She went to Sunita's on Thursday as planned, because Sunita had been waiting longer than anyone for something to happen and deserved to know that something was happening.
Sunita had food ready, which Priya had not expected and which made her, briefly and thoroughly, want to cry. She ate first. Sunita watched with the no-nonsense attention of a woman who recognised a person who had not been eating properly.
Sunita reached under the low table and brought out a folder. Old, worn at the corners, stuffed with paper. She set it on the table with the expression of something she had been keeping and was now releasing. "I have been collecting this for two years," she said. "Every person from this settlement who entered the Wellness Scheme and died in an accident. Names, dates, circumstances, what the family was told, what the families know."
Priya opened the folder. Names. Dates. Photographs in some cases — family photographs, the kind printed at the festival photo shop. Faces. Mahesh Kale, thirty-four. Jayesh Waghmare, twenty-six. Kalpana Shinde, thirty-one, garment worker, who died in a fall from scaffolding at a building site she had never worked at. Devraj More, forty, waste-picker, whose family had been given a compensation payment so large that they had bought a flat and moved away and had never spoken publicly about how Devraj died.
"How many from this settlement specifically?"
"Thirty-one that I can document. Probably more — families who moved, people who had no one to notice." Sunita's voice was very steady. "I am not an educated woman, Dr. Vashisht. I know that. What I collected here is not what a lawyer would call evidence. But it is what I could do, and I did it, because someone had to keep count."
