She had not cried. She noted this with the detached curiosity of someone observing a fact about themselves from a slight distance. She had expected to cry at some point — in the helicopter, or at the hospital, or when Prem Lal had shaken her hand and said what he had said. She had not. She had answered questions from the district authority — three hours of debriefing, a woman from the state education department who was very thorough, Sanjay Rawat who came in at the end and sat across from her with a cup of tea and asked her to go through the whole morning from the beginning. She had gone through it. She had been accurate and specific and had not embellished and had not minimised. She had given them everything she knew.
At six PM she was in a room that the hospital had set aside — a staff room, quiet, with a window that showed the mountain road that went toward Kedarpur. The road was closed. She could see the closure barrier from here. She was sitting in a plastic chair and she had her lesson plans in her lap — the plans for the first week, which she had prepared with such care in Laxmi Nagar — and she was reading them. Not for any specific reason. Just reading them. Class 6-B, first week, introduction to the term's themes.
The phone on the table was the district hospital's phone. The woman from the education department had offered it to her — her own phone still had no signal, would not have signal until she was back in Rishikesh. She had called her mother in Kottayam. Her mother had answered on the first ring and said "Priya?" in the tone that meant she had heard something and was not sure what. Priya had said: "I'm fine, Amma. First day went a bit differently than expected." Her mother had made a sound that was not a word but communicated everything it needed to communicate. Then she had asked three questions, in this order: "Are you hurt?" and "Are the children okay?" and "What happened?" and Priya had answered all three and then they had talked for twenty minutes about nothing in particular, just the sound of two people on opposite ends of a long distance who needed to hear each other's voices.
