He got on his radio. "Rudraprayag, this is Prem on the ground at kilometer fourteen. I'm with the bus driver — he's stable, concussion suspected. I need helicopter for medical evacuation. What's the bird status?"
The answer came back quickly. The helicopter had left the pad at Rudraprayag at nine-fifteen when the cloud ceiling had lifted marginally. It was inbound. Estimated arrival at the gorge: twenty-two minutes.
"Twenty-two minutes," he told her.
She nodded. The nod of someone receiving information and filing it. She looked very tired. Not the tired of someone who was giving up — the tired of someone who had been running on fabricated certainty for two and a half hours and could feel the edges of it, but who had not given up and was not going to.
"The children," she said. "Tell me when Dr. Sharma has seen them."
"I will," he said. "And the children are fine because of you." He said it the way he always said the true thing when it was also the useful thing — directly and without elaboration. "You kept thirty-two children calm and organised them and moved them to safety in a flash flood on your first day of school. I want you to know that I know that."
She looked at him. Then she looked at Ganesh and straightened the neck support slightly, the adjustment of someone who had been attending to something for a long time and was going to continue attending to it until the job was genuinely done. "Let's get him to the hospital," she said.
