She had packed appropriately for the caution and come anyway, because the posting was the posting, and after three years of substituting, the posting was what mattered.
The school bus left the main road junction at seven AM. She had been told this by the principal, Mrs. Chamoli, who had also told her that the bus picked up students from three villages before reaching the school, that the driver Ganesh had been doing this route for eleven years and knew every turn by heart, and that the children of Classes 6 through 9 — thirty-two of them, aged eleven to fourteen — were "spirited but manageable." Mrs. Chamoli had said this with the specific expression of a principal who has been saying "spirited but manageable" for many years and has found it covers most situations.
Priya had arrived at the junction at six-fifty, which was ten minutes early because she was new and new things required ten extra minutes. The bus was already there — a yellow school bus of the kind that was the same everywhere, the same battered yellow, the same cracked vinyl seats, the same faint smell of diesel and children's tiffin boxes that she remembered from her own school years. Ganesh was a compact, quiet man in his forties who had looked at her paperwork and nodded and told her the seat behind his was the teacher's seat and that the children would come in from the left.
They had come in from the left — three batches from three different village stops, the bus filling gradually with the specific morning energy of children who were not fully awake yet and were therefore operating on the minimum necessary level of noise. By the third stop, she had thirty-two students from Class 6 through Class 9, their backpacks stacked in the aisle and under seats, their voices at the morning register that was two steps below full volume but moving toward it as the caffeine of the journey worked on their systems.
