Sunita Mehta saw the news alert on her phone at eight-fifteen while she was making morning chai.
The alert was from a Uttarakhand regional news application — the kind she kept on her phone because her daughter Asha was at school in Kedarpur and the news app covered Kedarpur district, and it was the kind of thing you did when your child was in a mountain school two hours from home in a region where things sometimes happened in monsoon season. The alert said: Flash flood warning — Kedarpur district gorge roads. Multiple road closures. Vehicles advised to halt.
She read it and set her phone down and picked it up again. Asha — eight years old, Class 6-B, today was her first day at Kedarpur Valley School. She had started Class 6 this year, having been enrolled in the school because Sunita's sister lived in Kedarpur and Asha would board with her during the school week. A decision that had seemed entirely reasonable in June, when the enrollment papers were signed, and which was now producing a specific quality of feeling in Sunita's chest that was not yet panic but was what panic felt like in its opening stages.
She called her sister, who lived in Kedarpur. The phone rang eight times and went to voicemail. She called again. Eight rings. Voicemail. She wrote a text message — Call me. Is Asha okay. What is happening with the flood alert? — and sent it and watched the screen for the double-tick that said it had been received and did not see it for four minutes, which was how long it took in a district whose mobile tower was probably dealing with the rain.
