Dr. Pillai sent her a message three months after the conversation in her office. The message was brief: The Nandgaon records have been processed. They are in the National Archive under the historical documentation category — all 247 names, all household data, all the information from your field enumeration. The site has been registered with the Archaeological Survey as a site of historical significance. A memorial is being proposed by the district administration. I thought you would want to know.
Meera read the message on a Tuesday morning, at her desk, with the Himachal Pradesh data in front of her. She read it and then sat with it for a minute — the specific quality of something coming to its conclusion, the thing that had been unfinished completing itself.
Two hundred and forty-seven names in the National Archive. Two hundred and forty-seven people who had existed and been killed and been erased from the records and had waited, in the specific way they had waited, for someone to write them back in. The archive was not the same as living. The archive was not what they had been before August 1947. But the archive was something. The archive said: these people were real. These people had names and families and occupations and ages. These people existed.
She had counted them. She had written them down. They were counted.
