Asha sat in the third row. She had arranged herself with the specific intentionality of someone who had thought about where they wanted to sit — not at the back, not at the front, but the third row, from which the board was visible and the teacher was visible and the whole room was visible. She had her notebook open already. She looked at Priya with the direct, interested look of a child who was ready for the day.
"Good morning," Priya said. She used the voice — the clear voice, the carrying one, the voice she had developed over three years and had used in ten days in ways she had not anticipated using it. "I'm Priya Nair. I'm your Hindi and English teacher. It's my second day." She paused. "Our second day. Let's make it a better one than the first."
There was a beat. Then — from somewhere in the middle of the room — a laugh. The real kind, unscripted, the kind that spread to the people next to it and then to the people next to them, and then it was across the room and it was thirty-two students laughing in the particular way of people who had shared something impossible and were now on the other side of it together.
Priya smiled. She opened the register. She began to call names — all thirty-two of them, in the order she had learned them, the order that was not alphabetical but was the order they had come to her at seven forty-four AM ten days ago on a rock shelf above a gorge. She called each name and each student said "present" and she made the mark and moved to the next name and each "present" was exactly that — a person, present, in the room, this room, this school, this ordinary extraordinary Thursday morning.
When she finished the register she put it down and picked up her marker and went to the board. She wrote the unit title in the clear, considered script she had been developing since teacher training. Courage and Conscience. She underlined it. She turned to face the class.
