A woman appeared at the edge of the village. She was carrying a clay pot on her hip and she looked at Meera with the direct, unsurprised assessment of someone who had seen strangers arrive before. Her clothes were cotton — a sari in a deep indigo with a border that was hand-woven in a pattern Meera did not recognise. Her hair was oiled and braided. She looked to be in her fifties, with the weathered, capable face of a woman who had worked outdoors her entire life.
"Aao," she said. Come. She turned and walked back into the village, assuming, correctly, that Meera would follow.
Meera followed.
She walked into Nandgaon and it was exactly what it appeared to be — a functioning village, mid-morning, its residents going about the activities of a functional village. She walked past a family sorting grain on a wide flat stone. Past two men repairing the wall of a structure, their hands moving in the practiced rhythm of people who knew how walls worked. Past a group of older women sitting in the shade of a large neem tree, talking in the low, continuous way of women who have been talking to each other for decades and have developed a shorthand for it.
