The information she gathered was detailed and internally consistent. The households were structured in the extended family patterns typical of agricultural settlements in this part of Chhattisgarh — grandparents, adult children, grandchildren, sometimes a widowed aunt or an unmarried cousin added into the household count. The occupations were: farming, primarily, with secondary activities of grain processing, craft work, and animal husbandry. Several households mentioned wells and a seasonal stream as their water sources. No one mentioned electricity or connectivity. No one mentioned any government service reaching the village — no school, no health post, no ration shop. This was unusual for a settlement of this size, but not impossible for a Category 4 village that had been, from the government's perspective, administratively non-existent for seven decades.
She wrote everything down. Names. Ages. Occupations. Family relationships. Birth order. She was thorough by training and by temperament, and she took the same care with the sixty-third resident she enumerated as with the first.
One household gave her pause. The family of a man named Birju — fourth household on the lane that ran along the village's eastern edge — had six members, and when she asked their ages, the answer was unusual. The grandmother was, Birju said, one hundred and three years old. The grandfather had died "recently." Their son — Birju's father — was seventy-eight. Birju himself was fifty-two. His wife was forty-nine. Their youngest child was eleven.
This was not impossible. A family of great longevity, a late child — unusual but within the range of the documentable. What gave her pause was different.
She asked, as she asked at every household, how long the family had been in Nandgaon.
"Always," Birju said. The specific simplicity of it.
"Can you tell me anything about when your grandmother came to the village? Where from?"
Birju looked at his grandmother — a tiny, ancient woman who was sitting against the wall of the house with her eyes open but focused on something that was not the present scene. "She was born here," he said. "Her mother was born here. It goes back."
"Has the family ever left the village?"
The question produced a silence. Not a long one — a few seconds. But a silence with a quality to it, the quality of a question that had touched something that was usually left untouched.
"No," Birju said. "We do not leave."
She wrote this down: Several households express no history of outmigration. "We do not leave" — repeated across households. Note: this level of settlement stability is unusual but not impossible in isolated communities.
