In Chak 7-SB, the cholera did try to enter.
It came in the body of a cart-driver who had gone to Montgomery town, drunk unboiled water at a roadside stall, and returned with a stomach that sounded like thunder and legs that could barely hold him.
His wife, terrified, wanted to hide him. Sickness carried its own shame. Neighbours talked. Marriage alliances could falter if a house was known to carry bad luck.
But before she could make up her mind, a figure appeared at the courtyard gate: a young woman in a simple cotton sari, dupatta pinned back, slate and notebook in hand.
"Baji," she called. "Daily check."
The wife's first instinct was to lie. "We are fine."
The health worker—Shazia, one of Mary's first trainees—did not move from the gate.
"Let me see everyone," she said. "You know the rule. We cannot mark the house 'safe' unless we see each face."
The wife hesitated, then stepped aside.
She had seen what happened last week when a family in the next village tried to hide a fever; the Farabis had come, their faces grim. The khaddar orders that kept that house's loom busy had been quietly reallocated. No shouting, no beating. Just a silence where there used to be work.
The house had learned its lesson.
Shazia stepped inside, eyes scanning with a calm that had once been nerves. She had watched Evelyn work in the clinic, watched Mary scold grown men into washing their hands, watched children who followed instructions live while those whose families ignored them did not.
She smelled it first—the sour, unmistakable smell of a body emptying itself too fast.
"Who is ill?" she asked quietly.
The wife's eyes filled.
"He went to town. Someone must have cursed us," she whispered.
"Or someone didn't boil water," Shazia said. "Where is he?"
In the back room, the cart-driver lay curled, skin dry and lips cracked. He looked at her with a mix of shame and pleading.
"Don't tell them," he rasped. "If they know, they will stop our work. We only just got the new cloth order…"
Shazia knelt beside him.
"If I do not tell them," she said, "you may be dead by sunrise. And then your wife will have no work, no husband, and no roof."
She looked at the wife.
"You want to keep your place on the khaddar list?" she asked. "Then let us do this properly. That was the rule from the beginning."
She stepped out to the courtyard and raised her hand in a gesture that had become, in these villages, as recognizable as the call to prayer.
The Farabi stationed at the stronghold—a low, solid building of brick and mud-shielding—appeared at the lane entrance within minutes, rifle slung, wireless satchel bouncing against his side.
"Yes, baji?" he said.
"Suspected case," she said. "Adult male, back room, severe weakness. House must be marked. I will stay. Nurse should be informed."
The Farabi nodded. He did not ask whether she was sure. In Sandalbar's ten villages, the female health workers' word on such matters had been given the weight of law.
He stepped aside, unrolled the small antenna from his satchel, and began tapping out a message in code toward the lodge.
Within an hour, a small team from the estate clinic arrived on a bullock-cart turned ambulance: a dresser, a compounder, saline bottles clinking in their basket.
The cart-driver was carried out, protesting half-heartedly, his shame warring with relief. His courtyard was limed; his family given boiled water and strict instructions. Shazia stayed to watch.
No one in the village called it cholera. They called it "that disease from town." But they called the health worker "doctor's sister" now, and they listened.
In the ten Sandalbar villages, scenes like that played out again and again—small, unremarkable on the scale of an Empire, decisive on the scale of a household.
Farabis and the Threat of Emptiness
The Farabis had been given clear orders.
Whenever a new case appeared—diarrhoea that did not stop, fever that came with cramps, any sign of someone collapsing near a water source—they were to:
Inform the clinic by wireless immediately.
Make sure the women health workers could enter the house.
Mark the door with a small, discreet chalk symbol only they and the clinic staff understood.
Speak to the men of the house, quietly but firmly:
"If you had hidden this, your name would have left our worker list by tonight. There would be no more cloth sent to your loom. No more wages. We protect those who follow rules. We do not feed those who risk everyone for pride."
It was a brutal calculus. It worked because it aligned three fears:
– Fear of the disease.– Fear of hunger.– Fear of losing the one basti where order seemed to hold when everywhere else was cracking.
Over time, the message settled into the bones of those ten villages. When a child vomited twice, someone sent for Shazia or one of her peers. When an old man had loose motions, the daughter-in-law reported it herself.
If the Farabi post was the shield, the women were the scouts. Together, they formed a net that let little through.
The result was visible in the numbers Harrington now read every morning.
The Map and the Pocket
It was near the end of the second week when he stood again before the wall map, spectacles slightly fogged from the humidity. The civil surgeon stood beside him, notebook open.
Red marks had spread across most of Montgomery now, like dried blood soaking into cloth. Some villages had two lines through them—first for "cases," second for "deaths." Others had subtle circles where the outbreak seemed to have slowed.
Then there was the irregular block of Sandalbar.
"Ten villages," the surgeon said. "A handful of cases. No recorded cholera deaths. Not one."
He sounded less like a doctor now and more like a student of some awkward miracle.
"The rest of the district?" Harrington asked.
"Dozens of deaths," the surgeon said quietly. "In some places, every lane has lost someone. Our staff is exhausted. Volunteers are burning out. Wells we told them to close are being used in the night when no one is looking."
Harrington's eyes traced the outline of the Sandalbar cluster again.
"What are they doing differently?" he asked, though he knew part of the answer.
The surgeon sighed.
"Everything we keep telling people to do on posters," he said. "But they enforce it. Women go house to house. Men with rifles back them. Jinnah administration has turned sanitation into a rule, not a suggestion."
"And the threat of taking away work," Harrington added. "Do not forget that."
The surgeon gave a tight, humourless smile.
"Fear of losing a day's wages," he said, "sometimes speaks louder than fear of losing a neighbour."
Harrington let that sit.
The contrast felt almost indecent: ten villages functioning like a controlled experiment in a glass jar, while the rest of his district writhed in the uncontrolled chaos of habit, fatalism, and scarcity.
"This is not natural," he said.
The surgeon glanced at him.
"Neither is organized drainage and boiled water," he replied. "Natural is cholera. Culture is cholera. What they are doing in Sundalbar—" he caught himself and corrected the slip "—Sandalbar—is manufactured."
"And yet," Harrington murmured, "it holds."
Harrington's Dilemma
That evening, he rode out.
He wanted to see, not just read.
First he visited a non-Sandalbar village—one of the many marked with rough crosses on his map.
The lane outside the well was a mess of discarded lime and footprints. The stone lip was stained. Women still came to draw water, nervous but stubborn.
In one courtyard, a boy lay on a cot under a tattered sheet, breathing shallowly. His mother fanned him with the edge of her dupatta, eyes hollow. A volunteer from the town stood nearby, telling her again to stop giving him unboiled water between bouts of vomiting. She nodded and then, as soon as he turned away, reached for the earthen pot out of sheer habit.
Fear, grief, and a hundred years of unexamined practice wrestled in the dust. The disease liked those odds.
Then Harrington rode on to the edge of Sandalbar territory.
The change was not in the colour of the soil or the shape of the huts. It was in the arrangement of small things.
Latrine pits, fenced and marked. Ash bowls placed near handpump platforms. Children's hands still soapy from washing after using the toilet. Chalk symbols—ordinary eyes would miss them—on certain door frames, marking houses under watch.
Near the stronghold of one village, a small group of women sat with slates on their laps. One young health worker was explaining, with a simple chalk drawing, how the disease moved from water to stomach to water again.
"When you cover with earth," she said, "you break the path. When you boil, you break the path. When you listen, you live."
A Farabi leaned against the stronghold wall, rifle slung, listening. Not to catch her in error, but as if quietly proud.
As Harrington rode past, a little girl called out, "Wash your hands, sahib!"
He almost laughed—and then realized she meant it. It was not a joke but a rule she now expected everyone to follow.
He touched the brim of his hat in acknowledgement and moved on.
By the time he headed back toward town, the sky was darkening, the first stars hesitating through cloud gaps.
One small island, he thought, in a district that is still drowning on dry land.
He felt relief that at least somewhere his reports would carry good news.
He felt, simultaneously, a tightening in his chest.
Because if one man with a handful of nurses and a private militia could hold back cholera in ten villages, what did that say about the rest of the machinery that men like him had spent their lives maintaining?
Was Sandalbar proof that the system could work?
Or that it had failed everywhere except where someone had seized it by the throat and forced it to?
He did not yet have an answer. But he knew this: the map on his wall would never look the same to him again.
And neither would the name Sandalbar.