They looked at her. She looked at them. Everyone was real, present, solid in the specific way of people doing specific things in specific places. The grain was real. The neem tree's roots were deep and visible. The smoke from the cooking fires smelled of wood and dal.
She was a census official. She documented things. She opened her notebook.
There was one thing wrong. One thing that she noticed and wrote down and did not think about deeply because she was still in the arriving-and-assessing mode of the first minutes in a new place. But she wrote it down.
The thing that was wrong was this: in the twenty minutes she had been walking through the village, she had not heard a single mobile phone. Not a ring, not a notification, not the specific tinny sound of a YouTube video being watched at low volume which was the universal constant of rural India in the present decade. No one had looked at a phone. No one had a phone visible. This was not impossible — some very remote settlements had no connectivity — but the absence was total, and the total absence of something ubiquitous had a particular quality, like a photograph that was perfectly composed except that every clock in it showed the wrong time.
She wrote: No mobile phones visible. No visible electrical infrastructure — no lines, no panels. Lighting appears to be lamp-based. Note: query connectivity status with residents.
The woman with the clay pot was leading her to a house at the centre of the village. Outside the house, sitting on a low wooden platform in the manner of someone who receives visitors in a specific place, was an old man. Very old — the specific oldness of people who had lived long and whose age had become their most visible quality, the accumulated years visible in the way they held themselves, the quality of their stillness. He had a white cotton dhoti and a calm, receiving expression.
"The government woman," the woman with the clay pot said, in the dialect of this part of Chhattisgarh that Meera could follow but not speak. "She has come to count."
The old man looked at Meera. He nodded. "We have been waiting," he said, in Hindi that was formal and careful, the Hindi of someone who did not use it often and used it correctly when they did. "A long time, we have been waiting for the counting."
Meera opened her enumeration forms. "I'm Meera Saxena," she said. "From the National Census Directorate. I'd like to speak with you about the residents of the village — how many households, how many people."
"Two hundred and forty-seven," the old man said, without hesitation. As if he had known the number for a very long time. As if the number was the most certain thing he knew.
She wrote it down.
