The Farabis trickled back to Sandalbar by train.
At the small station nearest the estate, Ahmed stood on the platform with a ledger and a forced sternness that cracked every few minutes into smiles.
"You see?" he told Mary, who had insisted on coming despite Evelyn's protests about her stitches. "I told you they would come back in one piece. No missing limbs. Only some stolen blankets and a few bruised egos."
Mary sniffed, but her eyes lingered on each face stepping down from the carriage.
"They have more lines on them," she said quietly. "The sort that come from counting other people's children."
The returning men looked thinner, harder. Their uniforms had acquired new stains and patches. Their movements carried a new kind of alertness—the sort that came from navigating not just fields but the cramped politics of city lanes.
As they walked from the station to the estate, villagers along the road watched with a mixture of curiosity and pride.
"That one was at the big station," someone said.
"That one shouted at my cousin in Lahore when he tried to sneak past a cordon," another added.
"Good," a third said. "My cousin needed shouting at."
At the HQ courtyard, Jinnah stood under the pipal tree where he had once announced their departure.
"You left as men of one estate," he told them. "You return as men who have seen how a city behaves when frightened. Remember that. It is not only our fields that need order."
He nodded to the havildars.
"Your rifles go back to their racks. Your wireless sets to their rooms. For a while, our world shrinks again. But the lines we have drawn in our heads"—he tapped his temple—"must not shrink."
They dispersed to barracks, to kitchens, to the familiar routines of roll-calls and patrol circuits along canal banks instead of alleys lined with brick.
That night, the estate slept more deeply than it had in weeks.
In Lahore, the absence was subtler.
The canvas annex at the station remained, but the sight of khaki-clad Farabis at every second corner faded.
Local policemen resumed their old spots at crossings. Municipal clerks returned to stamping documents with the relaxed fatalism of men who knew that, crisis or not, the paperwork would outlive them.
In the lanes, people still boiled water—less rigorously than in the worst days, but more than before. Ash bowls remained outside some doorways; others had slid back into disuse.
One evening, in a courtyard near Anarkali, a group of women sat chattering as they kneaded dough.
"Do you remember those songs?" one asked suddenly.
"What songs?" another replied.
"The cholera ones," the first woman said. "The ones that girl sang at the temple. About Ganga refusing to enter a dirty house."
"Oh," a third woman said. "Yes. She sang nicely."
"They stopped coming, those singers," the first went on. "First the announcements. Then the songs. Now only temple bells and the usual bhajans."
"They were paid by the sanitary council," someone pointed out. "No more cholera, no more coins."
A boy passing by with a bucket remarked:
"I miss the man with the drum who shouted about boiling water. He had a funny moustache."
"You miss the free entertainment," his mother said. "Not his moustache."
Exactly, Bilal said in Jinnah's mind, miles away. They miss the songs more than the wolves. But the song is the hook you left in their habits. That is enough.
In another lane, a shopkeeper who had once cursed the Farabis now grumbled about their absence to his neighbour.
"At least when they were here," he said, "the inspector came on time. He was afraid of those wireless reports. Now he strolls again."
"Then perhaps," his neighbour said, "you should complain to the Farabis."
"They have gone," the shopkeeper replied.
"Exactly," the neighbour said. "So perhaps you should complain to the inspector instead."
The shopkeeper stared at him, then barked a laugh.
"Maybe," he admitted. "Maybe we learned something too."
Closing the File
Back at Sandalbar, Jinnah sat in his study with a final stack of reports.
They summarized the last fortnight: residual cases, closure of auxiliary wards, transition plans for the local sanitary councils. Attached to them was the Governor's formal letter of thanks, stamped and sealed in suitably dignified language.
He read the letter once, then folded it and placed it in a file marked simply:
"Cholera – Lahore / Montgomery, 1930."
He did not put the file in the front of the cabinet, nor bury it at the back. It went in the middle—reachable, but not begging for attention.
"You are not framing it?" Evelyn asked from the doorway, leaning against the jamb.
Jinnah shook his head.
"No," he said. "Frames are for things one wishes to display. This" —he tapped the file— "is for things one wishes to remember quietly when the next storm comes."
"And when is that?" she asked.
He looked out of the window, toward the fields where villagers were already discussing next season's cotton and mustard as if rivers and disease did not have long memories.
"Soon enough," he said. "If not cholera, something else."
Always, Bilal whispered. That is why systems matter more than victories.
Jinnah closed the cabinet.
"For now," he said, turning back to his desk, "we go back to our little experiment."
"Which one?" Evelyn asked. "Hospitals? Schools? Wireless? Wolves?"
"All of them," he said. "We have proven that this estate can lend its nerves to a city. Now we must prove that it can grow its own bones stronger."
"Spoken like a man who has no intention of resting," she said.
"I will rest," Jinnah replied. "When the drains of this country no longer frighten me more than its politicians."
She laughed.
"That," she said, "may take more than one lifetime."
"Then," he said calmly, "we had better start early."
Outside, under a sky not yet sure whether it was winter or spring, Sandalbar settled back into its own rhythm—looms clacking, children shouting, Farabis drilling along the canal paths.
The wolves had come home.
The city they had left behind would one day forget their faces—but perhaps not entirely the way they had walked its lanes, measured its wells, and taught its people, however reluctantly, to see their own filth as something more than fate.