The school reopened on a Thursday.
Ten days after the flood — ten days for the roads to be assessed and the lower sections to be cleared and the damaged portion of the gorge road to be given a temporary surface and the district education authority to complete their safety review and Mrs. Chamoli to arrange alternative bus routing that did not use the kilometer fourteen section, which was going to take several more weeks to fully restore. Ten days, which the students had spent at home and which Priya had spent in the guest house in Kedarpur, because going back to Delhi and coming back seemed like the wrong logic when school was reopening in ten days, and she had a classroom to prepare and lessons to plan and thirty-two students to think about.
She had thought about them. She had thought about each of them, in the careful way she now thought about people she had spent eight hours with in extreme conditions — not sentimentally, but with the specific attention of someone who had learned a great deal about thirty-two people in a very short time and who was now their teacher, and who intended to be a good one.
