Meera wrote this in her notebook: Local belief: settlement associated with Partition-era incident. Residents of nearby villages advise against visiting. Driver's grandmother's account: "The dead don't know they're dead." Note for historical context. Continue verification.
She was a census official. She documented things. The documented thing here was a local narrative, which was relevant context. The local narrative was not, itself, a reason to turn around.
The road continued for another forty minutes. The forest thickened on both sides — the specific density of old growth, the kind that closed over roads that hadn't been regularly used, reaching its canopy across the track in the way that forests reclaimed spaces they considered theirs. The light changed as they went deeper into it — not dark, exactly, but filtered, the way light came through layers of leaf before it reached the ground, green and indirect and constant.
"The satellite imagery," she said, partly to herself, checking her GPS unit. "It shows this area as forest cover. No structures."
Sukhram said nothing.
"The imagery is three years old," she said. "Could have been re-vegetated since." She was explaining to herself, or to the notebook, or to the habit of thinking out loud that she had developed on enough solo field postings that it had become the way her mind worked when she was paying attention to something.
The jeep came around a bend in the road and the forest opened, and Nandgaon was there.
