The camera was registering environments. Objects. The marks of presence. But not the people themselves.
She put the camera down. She picked up her notebook. She wrote: Camera issue: appears to not register human subjects at all — neither villagers nor myself. Consistent across all tests. Rule out: sensor malfunction specific to human subjects? Anomalous. Continue written documentation.
She would not look at the photographs again that night. She would look at them again in the morning. She would deal with them then.
Outside, the village had gone dark and quiet. Rural dark — complete, the specific darkness of a settlement with no electric lighting, where after the lamps were extinguished the night was real night, not the ambient-lit semi-darkness of cities. She could hear things in the dark: the wind in the trees at the village's edge, an owl somewhere far off, the sounds of a functioning settlement at rest.
And one other thing.
She lay on the cot with the clay lamp still lit, listening, for a long time before she was able to identify what the other thing was.
It was voices. Very low, very many, all at once — the overlapping murmur of a crowd that was not speaking to be heard but was speaking the way people spoke when they were in a group and everyone was saying something at the same time and none of it was meant to rise above the others. Like prayers spoken together, each person saying their own words, the combined sound becoming a texture rather than a collection of sentences.
She went to the window. The lane outside was dark. The houses across the lane were dark — no lamplight visible in any of them.
But the sound was there. Coming from the village — from the central area, she thought, where the peepal tree was, where Ramdas had sat during the day. The murmur of many voices, not asleep, not speaking to be heard, speaking because speaking was what they did.
She opened the door of her room quietly and went into the corridor that led to the house's small courtyard. Ramdas was sitting in the courtyard. Not asleep. Awake, in the dark, his eyes open and his face turned toward the village's centre.
"What is that sound?" she said.
He did not startle. He had known she was coming out — she could tell from the absence of surprise in his posture. "The village," he said. "At night."
"The village is talking," she said.
"Yes," he said. "We talk at night. We always have. There is a lot to say." He paused. "When you have waited as long as we have — there is much to say."
