Ramdas was quiet for a long time. They were sitting in the courtyard after dinner. The village sounds at night had begun — the murmur of voices from the central area, the particular texture of the collective night-talking that she had heard the previous night. He listened to it for a while. Then he began.
"It was the time of the change," he said. "When the British were leaving and the country was becoming itself. A big time. We heard about it from the people who passed through on the road — there was more traffic on the road then, traders, people moving. We knew the big change was coming. The village was waiting, the way you wait for rain when you have watched the sky change."
He stopped. He looked at his hands.
"In August," he said. "A group came. Men with weapons — not soldiers, not official, just men. Some from the next district, some from further. The trouble in those days made men travel in groups with weapons for many reasons, and most of those reasons were not good. They came to Nandgaon in the night." He paused. "They were angry about something. Something that had happened somewhere else — we were not part of it, we had nothing to do with it, but in those times anger travelled and found places to land that were not where it began."
Meera did not say anything. She listened.
"They came in the night," Ramdas said again. "And in the morning—" He stopped. He was very still. The lamplight on his face was the lamplight of this night, this present moment, and he was in it and also in something else simultaneously, the way people were when they told stories that were not finished in the telling. "In the morning there were very few of us left who had — who were in the condition that—" He stopped again.
