Why was Tulsi chosen to guide the survey team?

When the survey team came to Belpada, they needed someone who knew every lane, well and field boundary. The headman sent them Tulsi, who was fourteen and had delivered milk to every house since she was eight.

For three days she walked ahead of the young officer with his tablet and his GPS. She knew which lane flooded in August, and which well had gone salty after the cyclone. She knew that the old banyan was a boundary, though no paper said so, because two families had agreed it in her grandfather's time.

On the fourth day the officer showed her the map on his screen. There was her village, drawn in neat lines and labelled in English: roads, houses, plots.

Tulsi looked at it for a long time.

"Where is the banyan?" she asked.

"Trees are not on the map," he said. "Only boundaries."

"The banyan is a boundary."

He frowned, and checked his papers. Then he looked at her. It was a long look, as if he had not properly seen her until then. He opened a new layer on the tablet and asked her to show him again, slowly, every place that the paper did not know.

It took the rest of the week. When the final map came, the banyan was on it, a small green circle with a name in English beside it that Tulsi could not read. Her grandfather could, a little. He traced it with his finger and said it was the first time the village had been written down the way it really was.