September arrived, and with it came mercy.
The Punjab sky softened. The brutal white heat of June and July loosened its grip and melted into a calmer, golden haze. Evenings stretched longer, cooler, and the air carried that familiar smell of wet earth—soil that had survived the monsoon and was now ready to work again.
But in Sandalbar, the season did not announce itself with poetry.
It announced itself with sound.
A low, constant thrum began to settle over the estate and its fifty villages—steady, mechanical, and patient, like a heartbeat that refused to stop. It was the sound of an economic engine waking up.
1) The Textile Assembly Line
Jinnah did not wait for his own cotton crop.
He had anticipated demand months earlier—Crown contracts were not rumors anymore. Police uniforms. Railway cloth. Prison supply orders. These were stable, predictable buyers, and predictable buyers were the closest thing to safety in a volatile province.
So in August, he had sent Ahmed to Lyallpur (Faisalabad) with instructions that were simple and expensive: buy raw cotton in bulk, pay properly, and bring it back before anyone else understood what Sandalbar was trying to become.
Now, that cotton was no longer a gamble sitting in bales.
It was turning into cloth.
The old image of a solitary weaver working a home khaddi—one man, one loom, one family's slow production—was being replaced. In each village, Jinnah had ordered the construction of weaving sheds: long bamboo structures, airy and clean, designed for light and ventilation instead of darkness and sweat.
Inside those sheds, the looms stood in disciplined rows.
Clack-thrum. Clack-thrum.
Hundreds of shuttles moved as if they had learned the same rhythm together. It was not one factory; it was many small engines running in parallel—a decentralized industrial complex stitched into the villages themselves.
Quality Control
At the end of each shed stood the inspectors.
Not foremen with whips. Not men with crude power and crude language.
These were the Farabi Women's Wing—women recruited on Jinnah's order, trained to handle problems men could not handle without scandal, and trained to enforce standards without turning the workplace into a bazaar fight. Mary D'Souza had personally shaped the first officers: stern, capable, and unromantic about excuses.
One of them was Zoya, a widow with sharp eyes and a chalk stick that carried more authority than most men's shouting.
She unrolled a length of grey police cloth, ran her fingers over the weave, then pulled a thread. Her mouth tightened.
"Too loose," she said plainly.
The weaver began to speak—half apology, half explanation—but she cut through it with the kind of logic the villages understood.
"The police will tear this in a week. Tighten the weave. We do not sell garbage to the Crown."
It wasn't cruelty. It was a new rule: Sandalbar would not survive by producing cheap cloth. It would survive by producing reliable cloth—work that could not be dismissed as peasant handiwork.
The Supply Chain
Once a roll passed inspection, it did not drift into the market like random village output. It moved with direction, like a river that had finally been given a channel.
First, inspection—Zoya's chalk mark: Grade A.
Second, embroidery—high-end shawls moved into the women's circles, where the rose-and-crown motifs were stitched with patient hands.
Third, finishing—everything flowed toward the central facility: steaming, dyeing, and standardization. Huge copper vats bubbled with indigo and khaki dyes, supervised by chemists, not just artisans who guessed by smell and prayer.
This was the point. It was still village work, but it was no longer village chaos.
2) The Field Marshal of the Fields
While cloth turned into contracts, Ahmed fought a quieter war in the open land.
The floodwaters had receded in late July, leaving behind a narrow window of damp soil—soil that could either be used immediately or wasted until the next cycle. Ahmed had taken the risk. He ordered the sowing of local Desi cotton seed at once.
A late sowing was a gamble.
But flood silt had enriched the earth, and the earth responded.
Now, in September, the fields had become a sea of green—thigh-high cotton bushes, lush and vigorous. Not yet flowering. Not yet profitable. But alive, which was the first victory.
Ahmed walked the rows with "Agriculture Scouts," young men trained to spot bollworms before they could turn a crop into a famine. He spoke to the farmers like a commander speaks to recruits.
"We protect what we have," he told them.
Someone asked about the famous American 4F seeds—those promised miracles that everyone had heard about.
"They will come next year," Ahmed said. "For now, we keep this crop alive. And we prepare the fallow land for Rabi."
"Wheat?" a farmer asked, already calculating hunger and storage.
"Wheat," Ahmed confirmed. "But not scattered by hand. Seed drills. Rows. Less seed, more grain. Jinnah Sahib has ordered them from the Agricultural College."
In another district, such talk would have sounded like a speech.
Here, it sounded like a plan.
3) The Scrap-Metal Web
Above the estate, perched on a ladder lashed to a Sheesham tree, Chief Engineer D'Souza worked with the focus of a man who trusted wires more than people.
He moved from village to village in a jeep loaded with coils of copper, vacuum tubes, and rusted boxes that looked like junk to anyone who didn't understand what they could become.
A village boy watched him struggle with a jagged piece of metal and finally asked the obvious question.
"What is it?"
D'Souza grunted, twisting a wire into place.
"This used to be part of a field telephone in the trenches of France," he said. "Now it is going to tell your father the price of wheat in Lahore."
Jinnah had secured tons of WWI surplus scrap—old radios, telegraph keys, field wires—and D'Souza was cannibalizing it into something alive.
Every cluster of five villages gained a Farabi Post: a small brick room with a wired connection to Estate HQ. And with that came reaction time—measured, not guessed. If bandits hit one village, the signal could reach HQ in minutes; help could arrive in twenty.
This was not just "communication."
It was deterrence.