So the sensor worked when pointed at objects. She set the camera on the window ledge, aimed it back at herself sitting on the cot, and pressed the timer function that would take the image in ten seconds. She sat and waited for the shutter sound and then went and looked at the image.
The image showed the cot. The mattress, indented from her sitting on it — the indentation clearly visible. The notebook, open, on the cot where she had set it. The pencil she had set beside the notebook. The room around it.
No Meera.
She held the camera and looked at the image for a long time. She was not in it. The objects that had been in contact with her were in it — the mattress, indented; the notebook, open — but she was not there. She had been there. She had been sitting on the cot when the shutter fired. The camera registered the indent of her weight on the mattress and the objects she had placed there, but not the person who had placed them.
No. The opposite. The camera was not registering her. The camera was registering the villagers and not itself — when she had reviewed the household photographs earlier, she had concluded that the villagers were not showing up, while she was. Now she understood it differently: she was not showing up either. In none of the photographs she had reviewed earlier had she appeared fully — only at the edges, glimpsed, not the focus of the frame. And now, when she was the direct subject, she was not present in the image at all.
