The village of Bargawa was eleven houses and a broken tube well and a small mandir and three people still living there — an old woman, her middle-aged son, and his wife — the rest having gone to Gwalior or Morena or Agra across the years, leaving behind the buildings and the tube well and the particular silence of a place that used to contain more life.
The old woman spoke to them from her doorway while her son looked at Vikram in the back seat of the Innova. He was not a doctor. He had, he said in the way of rural people who have made do, some experience. He looked at the bruise, at the pulse, at the torn shirt.
"He was hit from behind," he said. "The blow is on the right temple but at an angle consistent with someone coming from behind and to the right." He said this with a matter-of-fact precision that was unnerving in its specificity. "He needs a proper doctor. Morena is forty kilometres. I can take him — my tractor can reach the paved road in twenty minutes."
"You know the ravines?" Aryan asked him.
The man looked at him for a moment. "Everyone here knows the ravines."
"Someone is in them. Someone took our driver."
The man and his mother exchanged a look. The old woman said something in a dialect that Kabir later identified as a Bundeli variant, and it went past Aryan and Priya and Tanya but not, Aryan noticed, past Kabir, whose expression shifted slightly as he caught parts of it.
"What did she say?" Aryan asked Kabir, quietly.
