She did not go back to Nandgaon.
She had told Dr. Pillai she wouldn't, and she meant it, and she kept to it. She went to Rajasthan, and then to Odisha, and then to a hill district in Himachal Pradesh where a resettlement project had created fifteen new hamlets that needed enumeration. She went to these places with her camera and her forms and the professional habits she had built over eight years, and the camera worked correctly in all of them — registering the people she photographed in the precise, factual, reliable way that digital cameras registered people. She kept photographing people, methodically, in the ordinary way. The photographs were ordinary. She was glad of the ordinary photographs.
She thought about Nandgaon sometimes. Not obsessively — it was not the kind of thing that consumed her. It was more the way certain field experiences became part of the reference material of a career: the thing you had seen that had expanded what you knew was possible, the data point that did not fit the existing framework and required the framework to expand rather than the data point to be discarded. She was a person who documented things. She had documented that experience. She kept the documentation.
