At first, the Premier dismissed this as exceptionalism.
"Jinnah's people have a head start," he told the Governor. "They had already trained their women. They already had latrines. It is unfair to compare our new efforts to his established arrangements."
The Governor let that stand—for two weeks.
Then he summoned both the Premier and Harrington to Government House.
The files on the table were no longer full of cable drafts and speculative memos. They were full of numbers.
Cholera cases. Deaths. House inspections. Latrine counts. Buckets of lime used. Wells closed and reopened. Reports from Evelyn, from the civil surgeons, from reluctant municipal clerks.
Harrington laid out a simple chart.
"In the ten Sandalbar villages," he said, "we have had a dozen confirmed cholera cases. Two deaths. Both in the first days, before their health workers tightened procedures."
He tapped another column.
"In the rest of Montgomery district," he continued, "we have had over a hundred deaths in the same period. In villages and towns where we announced schemes, distributed pamphlets, begged committees."
He did not raise his voice. The quiet made it worse.
The Premier's jaw flexed.
"And Lahore?" the Governor asked.
The Premier sighed.
"The city is too big to speak of as one unit," he said. "Some wards are improving. Others are not. One mohalla closes its wells; the next refuses. At best, we have contained panic. We have not yet contained the disease."
The Governor's gaze went back to the chart.
"Explain to me," he said softly, "why ten villages on one estate can do what an entire elected ministry cannot."
The Premier bristled.
"With respect," he said, "Jinnah is one man with absolute control over a small population. We are a coalition. We must answer to Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, urban traders, rural landlords. We cannot impose rules with the same ruthlessness. He threatens to cut off loom work and ten houses fall in line. If we tried to do that in Lahore, they would burn the Council Hall."
"He also has women going into houses," Harrington added quietly. "Women appointed not by marriage or family, but by competence. They check water pots and latrines without asking the husband's permission. If they are obstructed, a Farabi appears with a rifle and a register. Our teams have volunteers and embarrassed municipal staff. Their teeth are made of words. His have consequences."
The Premier frowned.
"You make it sound as if we should be more like him," he said. "But Punjab is not an estate. And we are not Jinnah."
"Just so," the Governor said.
He leaned back, fingers steepled.
"That is precisely the point."
When the Premier had gone – called away to handle a protest in Shahdara over a closed ferry ghat – the Governor remained in his chair, staring not at the map, but at the empty space just above it.
Harrington waited, hands behind his back.
"You were right," Sir Geoffrey said at length, voice flat. "Our Unionist friends cannot translate a model into a system. They attempt to borrow the shape, but not the spine."
"Too many stakeholders," Harrington said quietly. "Too many people whose feelings must be spared. Jinnah offends peasants, zaildars, and occasionally you, Your Excellency. He does it politely, but he does it. They cannot."
The Governor allowed himself a small, wry exhale.
"He is an Indian leader," he said, "who prefers drains to demonstrations. Slogans bore him. Sewers do not."
He rose and walked to the window.
Outside, the lawns of Government House lay lush and manicured, waterlogged in all the right ways. The drains here worked. No one ever wrote speeches about them.
"What is the usual pattern?" he asked, almost to himself. "Our Indian politicians – Congress, League, Unionists – they come to us demanding rights, seats, portfolios, inquiries, commissions. They speak of injustice. Honor. Motherland. Very rarely do they speak of latrines."
Harrington's mouth twitched despite the grimness of the topic.
"Jinnah," the Governor went on, "did the opposite. He came asking for seed stock, wireless sets, cotton varieties, medical licenses. When he said 'freedom' to my face, he did not mean from us. He meant from cholera."
He turned back.
"In a way," he said, "that is far more dangerous."
"Because it works," Harrington said simply.
"Yes," Sir Geoffrey said. "Because it works. A man who can show peasants that their children live longer under his systems than under anyone else's slogans… that man does not need to shout. People will remember quietly. For years."
He moved back to the desk and flipped open the Sandalbar file.
"London will be smug when I send them the report," he said. "They will say, 'Ah, an Indian who has learnt from us. An Indian who can administer.' They will call him the finest product of British tutelage."
His fingers lingered on a page summarizing the estate's sanitation rules.
"But they will not understand," he added softly, "that such men do not remain products. They become producers."
He closed the file.
"And so," the Governor said, "we come to the inevitable point."
Harrington raised an eyebrow.
"Which is?"
"That we must call him in," Sir Geoffrey said. "Officially. Not just as a landlord, not just as the administrator of ten tidy villages. If this province is to survive more such outbreaks, we cannot rely on ministries that fear offending their own voters. We require someone willing to offend everyone – equally – in the name of order."
He gave a thin, grim smile.
"Fortunately for us," he said, "we already know such a man. Unfortunately, he knows his own value."
The Decision
The Governor sat and reached for his pen.
He wrote slowly, more as a way of thinking aloud than from need:
To: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Esq., Sandalbar Estate, Montgomery.
In light of the present cholera outbreak and the exemplary record of your estate in containing the same, this Government desires to consult you urgently on measures for the wider application of your methods to other parts of the province.
Please attend at Government House, Lahore, at the earliest opportunity.
He paused, then added a line that no other Indian leader would have received in such a letter:
Your experience in law and administration is, in this matter, considered essential.
He sanded the ink, folded the paper, and sealed it with the small wax impression that carried the Lion and the Unicorn.
"Send this by special runner," he told his secretary. "And wire ahead to Montgomery so Jinnah knows it is coming."
As the door closed behind the man, the Governor leaned back and closed his eyes for a fleeting moment.
We are about to ask a barrister-landlord to teach an elected government how not to let its people die from their own habits, he thought. History will either laugh at us—or, in some future no one can see yet, thank us.
In Montgomery, on a veranda that looked out over ordered fields and latrine lines that had become as familiar as trees, a peon would soon ride up with an envelope.
In Lahore, wells still bubbled with invisible danger.
Between those two points, a thin, invisible line was being drawn – not of geography, but of trust.
The Crown, for all its pride, was about to admit that in the fight against cholera, one Indian's way of thinking might be worth more than a dozen pious resolutions.
And Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had once devoted his life to arguing in polished courtrooms, was about to be asked to argue with something far more stubborn than any British judge.
He was about to be asked to argue with an entire province's habits.