Meera stopped. She looked at the old woman. The old woman was in the morning sun. The morning sun, coming from the east, was casting shadows westward — the shadows of the houses, the trees, the people moving about in the early morning. Meera looked at the old woman's shadow. It fell behind her on the threshold, the specific shadow of a person sitting with their face upward.
The shadow was there.
She looked at the shadow for a long time. She looked at it with the full attention of someone who had been looking at shadows for the past two days without being able to say why, and she looked at it and the shadow was there — the old woman's shadow, specific, complete, the shape of a one hundred and three year old woman sitting in the morning sun with her face tilted upward.
She went to the last seven households and enumerated them and wrote everything down. She was very calm. She had been calm for two days — not the calm of a person who has suppressed a reaction, but the calm of a person who is in a situation that is not within the available frameworks and has decided that the available frameworks are not the right tool and has set them aside and is working from something else. What that something else was, she did not know precisely. She kept working anyway.
At midday on Day Three she completed the final household. She sat in Ramdas's courtyard and collated her forms. Two hundred and forty-seven persons. Fifty-three households. The data was complete, cross-referenced, consistent. It was the best census enumeration she had done in eight years of field work — thorough, detailed, accurate. She had the names of every person in the village and the relationships between them and the family histories going back three generations in some cases and the occupations and the ages. She had it all.
She did not have a single photograph that showed a human being.
She had, on the camera, one hundred and sixteen photographs. She had reviewed all of them. They showed the village comprehensively — the structures, the trees, the wells, the cooking fires, the lanes, the central area with the peepal tree, the fields at the village's edge. They showed everything that was Nandgaon except the people who lived in it. The people's presence was everywhere — in the objects they had arranged, the fires they had lit, the grain they had been sorting that still sat in its baskets, the shadows they cast that appeared in several photographs where the angle had been right — but the people themselves were not in a single image.
