She thought about Ramdas's handshake. Warm, real, the temperature of a person in the summer. She thought about Kalyani in the morning sun with her face upward and her shadow on the ground behind her — the shadow that had been there, solid and specific, the mark of a body that the sun could not pass through. She thought about the night voices saying two hundred and thirty-one names in the dark, the names of the dead said by the dead, the specific act of a community that had refused to forget even in the absence of anyone outside to tell. She thought about Ramdas saying: we have waited a very long time to be counted.
She thought about the photographs. One hundred and sixteen photographs of a village where no human being appeared in a single image. She had uploaded them all. They were in the archive with the enumeration data — the photographs of the empty village that was full of people, the fires burning in images where no hand tended them, the shadows of absent people falling across absent ground. The official record of a place that the official record said did not exist, documented by a camera that could not see the people who had asked to be seen.
Some things, she had thought in the hotel room in Raipur, existed at the edge of what recording technology could capture. She had been right about this in one way and wrong about it in another. The camera had not captured them. But the notebook had. The forms had. The written names and the relationships and the occupations and the ages — all of it, captured in the old way, the human way, the way the British census man had done it in 1941 with a book, the way it had been done since before there were cameras or databases or digital systems. One person going to another person and asking: who are you? How many are you? What is your name?
And the other person answering.
