She thought about what she knew. She thought about what the Data Quality Officer had said. Two hundred and forty-seven persons recorded as deceased. The land vested to the state because there were no surviving residents to vest it to. The official record, the true record, the record that she had started with in the folder on her kitchen table in Laxmi Nagar: no one had survived. No one.
She thought about what Ramdas had told her. Two hundred and thirty-one killed. Sixteen survivors, from whom the village had rebuilt. We are all here, he had said. All two hundred and forty-seven of us.
She thought about the arithmetic she had been doing and avoiding for two days: if the official record said everyone died, and Ramdas said two hundred and thirty-one died and sixteen survived, then one of them was wrong. But Ramdas's number and the official number both added up to two hundred and forty-seven — because the village she had found had exactly two hundred and forty-seven residents. The survivors and the dead, together in the same number, the same village, the same enumeration.
She thought about the old woman Kalyani, who had been twenty-six in August 1947 and who had a shadow. She thought about the shadow carefully. The shadow had been there. She had looked at it. She had looked at it specifically because she was looking for something to hold onto, some evidence of the ordinary, and the shadow had been there. A shadow required a physical body — a body with mass and opacity, something for the light to stop against. If the camera could not record the people of Nandgaon, it was not because they were not physically there. They were physically there — the shadows confirmed it, the moved grain confirmed it, the turned shoe confirmed it. They cast shadows. They moved objects. They were warm — Ramdas had shaken her hand, and his hand had been warm, the temperature of a living person's hand in summer.
They were there. The camera just couldn't see them.
Some things, she thought — and it was the strangest thought she had ever had, quiet and clear in the middle of the hotel room — some things existed at the edge of what recording technology could capture. The census had always been a human act — a person going to another person and asking questions and writing down the answers. The camera was new. The digital platform was new. But the act of counting and being counted was old. As old as the British census man in 1941 with his book. As old as the Romans. As old as the act of saying: you exist, you are here, you matter enough to be written down.
She had counted them. She had written them down. They were in the records now — two hundred and forty-seven names, two hundred and forty-seven households, two hundred and forty-seven people who had waited for seventy-seven years to be acknowledged by the system that had failed to acknowledge them in 1947 and every census year since.
