Chapter 1 — The Assignment

Dr. Meera Vashisht. Child Psychologist. March 2022.The folder landed on Meera's desk on a Tuesday, which she would later think was significant only in the way that all arrivals are significant once you know what they contain.The cover sheet read: Child Welfare Assessment — Sunderkhal Village, Chamoli District, Uttarakhand. Preliminary flag: no children from Sunderkhal enrolled in block-level schools. No birth registrations filed in fourteen years. No outpatient records at district hospital. Requesting assessment visit.Meera was employed by the Pahari Foundation, an NGO that did child welfare work in the remoter districts of Uttarakhand — places where the government's reach was thin and the gap between what children were supposed to receive and what they actually received was measured in kilometers of bad road. She had been doing this work for six years. She had a good instinct for the difference between bureaucratic absence and something actually wrong.This file set off the second instinct.No birth registrations in fourteen years was not unusual in extremely remote settlements. No school enrollment was unusual but explicable — some families ran informal arrangements, some children were educated by relatives, some simply fell through. No hospital records was concerning but not alarming.All three together was a pattern.She read further. The foundation had a previous note about Sunderkhal from 2019 — a journalist named Rajan Sood had requested their assistance in verifying some claims about the village. She found the correspondence. They had sent a letter to the district panchayat requesting information. The panchayat had replied that Sunderkhal was functioning normally and did not require outside intervention.Rajan Sood's name she recognized because she had seen it in a news brief: missing, November 2019, last known location Chamoli district. The case was unsolved. The brief mentioned he had been working on a story about remote communities.She put the file down. She picked it up again.She went to see her supervisor, a man named Devraj Nair who had been doing this work since before she was born and who had the particular quality of someone who had seen too much to be easily alarmed and too little to stop being careful."Sunderkhal," he said, when she showed him. He took off his glasses and looked at the wall. "I know that name.""From the Sood note?""Before that. Ten, twelve years ago we had a flag from a schoolteacher in the neighboring village — Patal, about eight kilometers away. She said children from Sunderkhal never came to the market, never attended festivals, never left the village perimeter as far as she'd seen." He put his glasses back on. "We wrote to the BDO. He said the village was self-sufficient and preferred minimal contact with the administrative structure. He said the children were educated internally." He paused. "I accepted it.""Do you wish you hadn't?""I wish I'd sent someone." He looked at the file. "I'm sending someone now."She looked at him."You're sure you want to go?" he said. "Alone?""Is there a reason I shouldn't?"He was quiet for a moment. The specific quiet of a man deciding how much of his unease to share."Take the satellite phone," he said. "Not just the mobile. The satellite phone. And check in every evening by six. If I don't hear from you by six, I start making calls." He paused. "And Meera. Don't eat or drink anything they offer you until you've had a full day to observe the village."She looked at him. "That's a strange instruction.""It's a strange case," he said.