He began to pace slowly now, not in agitation, but as an advocate organizing exhibits for a jury that did not yet know it wanted to acquit.
"Consider," he said, "the cost of sending cloth from England to India. You pay British wages to workers in Manchester. You maintain heavy machinery in old mills. You pay for coal, for supervisors, for repairs. Then you ship thousands of miles by sea. Insurance, freight charges, dock fees. Once it arrives in Bombay, you pay for warehousing, middlemen, transport inland, more storage, more handling. At every stage, cost accumulates. And at the end, your agent in some district bazaar looks at a peasant who barely eats twice a day and expects him to pay a price that reflects all that."
He stopped by the big window, looking out at the flag flying damply above the garden.
"Even if he wishes to buy, he cannot. If he cannot buy, your stock sits unsold. If it sits unsold, you cut your losses. Sometimes you burn it. Sometimes you dump it at a loss. Either way, the arithmetic bleeds."
The Governor did not interrupt. His fingers had drifted toward a pen, then stilled.
"And then," Jinnah continued, "Mr. Gandhi arrives with his spinning wheel. He says, 'Spin your own. Wear your own. Boycott Manchester.' The poor have an excuse not to buy what they already could not afford. You blame him for lost sales, but in truth, he has simply given piety to your miscalculation."
He turned back from the window.
"I do not propose to compete with Manchester," he said. "I propose to relocate it."
Sandalbar as Factory
The Governor's eyebrow lifted. "Relocate it," he repeated, sceptical but listening.
"Yes," Jinnah said. "Not in name. In practice."
He moved closer to the desk, hands loosely clasped behind his back now, his body language that of a man assembling precedent.
"Bring investment to Sandalbar," he said. "Or to places like it. Not as charity. As business. Your investors establish mills—not massive monsters of brick and smoke at first, but moderate-scale, well-designed workshops. They bring the machinery, the designs, the supervisors. We provide the land, the cotton, the labour."
He ticked points off lightly on his fingers.
"Cheap land—you can see my titles. Trained labour—my villagers already show they can follow instructions, keep schedules, maintain cleanliness. They are not striking. They are eager. Cotton grown within cart-distance—no long hauls, no spoilage. Finished goods can move along the rail lines you already control."
He allowed a small pause.
"One more thing," he added. "No Swadeshi threat. Because the cloth is, in effect, British cloth. British-designed, British-owned. Only the spinning and weaving is done under the sun of Punjab instead of the smoke of Manchester."
The Governor frowned, not in rejection, but in concentration.
"And Gandhi?" he asked. "He urges people to spin at home, to reject foreign cloth entirely."
Jinnah's mouth hardened very slightly.
"Gandhi's cloth cannot match this," he said. "Not in quality. Not in consistency. It is a symbol, not an industry. You cannot clothe a continent with symbols. When British-designed fabric, woven in India, begins to sell at prices even the poor can afford, the charkha will become what it was always destined to be: a relic of an honourable gesture, not a permanent economic solution."
You are offering to beat him with his own slogan, Bilal observed, half-admiring. 'Self-reliance,' but under their ownership.
"In such a system," Jinnah went on, "you do not lose industrial power. You extend it. Textiles anyone can produce eventually. Machinery, patterns, technology—those remain British. You retain the head and spine of the beast. We simply grow the limbs where they can actually reach the people."
The Governor's Realization
Silence fell, not heavy, but thick with calculation.
The Governor lowered himself slowly into his chair, more as an act of thought than fatigue. His hand went almost unconsciously to the blotter, fingers tracing a faint, invisible circle.
"You propose," he said carefully, "to turn India into a factory of Britain… within Britain's own Empire… using Indian labour to produce British goods at Indian prices… and in doing so, to raise a class of Indians who have money in their pockets because they work in British-run industry."
He looked up sharply.
"And you believe this will reduce political unrest?"
"Yes," Jinnah said simply.
"How?"
"Because hunger is noisy," Jinnah replied. "Work is quieter. Men who can feed their families think twice before risking everything in a riot. Villages with clinics, schools, wages, and radios have more to lose than a slogan can give them. You are trying to hold an Empire on empty stomachs and wounded pride. Fill the stomachs, and pride grows less restless."
He let the next phrase follow with deliberate weight.
"And those who are comfortable, Governor, are far more likely to defend their comfort than burn it down."
Sir Geoffrey exhaled, almost a laugh, but not quite.
"You would make them loyal by making them… better off," he said. "A curious sort of colonial heresy."
"Call it enlightened self-interest," Jinnah said. "Yours and mine."
What He Asks
The Governor studied him, measuring not just the words but the man behind them.
"And what, in return, do you want?" he asked at last. "Not in abstractions. In specifics."
Jinnah did not need to think about it. The list had been forming in his mind for weeks, item by item, each one tied to some crisis he had already lived through at Sandalbar.
"I want," he said, "room to do what we both require."
He raised a finger.
"Order. The freedom to enforce discipline within the estate. Your officers can observe; they can report; they can veto if I cross a legal line. But they must not interfere in every daily arrangement or we will suffocate."
A second finger.
"Sanitation. Continued medical supplies, recognition of the lodge clinic as a proper hospital once improved, and the authority to impose health rules that will save lives even when they offend habit. You have seen the reports from the doctors you sent. They found fewer cholera cases in Sandalbar than in towns with full municipalities."
A third.
"Stability of labour. Peasants who know that their seed loans will not carry usurious interest. That in flood or drought, there is a system, not just a prayer. They will work better for me—and in time, for your investors."
He looked directly at the Governor.
"And I want this, above all: you to understand that I do not seek slogans. I seek results. I am prepared to give the Crown credit for every visible success at Sandalbar. Let the newspapers print your officers' names. Let the record show that under the British flag, villages prospered. History may know the details one day. I do not need it written now."
You're selling your shadow and keeping the substance, Bilal said softly. A good bargain, if he accepts.
Dangerous or Useful?
Sir Geoffrey's shoulders, which had been held in rigid tension, eased a little. The lines around his eyes did not disappear, but they softened.
"You are asking me," he said slowly, "to endorse the creation of a semi-industrial, semi-military, highly disciplined pocket inside my province. Staffed by your Farabis. Adored—or at least trusted—by their villagers. All under the flag of the Crown, and under the mind of one man who was not elected to anything."
"Yes," Jinnah said. "Because I believe that pocket will become your strongest argument when the rest of India asks, 'What has British rule ever done for us?' You will say, 'Look at Sandalbar. Look at this experiment. There, at least, we did something that worked.'"
The Governor looked down at his hands.
"You are not dangerous in the way my Home Secretary fears," he said quietly. "You are dangerous in a much more insidious way. You make continued British rule seem… rational."
"I make order seem rational," Jinnah corrected gently. "If the Crown embodies that order, people will continue to tolerate the Crown. If it does not, they will look elsewhere. That elsewhere need not be chaos—if we build alternatives now that still point back to your law."
Sir Geoffrey was silent long enough that the tick of the clock on the mantlepiece became uncomfortably loud.
Then, abruptly, he stood.
He walked to the map on the wall and rested his hand for a moment over the region marked Montgomery. Somewhere within those lines lay Sandalbar: a dot, a name, and now, perhaps, a seed.
"This is not what I was trained for," he said, not turning around. "We were taught to maintain, to preserve, to prevent change from coming too quickly. You are asking me to accelerate it—and trust that it runs in our favour."
He turned then, his gaze steady.
"And yet…" he said, "what you propose sounds, in its cold arithmetic, far more likely to preserve British interests than anything my more cautious colleagues are counselling."
He came back to the desk.
"And London?" he asked. "They will call this madness."
"London," Jinnah said, allowing himself a small, thin smile, "will change its mind the moment the first dividend cheques arrive with Sandalbar's name in the margin and a British investor's profit at the bottom."
The Handshake
The Governor looked at him for a long, searching moment. He saw, perhaps more clearly than before, the full shape of the man in front of him: the fastidious barrister, the reluctant landlord, the uninvited administrator who had turned flood and crisis into a laboratory for governance.
"You are not sentimental, Muhammad," he said at last. "That is… refreshing. And unnerving."
"Sentiment," Jinnah replied, "does not repair canal breaches or pay weavers. It has its place—in speeches, in poems, in the hearts of those who can afford it. I am not among them. I am among those who must make broken things work."
Something in that answered a question the Governor had not voiced aloud.
He drew a breath, then extended his hand across the desk.
The gesture was not casual. It was the offering of a man who understood hierarchy very well and did not often discard it.
"Do it," Sir Geoffrey said. "Proceed. Cautiously. Quietly. Keep the Crown's emblem where you promised. Keep your Farabis within the law. Keep your radio waves free of slogans and full of weather, prices, and news that makes us both look competent."
He almost smiled.
"And, for the love of God, warn me before you decide to improve anything else."
Jinnah took the hand.
His grip was firm but not crushing, his expression as controlled as ever.
"Thank you, Your Excellency," he said. "I assure you, you will have order. And accounts."
He released the hand, gathered his gloves, and turned toward the door.
As he walked down the corridor, past the portraits and the polished floors, Bilal's voice came again, quiet and wry.
Well, it said, you have just persuaded the representative of the British Crown to authorize an industrial experiment that will change the lives of villages—and perhaps the politics of a continent—because it looked tidy on a balance sheet.
Jinnah did not answer, outwardly. His footsteps remained steady, his face unreadable to the servants who bowed as he passed.
But inwardly, to that second presence, he allowed a single response.
No, he thought. Because it looked inevitable. I merely taught him to call it his idea.