"They counted us in 1941," the old woman said. "I remember. A young man with a book. He sat in the square and counted." She looked at Meera steadily. "He said he would come back. He did not come back."
"No," Meera said carefully. "The census was interrupted. After 1947."
"After," the old woman said. She turned her head back to wherever she had been looking. "Yes. After." A very long pause. "You should count carefully," she said. "Every one. Do not miss any."
"I won't," Meera said.
"It is important," the old woman said. "That we are counted. That someone writes us down." She paused. "We have waited a very long time to be counted."
Meera sat with her for another few minutes. The old woman said nothing more. Meera wrote down her information — name, Kalyani, age 103, occupation none-retired, permanent resident — and moved on to the next house.
Outside, walking the lane to the next household, she stood for a moment in the afternoon light and took a long breath. The feeling she had been carrying since the moment she walked into the village — the feeling she had been explaining away with sensor malfunctions and census forms and professional habits — was, she noted precisely, the feeling of being in a place where the ordinary rules of things were slightly different from outside. Not dramatically different. Not impossible. Just slightly. Like a room where the light comes from the wrong direction and you can't immediately identify which direction is wrong, only that something about the light is not quite right.
She wrote: Note to self: document observations factually. Do not interpret. The village is a real village. The residents are real residents. The census will be accurate and complete.
She went to the next household. She knocked on the doorframe. A woman came out, blinking in the afternoon light, and smiled at her with the uncomplicated smile of someone who had been expecting her. "Come in," she said. "Come in, we have been waiting."
They had all been waiting. Everyone she spoke to said some version of it. We have been waiting. A long time, we have been waiting. She told herself this was a natural response in a community that knew the census official was coming — word had spread, Ramdas had probably told people, communities prepared for official visits. But the waiting they described had a quality that was longer than one day, longer than one morning's worth of preparation. The waiting they described was the waiting of people who had been expecting something for a very long time and had simply continued in the expectation of it, day after day, until it finally arrived.
