy.
Instead, they had found something the Empire rarely managed to produce in the countryside even with full budgets and official decrees:
A functioning, disciplined, almost self-respecting community—built not by the Raj, but by one barrister, a handful of doctors and nurses, and a locally trained militia called the Farabis.
It did not fit any of their neat categories of threat or loyalty.
And that, more than rifles or slogans, made Sandalbar memorable in their reports.
When they sent their impressions back to Lahore, they would not be able to honestly write "dangerous."
But they would almost certainly write "unusual."
And in the language of administration, "unusual" was sometimes the first quiet warning that something new had appeared on the map—something not entirely under the Crown's control.