"They're here," he said. He said it quietly, first, because quiet was the register he had been operating in for the past hour, keeping the children calm with the volume of his voice as much as with the content of it. Then he said it again, louder, because the children needed to hear it and being heard was the most important thing he could give them right now. "The rescue team is here. I can see them on the road."
Thirty-two children on a rock shelf looked down at the road. Thirty-two children saw five people in rain gear wading through water on a mountain road below them. Thirty-two children made a sound that was not a sound Vikram had heard before and that he would not be able to describe later — the sound of relief in people who had been holding a kind of grief they didn't know they were holding, the grief of not knowing, the grief of the waiting, and now the grief was releasing and what was underneath it was just the pure fact of being alive and being found.
He looked at the children. Several of them were crying — not the fear-crying of the bus, but a different kind of crying, the kind that came after the other kind. Even Ritu, who had been the most contained of all of them for the longest time, was crying. He looked at her and she looked at him and he said: "You crossed the water by yourself," and she said "I know," and she was crying and smiling at the same time and he thought this was probably the most important thing he had learned today, that crying and smiling could happen simultaneously in a human face and both could be the right response to the same moment.
Dr. Anisha Sharma reached the slope first. She came up it faster than he would have expected from someone carrying a medical kit, with the efficiency of someone who had been moving with purpose for two hours and was not going to slow down now. She introduced herself and started moving through the children in the systematic way of someone doing a medical assessment, and within four minutes she had triaged all thirty-two, confirmed Divya's wrist fracture, dressed the head wounds properly with real bandaging material instead of scarves and torn tiffin box lids, and given a glucose biscuit each to the three youngest children who had gone slightly cold and needed the energy.
