"I see," Meera said. Her voice was very steady. It was the steadiness of a person who has received a piece of information that completes a picture they had been avoiding completing, and who is now completing it anyway because it is in front of them and there is nothing else to do with it.
"The submission is flagged because we would need verification of how a settlement with a historical record of complete mortality could have current resident data," the officer said. "I'm not questioning your field work — I understand you went there and gathered this information. But administratively, we need to understand the discrepancy before we can process the records. Can you help us understand how—"
"I need to look at the photographs," Meera said.
A pause. "You uploaded photographs with a note that the camera had malfunctioned—"
"I need to look at them again," Meera said. "From my end. I need a day."
"Of course," the officer said. "The submission will be held pending your review. Reference number CG-2024-NDV-0847."
She hung up. She opened the uploaded photographs on her laptop. All one hundred and sixteen of them, in the order she had taken them.
She had been through them before. She had established that they showed no human beings. She looked at them again anyway, because this was who she was — she looked at things again when she needed to look at things again. She was a person who documented things, which meant she was also a person who reviewed the documentation.
She went through all one hundred and sixteen photographs. She looked at each one for longer than she needed to — longer than the image required, longer than the purpose required, because in each one she was looking for something specific that she both wanted to find and did not want to find.
She looked at each image and she was not in any of them. She looked at each image and the people she had photographed were not in any of them. She looked at each image and the village was there — complete, detailed, real — and the evidence of presence was everywhere, in the arranged objects and the cast shadows and the indentation of the mattress on the cot in the room where she had slept.
But in every photograph, in every single one of one hundred and sixteen images taken over three days in the village of Nandgaon, there was not a single living person.
