The first thing the villagers noticed was not the rifle.
It was the brick.
On the edge of the village—where the last huts thinned into scrub and the path dissolved into fields—men were stacking fired bricks into a low, thick wall. Not a decorative boundary, not a landlord's marker, but a practical shape: corners, a narrow gate, a raised platform inside that could see down the approach road.
A place designed to hold.
Three Farabis walked the site in silence. One carried a rifle and moved like he knew exactly where the blind spots were. One had a wireless set wrapped in canvas, checking it as if it were as valuable as ammunition. The third carried a medical bag, modest and clean, like a promise made without speech.
They did not posture. They did not shout at laborers.
They simply worked—and that quiet work felt strange to people who had spent years watching authority arrive only to threaten, take, or bargain.
By late afternoon, the headman was told to gather the village men at the open patch near the banyan tree. Not to celebrate. Not to listen to politics. Only to be instructed.
When the villagers assembled, they came in the careful manner of rural Punjab—standing in clusters, leaving space between groups, keeping women and children at the back. They watched the Farabis the way one watches a new animal: trying to decide whether it bites.
The senior Farabi stepped forward. He did not climb a platform. He did not ask for applause. He stood on level ground.
His voice was loud enough to reach the edge of the crowd, but not theatrical.
"I am assigned here under Jinnah Sahib's order," he said. "For your safety and for the maintenance of Crown order."
A ripple moved through the gathering. The name alone carried weight, even in villages that had never met the man.
The Farabi raised one hand—not a gesture of control, but of sequence.
"Listen carefully," he said. "These are instructions. Not advice."
He pointed toward the half-built structure at the village edge.
"That is the stronghold," he said. "It will be finished within days. Brick walls, a gate, and a raised platform."
Then he spoke the sentence that changed the villagers' posture from suspicion into something closer to relief.
"If bandits raid at night," he said, "you do not scatter into fields. You do not hide in your huts like animals."
He paused long enough to let the old fear rise—and then he cut it.
"You run to the stronghold."
A few men exchanged glances. Someone muttered, "At night?"
The Farabi's eyes moved to him calmly.
"At night," he repeated. "The brick walls will hold you. The rifle will handle bandits."
He did not say it like a boast. He said it like a fact—the same way a farmer said rain would flood a canal if the gate wasn't lifted.
The wireless man stepped forward and lifted the canvas-wrapped set slightly.
"If you hear gunfire," he said, "or if you see a fire signal from the fields, send a boy to us immediately. Do not send five men shouting. One fast boy. We will transmit and call the nearest team."
The medical aide stepped forward next, opening his bag just enough for the villagers to see cloth wraps and small bottles.
"If someone is sick," he said, "come to the stronghold. Fever, infection, wound. Do not wait for it to become death."
A villager at the back spoke up cautiously. "Even at night?"
The medical aide nodded once.
"Even at night," he said. "Sickness doesn't wait for sunrise."
The senior Farabi raised his hand again.
"And there is a third instruction," he said.
The villagers leaned in without meaning to. Instruction was a rare thing in their lives. Mostly they were told what not to do.
"Send your youngsters," the Farabi said. "Especially children."
A murmur ran through the men. Children? To a stronghold?
The Farabi continued without emotion.
"They will learn basic reading and numbers. Discipline. Clean habits. Whatever is taught, it will be under order. This is Jinnah Sahib's directive."
He let his gaze sweep the crowd.
"Not to make them clerks," he said. "To make them harder to deceive."
That line landed like a stone dropped into a pond. Men who had been cheated in courts, cheated by moneylenders, cheated by Zaildars, understood immediately what it meant to raise children who could count, read, and recognize fraud.
A man with a weathered face—older, respected—cleared his throat.
"And if someone refuses?" he asked, not as a threat, but as a test of how this new authority behaved.
The Farabi's expression did not change.
"Then you refuse," he said. "No one is dragged. But remember—when the next bandit comes, he will not ask politely before taking."
Silence followed. Not uncomfortable. Considered.
Because the villagers were not ignorant. They simply lived under a logic where safety was purchased through fear or bribery. This was something new: safety offered as procedure.
And they had already seen what procedure under Jinnah looked like.
They had seen bandits marched through dust in ropes, their myth broken in public.
They had seen Zaildars—men who once spoke like kings—put behind bars like ordinary criminals.
They had seen stolen grain returned with receipts, and looted livestock handed back under a stamp.
They had seen kidnapped women and children—alive—treated, clothed, and returned.
Whether the Crown's officer spoke at the distribution or not, villagers were not stupid.
They understood where the method came from.
A whisper passed through the crowd—quiet, respectful, inevitable.
"Vakeel Sahib," someone murmured. "Jinnah."
Another man said, "They say if a village falls under Vakeel Sahib, the village becomes clean."
A third voice—an old woman's, sharp from the back—added without fear:
"Clean and safe."
The senior Farabi heard it but did not react. Praise was not his duty.
He spoke again, concluding the instructions as if closing a file.
"Remember," he said. "If trouble comes, you run to the stronghold. If sickness comes, you come to the stronghold. If you want your children to have a future that cannot be stolen, you send them to the stronghold."
He pointed once more at the brickwork.
"This is not only a wall," he said. "It is a rule. And rules protect more than guns."
The villagers began to disperse slowly, not rushing, not cheering, but moving with a new behavior that the Governor's men would have recognized if they had been there:
People who had begun to believe that the state might actually arrive in time.
Later that evening, as the sun sank and the fields turned dark, the headman walked back to his house and found his youngest son waiting at the doorway.
"Abba," the boy said, cautious, "can I go tomorrow? To the stronghold?"
The headman looked down at his child and, for the first time in years, did not feel the reflexive fear that asking for anything would invite punishment.
He thought of the bandits. The Zaildars. The long years of helplessness.
Then he thought of the brick wall rising at the edge of the village, and the three quiet men who did not shout, did not steal, and did not beg for respect.
He nodded once.
"Yes," he said. "Go."
And in the night, when the wind moved through the sugarcane and the village listened as it always had, there was still fear—but it was a smaller thing now.
Because fear had been given an address.
A wall.
A gate.
A stronghold.
And a name that had already begun to grow beyond any official stamp:
Vakeel Sahib.