5 ideas
Nawabdin, an electrician on K.K. Harouni's estate, lives by small ingenuity: he slows the electricity meters on the farm's tube wells and coaxes favors from his employer. By flattering and petitioning the old landowner he secures a motorcycle, which lifts his status and income.
In a feudal household, a dependent's position rests on a personal bond with one powerful person, not on any right, contract, or institution. When that person dies or weakens, the protection disappears at once. Heirs, rivals, and legitimate family then reclaim what the dependent held, so years of accumulated favor can be erased overnight.
Women with no property or protectors, such as the maid Saleema and the poor relation Husna, use sexual and emotional closeness to men above them as their main route to safety and advancement. The stories insist the bargain is real and sometimes tender, but always unequal. When the man is gone, the woman is the first to be expelled, because her claim was never recognized.
Read the estate as nested hierarchies rather than one line between master and servant. Each person is a supplicant to someone above and a small tyrant or patron to someone below, so managers, drivers, and maids reproduce the landowner's methods of favor, extraction, and exclusion. This shows why the system holds even as the old landowner declines: its logic runs through everyone, not only through the man at the top.
As the aging landowner withdraws to the city and loses interest, real control of the land passes to his managers, who skim, sell, and build private fortunes on the estate. This is embodied in Chaudrey Jaglani. The old feudal order decays through a gradual transfer of wealth to the intermediaries who run the land day to day, not through revolt.