"I've read your field report," Dr. Pillai said. She had the report on her desk — printed, annotated in several colours of ink, with flags on specific pages. "All of it. Including the supplementary note." She looked at Meera across the desk with the expression of a woman who had been in this organisation for twenty years and was encountering something her experience had not equipped her for. "I want to understand what you observed."
Meera understood this. She had been expecting it. She walked Dr. Pillai through the three days methodically — the GPS coordinates and the satellite imagery discrepancy, the village that was present when the satellite showed nothing, the residents who were present when the official record showed no survivors, the camera that produced images of environments without people, the shadows and the moved objects and the turned grain, the night voices saying two hundred and thirty-one names.
Dr. Pillai listened. She wrote things down. She asked questions — practical, specific questions, the questions of someone trying to locate the edges of what they were hearing.
"The photographs," she said. "I've looked at all one hundred and sixteen. I want to be clear about what I saw." She turned a page in the printed report. She had printed several of the photographs. She placed them on the desk between them. "I see environments. I see objects. I see evidence of human presence — the fires, the arranged spaces, the shadows." She looked at one photograph — the courtyard photograph, the one where five shadows fell on the wall from people who were not visible. "I see shadows. Of people. Clear shadows." She looked at Meera. "But no people."
"No," Meera said. "No people in any of the photographs."
"And yet you spoke to two hundred and forty-seven individuals, gathered detailed information, shook the headman's hand, ate food prepared in that settlement, slept in a room there for three nights."
"Yes."
Dr. Pillai was quiet for a moment. "I have to ask you the question that I'm required to ask," she said. "Whether there is an explanation for this enumeration that doesn't require — that falls within the normal explanations. Whether the village exists in the conventional sense and there has been a series of equipment failures and documentation errors."
