"And what of railways? Ferries? Highways?" Jinnah asked. "The disease does not respect our municipal boundaries."
Then your plan must not stop at them, Bilal replied. You will insist that every railway station in Lahore and Montgomery set up isolation wards – not as separate hospitals hidden away, but as visible annexes. Every incoming train must have a marked isolation carriage attached, staffed, ready.
"To put whom in?" Jinnah asked.
Anyone visibly ill with classic symptoms, Bilal said. You will not catch all. But you will catch some. Enough to send a message: trains are not free of scrutiny. Travel is not an escape.
"And religious places?" Jinnah asked. "Mosques, temples, gurdwaras, churches?"
They are the spine of these communities, Bilal said. You ask – as a condition of cooperation – that each major place of worship set aside one hall, one courtyard, one cloister as an auxiliary sick ward.
Jinnah's eyebrows lifted.
"You want them to bring disease into the one place they feel is pure?"
Precisely, Bilal said. Because when a mosque's veranda is lined with cots, when a mandir courtyard holds pale children, when a gurdwara langar hall feeds the sick, the congregation will not be able to pretend this is somebody else's problem. And if, after seeing that, they still ignore the imams and granthis and pandits reading verses on cleanliness—
He paused, letting the thought finish itself.
—then the guilt is on them, not on the state.
Jinnah was silent for a long moment.
"You are using their own sacred spaces as mirrors," he said at last. "So that if they refuse to listen, they cannot claim ignorance."
Yes, Bilal said. And you will make sure no one can claim that you or the British sat idle. You will draft a plan that makes resistance naked. Either they cooperate and survive more often. Or they obstruct and expose themselves as the ones standing between their own neighbours and safety.
He hesitated, then added another strand.
There is one more thing you will ask of the Governor, Bilal said. You will offer him something he does not yet realise he needs: your Farabis as a check upon his own machinery.
Jinnah's pen stilled over the page.
"A parallel police?" he asked softly. "They will never agree."
Not a second police, Bilal said. You will not say 'replace'. You will say 'reinforce'. You will tell him: our Farabi network will work alongside municipal and local government – not against them, not over them on paper – but as a constant reminder that orders must bite. Officially, they will be 'auxiliary sanitary enforcers'. In truth, they will be the leash on the men who are supposed to enforce.
He could almost see it as Bilal spoke: small posts in key wards, Farabi squads seconded "temporarily" to assist health teams, their reports bypassing sleepy clerks.
Any official found idle, obstructive, or lazy, Bilal went on, will be noted in Farabi reports and sent not to the local board, but straight up the chain – to the Governor's secretariat. You offer the Governor an extra set of eyes over his own enforcers. An enforcing body over the enforcers.
"And he will ask who commands this body," Jinnah said.
You will not say 'I', Bilal replied. You will say: "Dr Evelyn Harrington will oversee the sanitary apparatus as chief medical co-ordinator. Every Farabi unit deployed under this scheme will carry a wireless set linked directly to a temporary Emergency Control Room in Lahore – located, for convenience, in the house where I lodge. All medical and enforcement reports will be relayed there in real time, and forwarded daily to Government House."
Jinnah exhaled slowly.
"So on paper," he said, "the Governor receives tighter supervision of his district. In practice, the lines run from Farabi posts and clinics to Evelyn's desk… and to mine."
Exactly, Bilal said. He gets control. You get a nervous system that actually feels pain when something fails.
"And if they riot regardless?" Jinnah asked. "If some demagogue decides that cholera is a conspiracy, that these measures are an insult to God?"
Then you do not meet him with argument, Bilal said. You meet him with a simple phrase repeated on every radio, every pulpit, every folk stage: "Those who block the doctors are the ones who bury the children." You do not call them traitors to the Crown. You call them traitors to their own blood.
Jinnah placed the pen down.
"You are a cruel man, Bilal," he said quietly.
Not cruel, Bilal answered. Just honest about what people respond to. They are not motivated by charts and circulars. They are moved by fear, shame, hope, habit. You cannot sterilize a city's water overnight. But you can contaminate its excuses.
Jinnah looked down at the page.
Under his hand, the first outlines of a proposal had taken shape: Local Sanitary Councils, Rings of Isolation, Religious Coordination, Folk Instruction, Arterial Controls, Farabi Auxiliary Network, Emergency Wireless HQ (Lahore).
He could already see the Governor's face tightening at some parts, the Unionist Premier balking at others.
"You realise," he said, "that if I put this on the table, they may say I am treating their capital like an overgrown estate."
They summoned you because their capital is behaving like an overgrown village, Bilal replied. Give them a village solution – scaled and sharpened. Whether they have the courage to use it is their test, not yours.
Jinnah capped the pen.
"Very well," he said. "Let us see if Lahore is willing to be offended into survival."
Outside, somewhere on the edge of the estate, a Farabi post tapped a short message into the night: routine status, all clear.
In the city beyond, lanes that had never heard of Sandalbar still washed their floors with water from infected wells.
Between those worlds, a plan had just been born—part medicine, part law, part song, part threat, and now a hidden leash on the very hands meant to enforce it.
It would not cure cholera.
But it might, Jinnah thought, give fewer excuses for letting it kill.