At midday, Sukhi brought her food. Rice and dal and a green vegetable she did not recognise, cooked in a way that was both unfamiliar and very good. She ate on the platform where she had been working and watched the village at midday — the slowdown, the people retreating to their homes for the rest hours, the particular mid-afternoon quiet of a village that has been working since early morning. A child ran past, chasing something. An older woman called from a doorway. A dog slept under the neem tree with the complete commitment to sleep that dogs achieve in hot weather.
It was an entirely normal village at midday. It was what it appeared to be.
She looked at the photographs she had taken so far on the camera's small screen. Fourteen images from Ramdas's household. She scrolled through them, checking for clarity and focus, the standard review she did after every batch of photographs to make sure she wasn't building up a set of unusable images.
Fourteen images. The platform. The peepal tree. The light through the leaves. The background of the village's central area.
Meera in most of them, visible at the edge of the frame because the camera's wide-angle setting sometimes caught her when she was positioning it.
And the members of Ramdas's household, exactly as she had photographed them, clearly present and clearly—
She stopped scrolling.
She went back to the second photograph. The one she had taken of Kamla, Ramdas's wife, sitting in front of her house.
The photograph showed the front of the house. It showed the peepal tree to the left. It showed the compacted earth of the village's central area, the other structures in the background, a cooking fire at the edge of the frame.
It did not show Kamla.
Kamla — who had been sitting directly in front of the camera when Meera had taken the photograph, who Meera had clearly seen in the small display screen at the moment of capture — was not in the image.
Meera went to the third photograph. Ramdas's eldest son, standing by the wall of the family's grain store. The wall was there. The grain store was there. The specific angle of the mid-morning light on the wall was there.
