"We finished chapter twenty-one, Ms. Sharma," Ananya said. "The verdict. We discussed it for about fifteen minutes after finishing the reading and Ms. Rao gave us a reflection question for the weekend." She paused. "The question was: is justice possible in a world where some lives are worth more than others?"
The question was exactly on the lesson plan. It was a good question — the kind that good teachers asked, the kind that stayed with students. Naina looked at Ananya, who was looking back at her with the pleasant, open, correct expression.
She taught the class. It went well. The students were engaged, responsive, asked good questions. At the end of the forty-five minutes she asked them to open their notebooks for a short writing exercise — five minutes, their own reflection on the verdict question — and as they bent over their notebooks she stood at the front and had the very specific feeling of looking at something that was exactly right in every detail and was therefore, in some way she couldn't yet identify, wrong.
She collected the notebooks at the end of class. They filed out — politely, in an orderly fashion, without the standard post-lesson scramble. They filed out quietly, and the last one — a boy named Rohan, whom she had noticed watching her throughout the class with attention that was different in quality from his classmates' — paused at the door and looked back.
He looked like he was going to say something. His mouth opened slightly.
"Yes?" Naina said.
Ananya appeared at his elbow, from somewhere Naina hadn't seen her go. "Rohan," she said. Pleasantly. With the pleasantness of a reminder rather than a greeting. He looked at Ananya. Then back at Naina. He smiled the right amount.
"Good class, Ms. Sharma," he said. And followed the others out.
Naina stood in the empty classroom. On the whiteboard, the date: Monday. Ms. Rao's name, half-erased from the last time she had written it herself, still visible under Naina's own. In the desk drawer: a red pen — personal, not the school's standard supply. A small hand cream. A bookmark from a Pune bookshop, marking a page in a copy of the next book on the curriculum.
People who were planning to take personal leave didn't leave their red pens behind.
She took out her own pen and, in the back of her planner, wrote: Day 1. Something is wrong with this class. Figure out what.
