"I've thought about that," Meera said. "The satellite imagery is three years old. Villages can grow where satellite imagery shows nothing — I've seen it in flood-prone areas where seasonal displacement means a settlement is in a different physical location every few years. The camera malfunction is unusual but not technically impossible. The documentary evidence is entirely in my written records — the forms, the notebook. Taken individually, each of these has an ordinary explanation."
"And taken together?" Dr. Pillai said.
Meera looked at the photograph of the five shadows on the courtyard wall. Five distinct shadows of five distinct people who were not there. "Taken together," she said, "the enumeration is accurate. I'm certain of that. Every piece of information I recorded from those residents is real — real names, real relationships, real histories. Whatever those people are, the information they gave me is true."
Dr. Pillai looked at the photograph. She looked at it for a long time. Then she said: "The historical record. Two hundred and forty-seven exact. The same number."
"Yes."
"The data quality system flagged it because two hundred and forty-seven is the exact number of deaths recorded in 1947," Dr. Pillai said. She was very quiet. "Not approximately. Exactly."
"Yes," Meera said.
Dr. Pillai sat back. She looked at the ceiling — the specific upward look of someone thinking about something that their downward framework has not managed to contain. Then she looked at Meera. "What do you want us to do with the submission?"
Meera had thought about this for two weeks. "Process it," she said. "Record them. They have waited seventy-seven years to be in the records. Whatever they are — whatever the category is — they are people with names and histories and families, and the government record should reflect that they existed. They were real people who lived real lives and were counted in 1941 and then — erased. Not just killed. Erased. The evacuation order, the Category 4 designation, the sealing of the land records — all of it. They were made to not exist in the documentation." She paused. "The documentation can correct that. It should correct that."
Dr. Pillai was quiet for a long time. Then she said: "I'm going to send a second team. To verify."
"Yes," Meera said. "You should."
"What will they find?" Dr. Pillai said.
Meera thought about this carefully. She thought about the village and the smoke and the grain and the shadows. She thought about Ramdas's warm hand. She thought about Kalyani in the morning sun. She thought about the voices saying two hundred and thirty-one names in the dark.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "Send them prepared to find either thing."
