"Ramdas-ji," she said. "The sixteen or so survivors — what happened to them? Where are they now?"
He looked at her with the sharp eyes. The eyes that had been assessing her since the moment she arrived. The eyes that had, she understood now, been deciding all along how much to tell her and in what order and what she was ready to understand.
"We are all here," he said. "All two hundred and forty-seven of us."
She looked at him.
"The ones who died," he said slowly, carefully, with the precision of someone who needed to say something correctly, "did not go away. This is our village. We were born here, we worked here, we were buried here — under these trees, in this ground. Why would we go away?" He looked at her with an expression that was the simplest possible expression — the expression of a man saying something that seemed, to him, entirely obvious. "We are here. We have always been here. We were waiting for someone to count us." He paused. "For someone to write us down. To make us real again, in the records. We have been real all along. But no one had written us down."
The lamp flickered. Outside, the voices of the village continued their nightly telling. Two hundred and thirty-one names, said in the dark, every night for seventy-seven years.
Meera Saxena sat in the courtyard of a dead man's house and looked at her enumeration forms and thought about what she had come here to do. She had come to count the people. She had counted the people. Whether those people were the kind of people the census was designed to count — that was a question she did not yet know how to hold.
She picked up her pen.
She continued her documentation.
