The winter sun over Lahore had lost its vicious edge.
It no longer hammered down on the city; it lay across it like a thin shawl. Streets that had smelled, weeks ago, of sweat and fear now smelled mostly of coal smoke, frying bread, and the faint aftertaste of carbolic left in doorways.
Cholera did not vanish with a trumpet blast. It thinned.
On the big charts in Government House, the red lines had bent and begun to drift steadily down. Wards that had once reported ten new cases a day now reported one or two, sometimes none. The station annexes still caught the occasional traveller with glazed eyes and sunken cheeks, but the steady flood had become a trickle.
In the Emergency Control Room, Evelyn stood before the map one last time, pencil tucked behind her ear, sleeves rolled, a faint smudge of dust on her cheekbone.
"Lahore district," she said, tapping a cluster of circles, "has had four days with only scattered reports. Montgomery city, five. The river villages are almost clear. If this continues another fortnight, we move from crisis to vigilance."
The Health Member nodded, weary but satisfied.
The Governor, seated at the end of the table, looked not at the map but at the woman and the barrister beside it.
"Dr Harrington," he said, "Mr Jinnah—your laboratory appears to have done its work."
"It was not our laboratory alone," Evelyn replied. "The imams, the granthis, the pandits, the councillors who actually obeyed… the Farabis."
She glanced at Jinnah.
"…And the people, when they finally believed this was not an elaborate insult to their dignity."
Jinnah inclined his head, accepting and deflecting at once.
"The machine ran because many parts moved," he said. "We merely helped oil a few that had rusted."
You also bolted on a few parts that never existed, Bilal murmured. He is being polite because the crisis is nearly done.
The Governor cleared his throat.
"In any case," he said, "we must now speak of unwinding the apparatus."
He gestured around the room.
"This Control Room was always conceived as temporary. The Assembly is already muttering about 'extra-constitutional structures' and 'overreach.' Now that the lines have turned"—he nodded at the chart—"we can begin dissolving this little war cabinet."
He turned to Jinnah.
"That includes your Farabi corps," he said. "You were generous enough to… lend them to us. Time to recall them to your estate."
"Generous," the Premier muttered under his breath.
"Effective," the Governor corrected mildly.
He looked back at Jinnah.
"Your men have done what few expected," Sir Geoffrey said. "They have managed to enforce without looting, to threaten without massacring, and to report without slanting every line. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that."
It was, for a British Governor, almost effusive.
Jinnah inclined his head.
"Thank you, Your Excellency," he said. "They will be… relieved to come home. Men trained as wolves do not enjoy living on another man's leash longer than necessary."
"And you?" the Governor asked. "Will you be relieved, Mr Jinnah?"
"I will be pleased," Jinnah said, "to return to a world where my enemies call me names in newspapers instead of in departmental minutes."
Evelyn snorted softly.
"He means he misses his estate," she translated.
The Last Messages
The order to draw down the Farabi presence went out by wireless that evening.
From the Control Room, three short signals radiated:
"Phase-down authorised. Wards to transition to local sanitary councils. Farabi posts to prepare for withdrawal in stages. Wireless sets to remain at main nodes. Report any sudden flare-ups immediately."
At Lahore Junction, the tall Sikh havildar read the message twice, then folded it into his pocket.
He looked around at the canvas annex they had built, the rows of cots, the buckets, the worn path from platform to ward. The station master, standing a short distance away, pretended not to watch him.
"So," the station master said eventually, "you wolves go back to your forest."
"We go back to our village," the havildar corrected. "The forest is still here."
The station master made a noncommittal sound.
"You have made yourself… useful," he admitted grudgingly. "I cannot deny that fewer bodies have left this station on stretchers than there might have been."
"Then perhaps, next time," the havildar said, "you will remember more quickly that 'inconvenient' is better than 'dead.'"
He nodded toward the wireless set in the corner.
"That stays," he said. "So do two of my men for another fortnight. They will not interfere in your timetables. They will merely listen."
"To whom?" the station master asked.
"To the disease," the havildar replied. "It speaks in numbers. We have learned its accent."
At Shahdara, the naib-subedar read the same signal under a tamarind tree and grunted.
He gathered the local sanitary council under the tree—imam, granthi, pandit, councillor, and the outspoken midwife who had bullied half the ward into boiling water.
"Our orders," he told them plainly, "are to begin stepping back. You have fewer new cases, fewer funerals. That is good. Now you must prove that you can hold your own lanes without men with rifles standing at every corner."
The councillor shifted uneasily.
"And if we fail?" he asked.
"We are not going to vanish into the sky," the naib-subedar said. "We are returning to Sandalbar, not to England. The Governor keeps the lines open. If your wells turn sour again, shout. But if you lean on us every time a child sneezes, you will never stand up."
The imam stroked his beard.
"People have begun washing their hands," he said. "Some even look ashamed when they do not."
"Shame is a poor god, but a useful policeman," the granthi remarked.
The midwife snorted.
"I will keep shouting," she said. "With or without your big guns."
The naib-subedar smiled faintly.
"I do not doubt it, bibi," he said. "In fact, I fear you more than cholera now."
Goodbye to the Wolves
In the lanes, word spread faster than any wireless could carry it:
"The khaki men are leaving."
Reactions were tangled.
In one mohalla, children ran behind a small Farabi patrol as they passed for the last time, chanting half-mocking nicknames they had invented during the crisis.
"Radio-wallahs! Rope-wallahs! Lane-closers!"
At the mouth of a lane that had once been sealed, a shopkeeper who had cursed them daily now stepped forward awkwardly.
"You were… hard on us," he said to the havildar. "But my youngest did not die. My neighbour's nephew did. I know the difference."
The havildar accepted this as the highest form of apology the man was capable of.
"Keep boiling the water," he said. "And keep telling new fathers that no story is worth more than soap."
In another ward, where the Farabis' first arrival had been met with stones and shouted accusations of betrayal, their departure reached ears that had mellowed.
A woman who had lost her husband but saved her surviving children stood at her doorway as the last patrol passed.
"May Allah send you back only for weddings," she said. "Not for funerals."
"Amen," one Farabi replied quietly.
At the gurdwara in Shahdara, where the langar had doubled as a feeding station for the sick, the granthi met the departing squad with folded hands.
"You guarded our langar," he said. "You kept the desperate from tearing food out of the hands of the weaker. That is seva too, in your way."
"And you fed our men," the naib-subedar replied. "That is seva in yours."
They exchanged a brief, awkward embrace—two hierarchies touching and then stepping back into their own orders.
Not everyone was sad.
Some councillors, some inspectors, some petty officials watched the Farabis leave with barely concealed relief.
"It will be good," a municipal clerk muttered to his colleague, "to sign forms without imagining some fellow with a wireless reading my every laziness to the Governor."
"You mean we can go back to walking slowly," the colleague said, half-joking.
"Yes," the clerk replied. "But… perhaps not as slowly as before."
He did not know why he added that last part. Habit, perhaps, had already shifted half an inch.
The Control Room's Last Day
In Government House, the Emergency Control Room thinned as well.
The extra clerks were sent back to their original departments. The third wireless set was disconnected and packed away. The map stayed on the wall, but the pins stopped moving.
On the final afternoon, Evelyn stood in the middle of the now half-empty room, turning slowly, as if memorising the pattern of tables and scuff marks.
"This place smells less of panic now," she said.
"It smells of stale tea and victory," Harrington replied. "A rare combination."
Jinnah came in, hat in hand.
"We are dismissed," he said. "The Governor has officially thanked us and gently suggested that we return to our normal mischief before the Assembly starts suggesting that we enjoyed this too much."
"You did enjoy it," Evelyn said. "Admit it. Even you cannot deny the appeal of moving pins on a map and watching numbers obey."
"I enjoyed," Jinnah said, "counting fewer dead. The pins were… tolerable."
You also enjoyed proving that an Indian mind could design a system that worked better than the one the Empire built, Bilal said. You simply refuse to say it aloud.
Evelyn began gathering her papers.
"I'm being sent back to Sandalbar," she said. "Officially as 'Medical Supervisor for Estate Health Facilities.' Unofficially as 'the woman who will make sure your experiment does not rot the moment you look away.'"
"An indispensable terror," Jinnah said. "I could not ask for better."
They walked down the corridor together, out into the courtyard. A car waited to take her to the station.
At the steps, she paused.
"You realise," she said, "that some of them will actually miss you."
"The Assembly?" Jinnah asked dryly. "I have misjudged their taste."
"Not the Assembly," she said. "The city. The wards. They grumbled, they fought you, but… some part of them has grown accustomed to the idea that somewhere, in a room like this, someone is listening when their imam shouts for help."
"Then they must learn," Jinnah said, "that listening is not a conjuring trick tied to my signature. It must become habit."
He opened the car door.
"For now," he said, "let us be content that the drains run and the charts bend the right way. Sentiment will only make us sloppy."