They were playing. They were real. They were present.
What was wrong with them was something she had to look at for several minutes before she could locate it.
The children were too quiet. Not completely silent — the running children made running sounds, and the ones by the well were clearly talking, and the stone game involved some negotiation — but the level of sound was wrong. Children playing produced a specific level of noise that was, in her experience, reliably characteristic — the unselfconscious noise of physical play, the raised voices, the laughter that was unmodulated because no one was modulating it. These children were producing the activities of play without the full volume of play. As if they were playing at the level of memory — the way you replicated the form of something rather than its full substance.
She looked at the children for a long time. Then she went back to her notebook and her work.
She was enumerating the households on the village's northern lane that day. She had twelve more households to do before the north side was complete. She went through them methodically, household by household, the way she always worked — names, ages, relationships, occupations, duration of residence.
Every household: permanent residents. No one had come from outside the village within living memory. No one had left within living memory. No marriages with outside families — the marriages were all between families within the village, which the genealogical records showed had been the pattern for generations. No one went to the sub-district headquarters for work or services. No one sent their children to the block-level school. The children were taught within the village, by the older residents — "the way it has always been," one woman told her.
"You have never had contact with the outside?" Meera said. She was careful about the way she asked it — not accusatory, just information-gathering.
