The second summons came before the mud in the first set of tyre tracks had dried.
It arrived not as a neatly worded letter, but as a messenger with a sealed envelope, bearing the small crest of Government House and the impatient air of a man who had been told not to waste time.
"From His Excellency," the messenger said, bowing just enough to show respect but not enough to linger.
Jinnah opened it in the outer sitting room of his Lahore house. There were only two lines, in the Governor's own hand:
URGENT. PRIVATE DISCUSSION.COME AT ONCE.
No qualifiers this time. No carefully neutral "wishes to confer" or "requests the pleasure." This was the language of a man who had already made up his mind about the seriousness of the matter, if not its outcome.
Twice in one week, Bilal murmured in his head, the tone dry. You are becoming a habit he cannot break.
Jinnah folded the note once, then again, as precisely as if it were a legal submission, and slipped it into his breast pocket.
"Tell him I am on my way," he said.
Back to Government House
The black car rolled through Lahore's midday traffic with more urgency than ceremony. The monsoon clouds still hung low, but the city streets had shifted from violent flood to sticky aftermath—puddles shrinking, carts leaving tracks in soft, drying mud, the smell of damp brick rising from old walls.
As the car turned off The Mall and up the long curve of the Government House drive, the Sikh sentries at the gate exchanged a quick glance. They had seen this same motorcar only days before. One of them straightened a fraction, not out of hostility but in acknowledgement that something out of the ordinary was happening. Senior lawyers did not usually become frequent visitors here unless they were being groomed—or watched.
The gravel crunched under the tyres. The façade of Government House loomed: red brick, pale stone, high windows reflecting the flat grey sky. The flag above the portico stirred in a fitful breeze.
Jinnah stepped out as the driver opened the door. His suit was immaculate as ever, a deep, almost-black charcoal. The tie knot sat at his throat with mathematical symmetry. The only concession to the humidity was the absence of an overcoat.
Inside, the house smelled of polish, pipe smoke, and rain held politely at bay by thick walls and heavy curtains. A butler led him through corridors where the portraits of past Governors seemed to lean down and weigh him against invisible standards.
The last time he had walked these halls, he had carried a wooden case containing a jasmine-scented shawl and an argument about partnership. Today he carried nothing visible.
You brought him proof then, Bilal said. Today you bring him a ledger in your head.
They reached the familiar door.
"His Excellency is waiting," the butler murmured, then withdrew.
A Governor on Edge
Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency was not behind his desk.
He was pacing.
The study, usually a tableau of controlled stillness—the map of Punjab on the wall, the neat stacks of files, the ordered inkstand—felt different today. The Governor moved from window to desk and back again, hands clasped behind his back, as if trying to walk the edges off an unwelcome conclusion.
He did not offer tea.
"Muhammad," he said as the door closed, dispensing with titles. "I will not pretend this is a social call."
Jinnah inclined his head slightly. "I assumed not, Your Excellency."
The Governor stopped pacing, palms pressing flat on the polished surface of the desk as though steadying himself on a ship about to roll.
"I must speak plainly this time," Sir Geoffrey said. "The Council is uneasy. London will be uneasy once they read the minutes. The Crown will never permit village-based industries to grow unchecked. Not in this way. Not now."
He lifted his eyes, the grey in them sharpened by something more than irritation—anxiety, perhaps, or the sense of being squeezed between two immovable facts.
"British mills," he continued, "depend on Indian buyers. Lancashire depends on this province buying cloth, not weaving its own. Khaddar, Swadeshi, homespun—all of it undermines Manchester. And you—"
He narrowed his gaze.
"You are competent. We grant you that. Perhaps too competent. Competence that begins to compete with Manchester, that dresses itself in village virtue… is, to some in Whitehall, simply sedition with better tailoring."
The word hung there between them: sedition.
Jinnah removed his gloves with measured calm and laid them side by side on the corner of the desk. Each movement was precise, almost ceremonial.
"With respect, Your Excellency," he said, "you are misunderstanding my intent."
The Governor's jaw tightened.
"Am I?" he demanded. "You produce fine cloth in rural Punjab, stamped with your estate seal and—now—my Crown. You prove that Indian hands can match, perhaps even undercut, imported fabric. You dress peasants in something better than rags and call it administration. London will not see benevolence. London will see numbers."
He is afraid of the wrong figures, Bilal murmured. Show him the right ones.
Jinnah's lips curved in the slightest of smiles, a lawyer's smile—small, controlled, summoned only when necessary.
"No," he said softly. "What I am doing does not threaten British imports."
He paused, letting the next sentence land with surprising gentleness.
"It saves them."
Turning the Equation
The Governor blinked once, genuinely wrong-footed.
"Saves them?" he repeated. "Producing cloth locally saves Manchester? That is… curious arithmetic."
"Only if one looks at one side of the ledger," Jinnah replied. He shifted slightly, moving so that he stood not as a supplicant but as an advocate addressing a bench. The governor's study became, in an instant, a courtroom.
"Governor," he began, "your economists in London think of India as a market. A consumer. A bottomless maw into which they can pour bolts of cloth and from which they expect coins to flow back across the sea. But this is an illusion."
He gestured, not broadly, but with a small, precise opening of the hand.
"India is too poor to be the market they imagine. A starving man cannot buy Manchester cloth. A woman with three half-fed children will not purchase fine linen. Your warehouses in Bombay hold unsold bales because the buyers you imagine simply do not exist in sufficient number."
He held the Governor's gaze.
"You are trying, if you will forgive the metaphor, to sell champagne on a street where people still beg for water."
Sir Geoffrey's mouth tightened a fraction, then relaxed. The image was sharp enough to sting but true enough to consider.
"And your solution?" he asked. "To produce champagne locally, perhaps?"
"To make water first," Jinnah answered. "And then let you sell them whatever you wish."