"Yes," he said. He said it without complaint or bewilderment. Just fact. "We hoped someone would come. We waited."
"Why didn't you go to the district headquarters yourself?" she said. "If you needed to report the village's existence—"
"We cannot leave," he said. Simply. "Nandgaon is where we are."
This was the third time she had heard this: we cannot leave. We do not leave. We are here. The variations on a single theme. She had been, in her professional habit, filing these under "high settlement loyalty typical of isolated communities." But the phrasing was wrong for that. High settlement loyalty produced we don't want to leave or there is no reason to leave. What these people said was: we cannot. A different kind of staying.
That night she ate with Ramdas and his family. It was a quiet meal — the family eating with the comfortable silence of people who had eaten together many thousands of times. Sukhi made roti on a flat stone over a wood fire. The dal was from the family's own stores. Everything they ate, she understood, came from within the village. Nothing came from outside.
After dinner she tried the camera again. She set it on a ledge and aimed it at the family gathered after the meal in the courtyard — three adults and two children, visible to her, present in the courtyard, casting shadows in the lamplight.
The image the camera produced showed: the courtyard, the lamp, the shadows on the wall — the shadows cast by the people present. The shadows of five people, clearly there, the shapes of them on the mud wall. And no people. Five shadows of five absent people, falling across the ground and the wall from a light source that was illuminating them from one direction, as if they were standing exactly where she could see them standing.
Shadows without people. Or people the camera could not see, casting shadows that it could.
She closed the camera and put it in her bag and did not take it out again that night.
