Chapter 6 — What the Ground Holds

She found the first one at the edge of the eastern terrace, where the farmland dropped away into a steep slope thick with oak.She had gone walking — a legitimate reason to move through the village alone, the kind of after-lunch walk that a visiting professional might reasonably take. She had told Kamla Devi she wanted to understand the terrain for her report. Kamla Devi had agreed with the smile that agreed with everything and meant nothing.The eastern terrace was the furthest point of the village from the central square. She walked it carefully, noting the terraced walls, the dried stalks of winter crops, the quality of the soil.The stone was at the base of a terrace wall. She might have missed it if she hadn't been looking carefully at the ground — it was flat, perhaps thirty centimeters by twenty, set into the soil with the specific intentionality of placement rather than accumulation. Not a building stone. Not agricultural infrastructure.She knelt beside it.The top surface of the stone had been worked. Not with tools — with something else, something patient and repeated. A child's handprint, pressed repeatedly until the stone's surface had taken the form of it. Next to the handprint: a date. Scratched in Devanagari numerals: 1993.She looked at the stone for a long time.Then she looked at the terrace wall. She walked its length slowly, looking at the base.Three more stones. 1991. 1996. 1988.All with the same worked surface. Some with handprints. One with a name scratched so faintly she could barely read it: Sunita.She stood up. She looked at the slope below the terrace.The slope was covered in oak, dense, the undergrowth thick with leaf matter. But she could see, at intervals, more flat stones at the base of the drop. More placements.She counted what she could see from the terrace: eleven stones.She thought about panchayat records with the same thirty-one children's names in 1991 and 2011.She thought about no children leaving for education or marriage.She did not go down the slope.She went back to the community hall, walking at the pace of a person on a casual afternoon walk, and she sat on the bed and called Devraj."I need you to contact the district forensic department," she said, when he answered. "I need someone who can come to Sunderkhal with ground-penetrating radar equipment." She paused. "I need it within forty-eight hours.""Meera." His voice had gone careful in a way that meant he'd been doing his own research. "What did you find?""Stones," she said. "Marked with names and dates. The dates go back to the 1980s." She paused. "Devraj. The notes on the panchayat records — the same names appearing in 1991 and 2011. Are the names also in the 1981 records?"She heard him move to his computer.A silence that lasted long enough that she knew what it meant before he said it."The same names," he said. "1981, 1991, 2001, 2011. All four census periods. The same thirty-one children's names." He was quiet. "Meera. Children from 1981 would be adults now. They would be in the adult count, not the children's count.""I know," she said."Then the children in those records—""Are either not real children," she said, "or they are the same children. Across forty years." She looked at the window. "Devraj. Get me the forensic team. And call the district police. I don't think this is a child welfare case anymore."