She asked the records clerk, a young man who had the distracted efficiency of someone managing three tasks simultaneously, if there was anything else on file for Nandgaon. He had looked at the name and then at his screen and then at her and then back at the screen and said, with the particular care of someone choosing words: "I would check with the block development officer's office before you go there. There have been some reports." And then the phone on his desk had rung and the conversation had ended in the way of conversations that end because something interrupts them, and she had not pressed because she was already going regardless and the word "reports" on its own told her nothing specific enough to matter.
She had pressed Sukhram in the jeep the following morning. He had driven for twenty minutes in the silence he preferred before responding.
"People say things about that village," he said. His eyes were on the road, which had begun as a paved district road and was currently in the process of becoming the dotted-line category of the map — compacted dirt, passable after the dry season, flanked by increasingly dense forest. "People from the villages nearby."
"What things?" she said.
"That it shouldn't be visited." He said it with the flatness of a man reporting a fact he had no personal opinion about. "Old story. From after Partition. My grandmother's village is fifteen kilometres from there — she told me not to go near it when I was young."
"Did she say why?"
A pause. The jeep navigated a deep rut in the road with the certainty of a vehicle that had been on these roads before. "She said the dead don't know they're dead, in that place." He paused again. "That was what she said. I thought it was superstition. Old women tell old stories."
