She spent the afternoon going house to house.
Ramdas had offered to accompany her, but she worked better alone — the presence of the headman tended to formalise the household visits in ways that sometimes produced more scripted answers and less genuine information. She preferred to arrive at each house on her own, with the enumeration forms and the standard introduction, which had the quality of a well-worn phrase now after eight years: Namaste, main Meera Saxena hoon, National Census Directorate se. Aapke ghar ke bare mein kuch information chahiye.
The villagers received her with a consistent, quiet hospitality. She was offered water at every house — clay pots of water, cold in the way that clay pots kept water cold. She was offered places to sit. People gathered around with the genuine curiosity of communities that did not receive visitors often, the particular interested attention that was not intrusive but was fully present, everyone in the household listening to what she asked and what the family member answering said.
She went through nine more households in the afternoon. She had her forms and her pen and the paper notebook as backup. She did not use the camera — she told herself she would figure out the camera later, perhaps clean the lens, perhaps check the sensor settings. She kept it in her bag.
