The Directorate sat on the report for ten days before responding.
Ten days was not unusual — administrative reviews of flagged submissions moved at the pace of administrative reviews everywhere, which was the pace of a system that had to balance precision against speed and which, over decades, had learned to favour precision. Meera was back in Delhi, back at her desk, back to the ordinary work of the Census Directorate — data entry reviews, field report collation, the ongoing administrative work that made up the bulk of a census official's year. She had a new posting scheduled for next month, a district in Rajasthan where a resettlement colony's data had gaps. She was preparing for it.
When the response came it was from a level above Mr. Pandey — from the Directorate's Deputy Director for Field Operations, which told her something about how seriously the submission had been taken. The Deputy Director, a careful woman named Dr. Pillai whom Meera had met twice at field operations reviews, called her into her office on a Tuesday morning.
