She had noticed it. She was not, by nature or by training, someone who paid close attention to weather — she was from Kerala, where monsoon was simply the condition of August, not a special event. But the sky change over a mountain valley was different from the sky change over a coastal plain, and even she noticed it: the specific rapid darkening, the way the light went from grey to something closer to green at the edges, the quality of the air coming through the open windows shifting from warm-damp to cold-damp in a matter of minutes.
Ganesh had noticed it too. She had seen him look up at the sky through the windshield, seen the slight adjustment in his posture — the forward lean of someone applying more attention. He had said something under his breath that she had not caught. He had reached for the radio handset mounted on the dash — the old-style radio that connected to the school and to the district transport office — and had been in the process of pressing the call button when the sound began.
Not a crack, not a boom. A roar. The specific, undifferentiated roar that was, she would later learn, the sound of a flash flood in a mountain valley — the sound of an enormous amount of water moving very fast through a confined space. The sound of a mountain valley deciding, all at once, that it was done being a valley and was now going to be a river.
The roar came from upslope, above the road, from somewhere she couldn't see. Ganesh heard it a fraction of a second before she did because he had been driving this road for eleven years and his body knew its sounds. She saw him react — the hard brake, the wheel turned, the radio handset dropped, a word she did not understand spoken with the complete emphasis of a man who had about two seconds to act on something.
The roar became the road. The road became water.
And then the bus was moving in a direction that buses did not move.
