task of counting the people who were present.
"Let's start with your household," she said. "Names and ages, please."
They spent the next two hours going through Ramdas's family. He had a wife — Kamla — and three adult children, and each of the adult children had spouses and children of their own. Nine people in his household. He knew the birthday of each one. He knew the ages in years. He gave the information with the precision of someone who had been keeping this accounting in his head for a long time.
He gave the names in the old way — the traditional way, with the village name as the family identifier, without the caste surnames that the government enumeration system expected. She noted this and filled in the family identifier field as "Nandgaon — Ramdas lineage" which was what the forms allowed her to do when traditional naming conventions didn't map to the form's structure.
When she photographed the household — the camera facing each member as required by the digital enumeration protocol — she noticed something. She would not identify what she had noticed until much later. At the time, she simply took the photographs, checked that the images had registered clearly on the camera's screen, and continued with the next entry on her form.
