She looked at it. She looked at the satellite imagery on her GPS screen. She looked at it again.
The satellite imagery showed forest — unbroken canopy, nothing below it but trees and undergrowth. What was in front of her was a village. Not ruins. Not overgrown foundations. A village: forty or fifty structures of mud and timber and thatch, the specific domestic architecture of this part of Chhattisgarh — low walls, wide eaves, painted with the ochre and white patterns she had seen in other settlements in this district. Smoke from cooking fires rising in thin columns above the thatched roofs. The sounds of a settlement at mid-morning — distant voices, a child somewhere, the rhythmic percussion of something being pounded, which was the specific sound of grain work that she had heard in a dozen villages in a dozen districts.
She looked at the GPS imagery again. The imagery showed nothing.
"You've been here before?" she said to Sukhram.
"No," he said. He was looking at the village with an expression she could not quite categorise — not fear, not surprise, but the specific alertness of someone whose body had registered something before their mind had caught up. "I'll wait here," he said. "I'll wait with the jeep."
She looked at him. "You'll be okay on your own?"
"Yes," he said. He did not look away from the village. "I'll be okay here."
She took her bag. She took the camera, the forms, the notebook. She walked toward the village. Behind her, she heard the jeep's engine turn off — Sukhram settling in to wait — and then the quiet of the forest closed around the road, and the only sounds were the sounds of Nandgaon ahead of her and her own footsteps on the packed earth of the path.
