In any Punjab village, a specific set of people hold most of what is not written down.
The oldest women, who hold the songs, the riddles, the tales, the birth and death customs, the tattoos and the genealogy of who married into where.
The granthi, who knows what is in the gurdwara's cupboard and who has been coming for how long.
The patwari, who holds the land record and knows every boundary dispute in the circle.
The oldest farmer, who remembers what was grown before, where the water was, and what the wells were like.
The retired schoolmaster, who is usually the only person in the village keeping any kind of written note and who will have thought about all of this already.
The nai and the mirasi, where they remain, who carried the names.
And the people at the edge of the village, in the settlement nobody's account includes, who have a different version of everything above and have never been asked for it.
The people who hold a village's history are specific: the oldest people, the granthi, the nai, the mirasi where there is one, the patwari, the schoolteacher and the family that keeps the shrine.
The mirasi is the one to find first. The genealogist and the singer of the family's own record, that community held the memory professionally, and very few of them are left.
Asking the sarpanch gets the official version. Asking the old woman in the third house gets the other one, and a good account carries both.