Vikram — 7:15 PM
His parents had come from Kedarpur — his father had driven, which meant his father had been in the car on a mountain road during a flash flood alert, which Vikram was going to process later. His mother had held his face in her hands for approximately one minute before she allowed him to speak. His father had looked at him with the expression of a man who had not been afraid — or who had been afraid in the specific way of men who had spent their careers in mountain terrain and knew how to manage fear as a professional input rather than a personal experience — and then had asked him, very specifically, what the limestone shelf had looked like and whether he had assessed the lateral stability of the rock face above it.
Vikram had told him. He had also told him about the emergency kit, and the radio, and the rope tied to the tow hook, and the crossing procedure, and the monitoring system. His father had listened to all of this with the attention of someone who was evaluating both the technical content and the person delivering it simultaneously. At the end he had said: "The tow hook anchor — that was correct. Rated for 1.5 tonnes, well above what the rope was carrying. Good judgment."
"Ms. Nair thought of the rope," Vikram said. "I thought of the anchor point."
"Good collaboration," his father said.
Later — after the hospital, after the car home — Vikram sat in his room and opened the textbook he had had on his lap when the flood hit. It was the Class 9 science text. He had been reading about water cycle systems and watershed dynamics. He looked at the diagram of a river catchment — the simplified diagram, the one that showed how rainfall in the upper catchment turned into water in the river below, the pathway from cloud to gorge in three clean arrows.
He thought about water rising one metre per hour. He thought about the arithmetic he had done on the back of his hand. He thought about the limestone shelf and its lateral stability. He thought about thirty-two people and what happened when the system you were in stopped being reliable and you had to make the system yourself from what was available.
He thought about Ms. Nair, who had made a system from what was available and the system had worked.
