Ganesh had arrived first, in the ambulance that met the first helicopter — directly into the ER, not via Sanjay. He was told: stable, responding to stimuli, likely concussion and minor head laceration, no indication of severe internal injury. Good outcome for a man who had hit a steering wheel at speed on a mountain road. Very good outcome.
The injured children arrived in the second and third lifts — Divya with her wrist, the children with head wounds, all of them alert, all of them with the specific look of people who had been through something and had come out the other side. Divya's wrist was confirmed as a fracture at the hospital, which was treated and cast and reported to her parents, who had arrived at the hospital from the nearest town by the time the cast was applied. Divya's mother, Sanjay noted, had held it together very well until she saw the cast and then had not held it together at all, which was entirely appropriate and which Divya appeared to understand was appropriate, because she patted her mother's hand with the patient generosity of a twelve-year-old who had just had the worst morning of her life and was now managing her parent's feelings about it.
The younger children arrived in groups and were taken to the waiting area that the hospital had opened specifically — a larger room, with the chairs and the floor and the windows, something that was not a medical space, somewhere they could simply be. Parents arrived continuously through the morning, some of them from Kedarpur, some from further. Each parent arriving to find their child was — in Sanjay's observation from the doorway of the waiting area — one of the most specific human moments he had seen in nine years of disaster management. Not the arriving-at-the-disaster moment, which was a different kind of specific. The arriving-after moment. The finding-them moment. The parent who had spent three hours not knowing, finding the child, and the child who had spent three hours in a situation beyond their experience, finding the parent. The particular way the bodies responded to each other — not always dramatic, not always the running-across-the-room version of the movies. Sometimes just a hand taken, a shoulder held, two people standing very still in the middle of a busy room.
