Now she was reading her lesson plans. The first unit was Courage and Conscience — the stories she had selected for the class that dealt, in various ways, with the question of doing the right thing when the right thing was difficult. She had selected them because they were good stories. They were still good stories. She was going to teach them. Probably next week, assuming the road opened, assuming the school reopened. She was going to teach Class 6-B about courage and conscience, and she would have a different frame of reference for it than she had anticipated, and so would they.
She put the lesson plans down. She looked at the window. She thought about all thirty-two of them — each face, each name, the inventory she had made in her notebook — and she thought: they are fine. Dr. Sharma had confirmed, Prem had confirmed, the hospital reports had confirmed. All thirty-two. Minor injuries, treated. All fine.
She thought about Ritu, who had crossed the water and walked straight up the slope without looking back. She thought about Asha, who had positioned herself at the end of the children's queue. She thought about Vikram, who had found the emergency kit and the radio and rigged the rope and counted the children every fifteen minutes and managed thirty-two people on a rock shelf for an hour by himself and had done it so well that the ground team had commented on it to Prem, who had told Sanjay, who had told Priya.
She thought about Vikram for a long time. A fourteen-year-old who had read the situation and responded to it with the competence of someone much older and who had, at the end of the morning, when she had found him on the slope before the helicopter came, been sitting with Asha and three other Class 6 students and explaining, very patiently, the mechanics of a helicopter winch because they had asked how it worked and he had explained it correctly because his father was a geologist who had been winched off a ledge once on a field survey and had described it in detail.
She would tell that to the class when she taught Courage and Conscience. That courage was not one thing — it was many things in the same day, each of them looking different from the others but coming from the same place. She would tell them what she had learned about the place it came from. She had learned something about that today.
