Chapter 14 — What the Police Found

The district police arrived at Sunderkhal on a Friday morning.Seven officers, a forensic team, and a public health official from the state government who had been called by the district magistrate after Devraj's escalation. They went in with the water testing equipment first, the protocol Meera had insisted on: don't drink anything, test the well before anything else.The forensic chemist who analyzed the well water on-site had a field testing kit and fifteen years of experience and the particular expression of someone who is finding something their kit was not designed to find.He found the compound.He could not identify it completely with the field kit — that would take the Dehradun laboratory and then a specialist facility in Delhi. But he could establish that there was a bioactive compound present in concentrations twenty to thirty times higher than anything he had previously encountered in natural water. It was not a known contaminant. It was not a mining byproduct. It had the chemical signature of something biological — produced by an organism or a metabolic process.The well was sealed.The adults in the village — twelve of them, plus Kamla Devi — were taken for medical assessment. All of them showed the absent blink reflex. All of them showed the low heart rate. All of them showed, in the preliminary assessments, the specific suppression of the tear response that Amrita Bhardwaj had described in her notebook.None of them were of the ages they appeared to be.This was established, in three cases, by identity documents that two of the adults had kept — ration cards, a voter ID. One woman's ration card showed a birth year of 1968. She appeared to be in her mid-forties. She was fifty-four.The children's documents were not found. The children had no documents at all.The ground-penetrating radar reached Sunderkhal on Saturday.The forensic team worked the eastern terrace slope for two days.They found, in the slope below the terrace walls, at depths ranging from thirty centimeters to two meters: the remains of twenty-three individuals. The depth and condition of the remains indicated burial over a period of decades. Some were clearly very old — the biological material had reduced to bone and trace organic matter. Some were more recent.A forensic anthropologist from Dehradun arrived on the third day. She examined the skeletal remains.Her report, submitted fourteen days later, noted: all twenty-three individuals showed skeletal morphology consistent with the size and development of children between the ages of approximately seven and fifteen. However, bone density and wear patterns in several cases were inconsistent with juvenile remains and suggested biological age significantly in excess of the apparent developmental stage.She wrote: these individuals had the skeletons of children and the bone wear of adults. In some cases, the bone wear suggested biological ages of forty years or more at time of death.She noted: she had not previously encountered this finding and had no framework to explain it.The causes of death were not established in most cases. Several of the more recent burials — those within the last fifteen to twenty years, based on decomposition rates — showed no evidence of trauma. They appeared to have simply stopped.Rajan Sood's remains were not found.