"I understand," she said. Quietly. "You don't have to describe it."
"No," he said. "I want to describe it correctly. That is important. To describe it correctly is important." He looked at her. "The government, later, wrote down: 'civil disturbance resulting in mass casualty.' That is what they wrote. Mass casualty." His voice was careful. Not angry, which she had expected, or sad, which she had expected. Precise. The voice of someone who had been thinking about the correct words for a very long time. "That is not a description. That is a category. What happened was not a category."
"No," she agreed.
"Two hundred and thirty-one people," he said. "That is how many. Not 'mass.' Two hundred and thirty-one specific people, each with a name and a family and a work they did and a thing they were going to do the next day that they did not do." He looked at the lamp. "I can tell you each of their names. I have been telling them every night, for seventy-seven years. In the night talking. We say their names so they are not forgotten."
Meera said nothing. She was doing the arithmetic without wanting to. The arithmetic was this: the 1941 census had recorded approximately 250 persons in Nandgaon. Two hundred and thirty-one had been killed in August 1947. That left approximately nineteen survivors — sixteen if you took the census number exactly. Nineteen people, or sixteen, who had survived whatever had happened and had been the seed of the resettlement Ramdas was describing, the village continuing, more people coming back.
But the village currently had 247 residents.
And no one in the village had come from outside. No one had married in from outside. No births were mentioned in any of the twelve or more households she had enumerated — no children born in the last fifty years, no generation of young adults who had been born here to parents who survived and grown up and had their own children.
She did the arithmetic and she held it very carefully and she put it aside. She was not ready for what the arithmetic told her. She would do the enumeration first. She would do the job. Then she would think about the arithmetic.
