Meera read the three reports in Dr. Pillai's office. She read them all the way through. Then she sat with them for a while.
"The satellite imagery," she said. "It showed forest cover. No structures."
"Yes," Dr. Pillai said. "Consistent with what the second team found. Ruins, substantially overgrown. From satellite altitude, they would appear as forest."
"But what I found," Meera said carefully. "What I walked through. What I slept in. That was not ruins."
Dr. Pillai looked at her. "No," she said. "It was not."
"The second team's photographs," Meera said. "Do they show anyone?"
"No," Dr. Pillai said. "Just the ruins." She paused. "And the shadows of the trees. There are many large trees. Their shadows are — they cover most of the site at certain times of day. Some of the shadow patterns are unusual. The consultant noted it. The shadows don't quite correspond to the trees' positions in several of the images."
They looked at each other across the desk.
"I want to ask you something," Dr. Pillai said. "And I want you to answer it honestly, whatever the answer is." She paused. "Do you think you should go back?"
Meera thought about the village. She thought about the peepal tree in the sunlight and the voices in the dark and Ramdas's warm hand and the old woman in the morning sun whose shadow had been there.
"No," she said. "I did what I went to do. I counted them. I wrote them down." She paused. "Whatever happens next — that's for other people. Other processes. I was the enumerator. The enumeration is complete."
Dr. Pillai nodded. Slowly. "The submission," she said. "What do I do with the submission?"
Meera thought about two hundred and forty-seven names in a notebook. Two hundred and forty-seven people who had told her their ages and their families and their occupations and had given her their history and had waited, with the patience of something that does not age because it has already ended, for someone to finally arrive with a book and write them down.
"Process it," she said. "Enter them in the records. Not as living residents of a current settlement — I understand that's not what the category allows. But there's a category for historical documentation of deceased persons at a registered site. The historical documentation consultant probably knows it. Enter them under that." She paused. "They asked to be counted. They have a right to be in the records. People who were killed don't lose the right to be documented. The erasure of them from the administrative record was part of what was done to them. The census can't undo August 1947. But it can undo the administrative erasure."
