"Not in a long time," the woman said. Her name was Phulbai and she was, she said, forty-one years old, though she looked older than that to Meera. "Long before my time."
"Someone comes to the village sometimes?" Meera said. "For trade, for medicine?"
"No," Phulbai said. "We have what we need." She said it simply, without the slight defensiveness that the answer sometimes produced in communities that were genuinely isolated — the defensiveness that came from having been told, by various government representatives, that they needed things they didn't have. Phulbai said it with the simple certainty of a fact. "We have what we need. We have had what we need for — a long time."
"Since when?" Meera said.
Phulbai looked at her. "Since we stopped needing things from outside," she said.
Meera wrote this down and moved on. She was three-quarters of the way through the enumeration. At the current pace, she would complete it by tomorrow afternoon. Then she would return to Raipur, submit the data, close the file. Whatever the data revealed about the administrative situation — about why a village of 247 people had been categorised as uninhabited for seventy-seven years — would be someone else's problem to resolve. Her job was to count the people. She was counting the people.
In the afternoon of Day Two she enumerated a household of five — a man, his wife, their three grown children — and at the end of the enumeration, when she was closing her forms, the man said: "You are the first person from outside who has come since the trouble."
"The first?" she said. "In all this time?"
