Injuries: six children with cuts, three of them head wounds, all of them superficial by her best assessment — bleeding freely because that was what head wounds did, but not deep. Four children with bruises on arms and shoulders. One girl — Class 7, her name tag said Divya — had a wrist that she was holding at an angle that suggested a possible fracture. Priya immobilized it with what she had — a pencil and a scarf from her bag — and told Divya it was going to be okay, that it needed support and not moving and that was what they were doing. Divya was twelve and she was crying but she was not panicking and she nodded at the instruction with the seriousness of a child who understood that instructions from an adult in this moment were to be followed.
The youngest children were Class 6 — eleven and twelve years old. Three of them were crying. One small girl named Ritu, who appeared to be the youngest on the bus, had gone beyond crying into the still, interior state of a child whose fear was too large for crying. Priya sat with her for two minutes. She held the girl's hand and she talked to her — not about the flood, not about what was happening, just talking, the low-register voice that was not the teacher's voice but the voice that came before the teacher's voice, the voice that was simply a human voice making sound to communicate: you are not alone, there is another human being here, the sound of another person is a form of safety. Ritu's hand, after two minutes, relaxed slightly from the rigid grip it had been.
The third count was for the record — her notebook, which she had in her bag, where she wrote all thirty-two names in two columns, with the injury status next to each. She did this because she needed to know who she had and what condition they were in, and because writing things down was the way her mind organised them, and because if — when — help came, she needed to be able to give a clear and accurate account of thirty-two children.
