Meera's hand went up first. "Yes," she said. "But I think conscience is harder to listen to than Atticus makes it sound. I think sometimes you hear it and you ignore it because the easier thing is louder." She paused. "And then later the harder thing turns out to have been the right thing, and you have to figure out how to live with having been quiet."
The room was very still. The specific stillness of thirty people recognising something in a sentenc+ht." She picked up her red pen — still in the drawer, exactly where she had left it. "But I also think the figuring out part is important. Conscience doesn't require perfect choices. It requires honesty about the choices you make." She looked at the class. "And the willingness to make better ones."
She opened the book to chapter twenty-two. The class opened their books. Outside the classroom window, the Pune afternoon was doing what Pune afternoons did in the pleasant season — the light on the school grounds, the sound of the junior school children somewhere below, a groundskeeper moving slowly across the lawn. Everything ordinary and real and present.
Naina stood at the back of the classroom and watched Kavitha Rao teach, and the class receive it, and the specific quality of a room where something had been broken and was being repaired — not perfectly, not without the marks of the break, but genuinely, with the full attention of everyone in it. She had been a substitute here for two weeks and she was, in a very real sense, no longer needed. The classroom had its teacher back. The job was done.
She would be sad to leave. She noticed this with the same directness she brought to everything she noticed. She would be sad to leave these students, who had shown her something about what loyalty and conscience and the difficulty of both looked like when they were real and not theoretical. She would be sad to leave Kavitha Rao, who was one of those teachers — rare in any school — who made the work look like what it actually was.
Dev caught her eye from the middle of the room. He made a small nod — the nod of someone acknowledging something that didn't need words. She nodded back. Then she turned quietly and went out the door and left the classroom to the people it belonged to.
