"You went into the drawer," Kavitha said. The first thing she said, after they had sat down.
"Yes. I photographed everything."
"Good." She said it simply. "I wasn't sure if anyone would find it. The letter was a hope, more than a plan."
"I read your lesson plan," Naina said. "The four-week plan you left. It was too detailed for someone planning to take leave. That was the first thing I noticed."
Something moved in Kavitha's face — the specific expression of someone being seen by someone who was paying the right kind of attention. "I wrote that plan two weeks before I left," she said. "I was still hoping it wouldn't come to that. That I would find a way to resolve it from inside." She paused. "There wasn't."
"Tell me what happened in the two weeks between the plan and leaving."
Kavitha told her. After the confrontation with Iyer, she had gone to Principal Verma. Verma had received her calmly, listened to everything, and then said: "I think you may be interpreting a routine administrative review in an unnecessarily adversarial way." She had been told to take the weekend to think about her perspective.
On Monday, she had received an email — from the school's HR system, copied to Verma and Iyer — documenting a "concern" about a recent "incident" in her classroom involving "inappropriate discussion of administrative matters in front of students." The incident was the Iyer confrontation. The language described her as having become "agitated" and "unprofessional." The first brick of the wall they were building around her.
On Wednesday, a parent — one of the six families — had filed a complaint about her marking, describing it as "inconsistent and potentially biased." The complaint was copied to the board of trustees.
On Thursday, Iyer had called her into his office and told her, very calmly, that it might be better if she took a short personal leave while the school reviewed its assessment processes. He had said this as if he were offering her something. She had understood that the alternative — left unstated — was a formal disciplinary process that would produce a record that would follow her professionally for years.
"Two to three months," Naina said. "He expected you to come back."
"After long enough that the exam period was over and the marks were submitted," Kavitha said. "After the evidence was only historical. After the families had what they wanted. And by then there would be enough on my file — the HR note, the parent complaint — that anything I said would look like the complaint of a disgruntled teacher with a documented history of conflict with management." She looked at her hands. "It was very well constructed. They've done this before,
