On the third day she finished the enumeration.
She went through the remaining households with the same care she had given to every previous household. She asked the same questions. She wrote down the same categories of information. Names. Ages. Occupations. Family relationships. Every person told her, without exception, that they had always been in Nandgaon. Every person gave her a name and an age and a family relationship and an occupation that was some variant of farming or craft or household management. Every person gave her information that was internally consistent, cross-checked against the information she had gathered from the other households, fitting into the overall picture of the village with the precision of a thing that was organised and real and complete.
She enumerated two hundred and forty-seven people. Exactly.
On the morning of Day Three, while she was working through the last seven households, she saw Kalyani again — the old woman from Birju's household, the one hundred and three year old woman who remembered the British census man in 1941. The old woman was sitting in the morning sun on the threshold of her house, her face turned upward, her eyes closed. Receiving the warmth of it. An old woman in the morning sun.
