On the second morning she saw the children properly.
She had seen them the day before — in passing, at the edges of things, the way children appeared in villages when a stranger was present: curious, hovering at a distance, running away when looked at directly, returning when the direct gaze moved on. She had noted them as children and moved on because the formal enumeration of children happened household by household with their parents, and she had been in the first-day mode of establishing the overall structure before getting into the details.
On the second morning, sitting at Ramdas's platform drinking the chai that Sukhi made every morning with the same precise combination of ingredients, she saw them properly. There were perhaps twenty children in her immediate view — ranging from what she estimated at four or five years old to early adolescence. They were playing. The playing was real — a game with a stone and a chalked grid on the compacted earth, the timeless game she had played herself; a smaller group chasing each other around the neem tree; two children sitting by the well, dangling their feet, talking with the absorption of children who were working something out together.
