She sat in the courtyard and held both of these things: the complete enumeration, the absent photographs. Then she packed her forms and her notebook and her camera and said goodbye to Ramdas and Sukhi and the household she had lived with for three days.
Ramdas shook her hand. His hand was warm. Real. The specific temperature of a living person's hand in the Chhattisgarh summer. She noted this with the professional attention she had been applying to everything and set it beside the photographs that showed no people and the voices she had heard at night saying two hundred and thirty-one names and the old woman's answer about the census being important, that it was important that they be written down.
"You will submit our information?" he said.
"Yes," she said. "I'll submit everything. Your names, your household data — all of it."
"We will be in the records," he said. Not a question. The specific relief of a statement finally made true.
"You will be in the records," she said.
He nodded. The nod of a man who has been waiting for something for a very long time and has finally received it. "Thank you," he said. "We have been here all along. It is good that someone finally wrote it down."
She walked out of Nandgaon. She walked the path through the forest back to where Sukhram was waiting with the jeep — he had returned, she could see the jeep, he was sitting in it reading something. The forest closed behind her as she walked, the path narrow and the trees dense on both sides. She walked for twenty minutes without looking back. When she reached the jeep and the road and the clear sky above the road, she stopped and looked back for the first time.
Through the trees, the village was visible — the smoke of the cooking fires, the shapes of the structures, the peepal tree visible above the roofline. Entirely present. Entirely there.
"Did you get what you needed?" Sukhram said.
"Yes," she said. She got in the jeep. "Let's go."
He drove. She looked at her forms. Two hundred and forty-seven people, all named, all documented, all waiting to be written into the records. She had written them down. She had done what they had waited seventy-seven years for someone to do.
She was very tired. She had not slept well for three nights. She looked out the window at the forest closing in on both sides of the road as they drove toward the paved highway and the district headquarters and the world where cameras registered human beings and people left their villages when they wanted to and the arithmetic of the living and the dead was the simple arithmetic she had been trained on.
She was going to submit the enumeration. She was going to write all two hundred and forty-seven of them into the records. They were going to be counted.
She had promised.
