Priya Nair had been awake since four-thirty AM.
Not because of nerves — or not only because of nerves — but because the guest house in Kedarpur where the school had arranged her accommodation had a thin wall and a rooster next door that apparently believed dawn began at four and was prepared to argue the point. She had lain on her narrow cot and watched the ceiling get gradually lighter and thought about all the ways a first day of school could go wrong, and she had arrived at the conclusion that she was as prepared as she was going to be, which was not entirely reassuring but was true.
She was twenty-six years old, had a B.Ed from MG University in Kottayam, and had spent the last three years substitute teaching in Ernakulam while she waited for a permanent posting. The posting to Kedarpur Valley School — Class 6-B, Hindi and English, in a mountain school in Uttarakhand — was not what she had imagined when she had imagined a permanent posting. She had imagined something closer to home. Kerala, possibly, or at minimum somewhere flat. Instead she had gotten Uttarakhand in August, which the school's administrative letter had described as "scenic and temperate" and which the internet had described as "peak monsoon season, frequent landslides, exercise caution."
