"When do I leave?" she said.
"Thursday," he said. "Train's at nine-forty PM."
She took the folder home that evening. She lived alone in a two-room flat in Laxmi Nagar that she had furnished with the practical minimalism of someone who spent enough time away from home that investing too much in its comfort felt like a bad bet. She made herself tea and sat at her kitchen table and opened the folder properly.
The folder was thin. Most field verification folders were thin — the point of the visit was to generate information, not to summarise it. There was the map, the forms, a brief district profile that covered the sub-district Nandgaon fell under, and a single sheet that appeared to be a historical reference note, the kind that the Directorate's records division occasionally attached to postings in areas with complex administrative histories.
The historical reference note was two paragraphs. She read it twice.
The first paragraph said that Nandgaon was recorded in the 1941 colonial census as a settlement of approximately 250 persons, primarily agricultural, in the eastern forested belt of what was then the Central Provinces. The settlement had been in the colonial records since at least 1891.
The second paragraph said that following an incident in August 1947 — described only as "civil disturbance resulting in mass casualty" — the settlement had been officially evacuated by the district administration and classified as uninhabited. All subsequent census cycles had recorded it as Category 4 — uninhabited.
She sat with the note for a while. Then she made more tea. Then she packed her bag with the methodical efficiency she had developed over eight years of field work: the camera, three sets of batteries, the paper notebook, the enumeration forms, the GPS unit, the good boots. She added one thing she didn't always pack: a small transistor radio that had belonged to her father, which she carried on postings that felt unusual in ways she couldn't articulate, the way some things felt unusual before you understood why.
Nandgaon felt unusual. She couldn't articulate why. She put it down to the Category 4 notation, which she had encountered before in other postings and which always carried a slight atmospheric weight — the weight of a place where something had happened that the records had declined to fully name.
She would go. She would verify. If the village was empty — which it almost certainly was — she would document the ruins and close the file. If by some administrative anomaly people were living there, she would enumerate them. Either way, two or three days.
She turned off the light and went to sleep, and the folder sat on the kitchen table in the dark, and the single word in the historical reference note that she had noticed but not thought about further sat in the folder, waiting for the right context to become significant. The word was the number: approximately 250.
