Astha (Rows, Columns, and the Lives Between Them)

Written by Astha Chaudhary

It was winter. In one corner of my house, near the window, I had set up a chair and a table. Outside, soft sunlight filtered through, while inside, the room was still, almost holding its breath. I woke up, had breakfast and sat down to work following my usual routine.

As an ecologist, most of my work has been rooted in the field. Over the last eight to nine years, I have worked across different landscapes. My work has been closely tied to research and conservation, largely focused on human–non-human interactions. Meeting people, talking to them, sitting with them, listening to their stories. This has always been the part of my work. After fieldwork, I usually move to the data-entry phase. That day, too, I was doing the same.

I approach data entry with deep concentration. There is no room for error. One incorrect number, one misplaced tick and the entire analysis could unravel. Yet data entry is never merely a technical exercise. Alongside it runs another process, one rarely acknowledged in any manual. The lived experience of the field.

In the midst of data entry, I suddenly remembered a woman. A woman who had been attacked by a crocodile. My research was focused on elephant crop raiding, but because she was speaking about a crocodile. Her image suddenly flashes in my mind. 

Memories began surfacing slowly. I could not recall her by name alone, but her face returned to me clearly. The way she had covered her head with her pallu, the small red bindi on her forehead. I remembered how she sat on a charpai, how she reached out her hand and showed how a crocodile had taken half of it while she was transplanting paddy. She had lost one hand. And yet, she was smiling. I remember noticing that smile and not knowing what to do with it. Such conflict stories during the field work left all of us helpless. What should we ask next? How do we continue filling out the questionnaire we are holding?

As I typed a remark, I even recalled the smell of soil from her village, the distant call of birds, the tree standing in her courtyard that I had noticed during our conversation. Within minutes, these small details kept returning to me. Everything she had shared during those two hours- her struggles, her quiet hope, the resilience in her eyes- came back to me, one memory after another, as I typed. 

The woman belonged to a village within the Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, Bharaich district, India. During the monsoon months, crocodiles often venture into the fields there. These incidents are documented in reports, recorded in files under the section on human–wildlife conflict.

After reflecting on her story, I scrolled through the sheet again. Hundreds of entries had already been completed. Something shifted in me. Out of context, I stopped and began reading each entry slowly, one by one. After a pause,

Faces returned to me 

Voices returned to me 

Places returned to me 

And then, for the first time, I felt—what have I done?

Perhaps I had filled the data sheet incorrectly. I checked it again. Everything was technically accurate. Still, the feeling persisted. Something was wrong. Or something was missing. Everything that was coming back to me lived only in my mind. it was nowhere on the sheet. The sheet was clean. My thoughts were not.

There was a hollow space. So much was missing.

People’s emotions were missing.

Hours of conversations were missing.

The colours of that place, that moment, the silence, story everything had faded away. None of it had a column. These reflections left me uneasy. I could no longer justify my own work to myself. I, too, was turning people into data, much like governments so often do. 

I, too, had left out what could not be easily measured. What does not fit into boxes quietly disappears. 

I called my best friend, who is also an ecologist and a brilliant human being, and shared what I was feeling. I told her that I had turned human beings into rows and columns, that people had been reduced to a single cell. That I felt I had entered the wrong data not because the enteries were incorrect, but because the lives were incomplete.

She said, “But this is research. You will enter data according to how the questionnaire has been designed. Only then can a dataset exist.”

I knew she wasn’t wrong. This is what I have always done. This is what we are trained to do. And yet, my mind refused to settle.

I said, “Yes, I know. But how do I reduce hours of conversation with each person into a single line and a single row? They are living people. And I have placed them into an Excel sheet. Right?”

That was the first time a question truly began to trouble me

Is this the limitation of the research?

Or is it simply our convenience?

Deciding what will be asked, what will be recorded, and what will be erased. This is political, she said. Who gets heard, and who is reduced to a number? Who remains visible, and who disappears between rows?

“Are we all just data for one another?” I said aloud.

I will be data for someone. Some else will be data for me.

Somewhere, on another screen, in another Excel sheet, perhaps my own life has already become a row- clean, coded, and stripped of context.

My friend remains silent.

I fell silent. And in that silence, all those people were there.

They still remained where I had left them, waiting inside an Excel sheet on my laptop.

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