Chapter 3 — Seventeen

By four in the afternoon she had identified seventeen children.Seventeen children in a village of approximately sixty adults, which was a higher ratio than she'd have expected, but which was explicable by the village's apparent insularity — no children leaving for school or marriage meant the population stayed.What was not explicable was this: she could not determine the age of any of them.This was not a figure-of-speech. She was a trained pediatric psychologist with six years of field experience. She could estimate a child's age within two years from developmental markers, from physical proportion, from the specific textures of behavior at different stages. She was good at this. She had never failed to range a child's age within an acceptable confidence interval.Every child she observed in Sunderkhal defeated this skill.It was not that they appeared older or younger than they were. It was that the developmental markers were — absent. Or present but wrong. Or present in combinations that should not occur simultaneously.The girl in the red sweater — she had found her, the one Sood had mentioned — had the physical proportions of a child between seven and ten. She had the hand coordination Meera observed as she watched her, from a distance, move stones from one pile to another in what appeared to be some kind of game or task. The coordination was adult. Not approximately adult — precisely adult, the motor control of a person who had been refining a task for decades.She wrote this in her notebook and then read it back and then wrote: possible explanation — repetitive practice of specific tasks produces adult-level motor precision.She wrote: insufficient to explain the whole picture.The boy in the blue sweater — the one she had first observed in the square — she watched him for twenty-two minutes at a distance of approximately fifteen meters. He was engaged in stacking firewood. The activity was efficient and silent. She did not hear him make a single sound in twenty-two minutes. Not a grunt of effort, not a cough, not the kind of unconscious vocalization that accompanied physical work. Silence so complete it was almost a sound itself.And the eyes.She had been trying to find an explanation for the eyes since the square.The human eye was not designed for sustained open exposure. The reflex that produced blinking — the orbicularis oculi — was involuntary at baseline rates. You could suppress blinking through conscious effort for perhaps thirty seconds before the reflex overpowered the suppression. Training could extend this; staring contests, certain meditation practices, stage performers learned to manage their blink rate. But the physiological minimum — the baseline moisture-maintenance blink — occurred every three to four seconds and could not be eliminated without consequence. Dry eyes. Redness. Irritation.None of the children had red or irritated eyes.Their eyes were uniformly clear. Uniformly dark. And in the entire afternoon of observation, she did not count a single blink from any of the seventeen children.Not one.She wrote in her notebook: Possible: medical condition affecting blink reflex? Consultation needed. Research: conditions causing reduced/absent blink rate in children.She wrote: Keratoconus, Parkinson's (adult, not applicable), Sjogren's (would cause dryness/redness). None fit.She drew a line under her notes.She wrote: seventeen children. Not one blink observed over approximately four hours of observation. Eyes show no signs of dryness or damage.She put down her pen.Outside the window of the small room Kamla Devi had allocated her — the guest room of what appeared to be the community hall — the light was going. The mountains were doing their evening thing: shadows lengthening across the terraces, the peaks going gold and then grey.She turned to pick up the satellite phone.Through the window, in the fading light, she saw three children standing in the square.Looking at her window.She had not heard them arrive.She made herself pick up the phone deliberately, slowly, and call Devraj. He answered on the second ring."I'm here," she said. "Everything is — I'm here. I'll call at six tomorrow.""Anything to report?"She looked at the three children in the square. They were still. The light was almost gone."I need you to pull whatever medical records exist for this village," she said. "And I need you to search for any literature on conditions causing complete suppression of the blink reflex in children." She paused. "In seventeen children simultaneously."A long silence on the line."Meera," Devraj said."I'm fine," she said. "I'll call at six."She hung up. She looked at the window.The square was empty.She had not heard them leave.