The school looked like money.
Not the loud, announcing kind — not gold gates or a marble entrance lobby. The quiet, certain kind. The kind that expressed itself in the width of the corridors, the quality of the glass in the windows, the specific green of the lawns that only came from consistent and expensive maintenance. Prometheus Academy occupied a large corner plot in Koregaon Park, Pune, and it had the settled confidence of an institution that had been where it was for long enough that it had stopped thinking about it.
Naina Sharma had taken the substitute assignment because she needed the money and the Pune transfer was available and her situation in Mumbai had become the kind of complicated that required distance. She was twenty-seven, had a B.Ed and a literature degree from Fergusson College, had been teaching English for three years, and had never in those three years taken a mid-semester substitute assignment. Those were difficult in ways that fresh-start assignments were not — you walked into a relationship between a class and a teacher that already had its shape, and you were required to fit yourself into that shape without disrupting it. Like being asked to sit in a chair that had already moulded itself to someone else's body.
She had been told, by the school's administrative officer Mr. Iyer, that Ms. Kavitha Rao — Class 9-B's English teacher — had taken sudden leave for personal reasons and the substitute assignment would run for an unspecified duration. "We expect her back soon," Mr. Iyer had said on the phone, in the careful tone of someone reading from a script. "A month, possibly less. The students are excellent. Class 9-B is our best academic section."
