The following morning, Friday, she arrived at school twenty minutes early. She went to the classroom. She left the door slightly open and sat at the desk at the back of the room — Kavitha's regular position during free periods, according to the class schedule on the wall. She waited.
The students came in at eight-ten. Talking, this time — real noise, the unguarded noise of students between periods. She heard fragments: a phone game, a disagreement about lunch, a comment about a test in another class. Normal. Real. The sound of children being children when no one was watching.
Then Ananya came in. She walked to the front, put her bag down, and said — not loudly, but clearly — "She's been asking about Ms. Rao."
The room went quiet. The kind of quiet that replaced noise instantly.
"She called Priti," Ananya said.
A girl Naina didn't know said: "Does Priti know what to say?"
"She knows," Ananya said. "But we need to be more careful. Don't give her anything to work with. If she asks directly, you don't know anything, you hope Ms. Rao comes back soon, end of story."
From the back row, Meera's voice — very quiet: "Ananya. What if—"
"Meera." Ananya's voice was still pleasant. Always pleasant. "We talked about this."
A silence.
"We talked about this," Ananya said again. Softer. Something that in a different tone might have been comforting but was not, quite.
Naina stood up. She walked to the front of the classroom, and thirty faces turned toward her with the horror of people who had forgotten they weren't alone, and then — in about two seconds, the time it took the faster ones to recover — thirty faces became the correct faces again. Pleasant. Open. The right amount of everything.
She looked at them. She looked specifically at Meera, who had not quite managed the full recovery. Something in Meera's face was still very slightly raw.
"Good morning," Naina said.
Thirty voices, together: "Good morning, Ms. Sharma."
She opened her lesson plan. She taught the class. And underneath the teaching she was thinking about the word Ananya had used: careful. Thirty children were being careful about something. The question was what they were being careful about, and the question behind that was: who had taught them to be?
