Asha, for her part, tolerated this for about thirty seconds with the patience of someone who understood the emotion required and was allowing it, and then said, muffled against her mother's shoulder: "Mumma I'm okay, I told you." And then she pulled back slightly and said: "Can I tell you about the crossing? I crossed the water. Vikram held the rope at the other end. He didn't let go. And there was a helicopter and the pilot was a lady and her name was Devika and she flies in the mountains every day."
Sanjay smiled. He turned away from the doorway — he had other things to see to — and went back to the coordination office. There were still the road assessments to complete, the condition reports for the Kedarpur route, the follow-up with the hospital on Ganesh's status, the written reports that would need to go to the state authority. There were always things after the things. The work of disaster management was not the dramatic part — the dramatic part was the helicopter and the ground team and the bus on the ledge. The work was the before and the after: the before that put the systems in place so that when the dramatic part happened there were people who knew what to do, and the after that made sure it was fully documented and the next time the systems were better.
He sat at his desk. Parveen had tea waiting. He drank the tea. He opened the incident report file.
At the top of the incident report form, under Outcome, he wrote: 32 children evacuated, all uninjured or minor injuries treated. 1 adult driver evacuated, condition stable. 1 teacher, first responding — managed entire situation without emergency training. All persons accounted for.
He looked at the last line. He thought about Priya Nair, who had come to Kedarpur on her first day of school and had two hours later been managing a bus full of children above a gorge. He thought about the radio transmission — the clear, carrying voice that had reached his base station through the static and the distance and the terrain. This is Priya Nair, Class 6-B teacher, Kedarpur Valley School. We are on the mountain road above the gorge at approximately kilometer fourteen. We have thirty-two students aged eleven to fourteen. The specificity of it. The clarity. The absolute absence of anything that was not useful.
He added a line to the report: Teacher Priya Nair, first respondent and sole adult with children — demonstrated exceptional calm and crisis management under conditions with no training precedent. Recommend formal commendation and emergency response training for all school staff in mountain districts.
