He was not entirely certain about the last answer. He had calculated it from what his father had told him about the 2013 flood — peak passage time, flood recession rate — and it seemed correct, but he had done it on the back of his hand with Rajan's pen and the calculation involved variables he was estimating and he was fourteen and not a hydrologist. But the answer was what it was, and giving a frightened eleven-year-old the specific and probably-correct answer was better than giving them no answer at all.
Asha had been the one asking most of the questions. She was eight — she had told him so, unprompted, approximately thirty seconds after he had sat down next to her on the shelf. She was the youngest student on the bus. She should, he thought, have been the most frightened, and she was not. She was very frightened — he could tell — but her frightened expressed itself as questions. Lots of questions. Detailed questions. He had answered all of them with the care they deserved.
"What's your name?" she had asked at some point in the question sequence.
"Vikram," he said.
"Are you the class monitor?"
"Class 9," he said. "There's no monitor system in Class 9."
"You're acting like a monitor," she said, with the specific accuracy of an eight-year-old who had identified the correct category for a thing. "You're making sure everyone is okay."
"Ms. Nair asked me to," he said.
"She's very good," Asha said. "For a new teacher."
"Yes," he said. "She is."
He was thinking about this — about Ms. Nair, who had come into the bus at seven AM and introduced herself and thirty-two minutes later had been on a tilted bus above a gorge managing thirty-two people she had known for thirty-two minutes — when he saw the first person appear on the road below the slope. Not on the road — on the water that covered the road. A person in rain gear, wading, holding a rope that was tied somewhere uphill. Then another person. Then a woman in a different kind of jacket, a medical kind. Then two more, all in rain gear, all coming from the direction of kilometer twelve, where the road was still accessible.
