40 days and 40 nights

Two of the younger teachers webbed a half dozen pieces of string from the teacher’s room to the windows across the hallway, and draped hundreds of dingy white washcloths across the strands. We duck under then on the way to the teacher’s room door in the morning. From down the hallway, they look like prayer flags. The walls near my desk are water-streaked a light cream zebra stripe. Praju spends all morning cleaning wet chalk residue out of her desk drawers. I sort out the power cords and Ethernet cables that we left to dry on the physics teacher’s desk. Outside the teacher’s room is a new, blocky sign that reads: DO NOT FLUSH WATER BOTTLES DOWN THE TOILET.

Because if you flush water bottles down the toilet, you will flood the teacher’s room. A pipe will become blocked and instead of funneling the rain from one side of the school to the other, water will drip out of the fluorescent lights and leak out of the seams in the ceiling, so that the teacher’s room will feel like a shimmering mirage. Full of computers. And other electronic appliances that go fizz! Bang! And you’re dead in the water.

Yesterday morning Praju and I braved the typhoon-like conditions to rocket the little car to school. We floated through puddles and whipped the rain off the windows and kept looking at the clock, worrying about being late. We ran inside, umbrellas flapping, and marked our way from the entrance to the teacher’s room with wet footprints. We slid open the door. Inside, instead of copiers awhirling and tea abrewing and bright lights! Big city! to welcome us, there were three shirt-less male teachers scooping up puddles of water with dustpans.

Our desks had been pushed to the far side of the room, up against the leaking windows, but far enough away from the eroding pillars in the center of the room to keep my computer dry. The story we’ve been told is that before the early morning class Gregory Peck Sensei noticed the walls were about to give way under a build-up of pressure, and so he casually pushed a few desks to the side. Praju’s ended up under one of the leaking ceiling tiles, and so her pile of old newspaper clippings and uncorrected essays is now one sopping wet mess. We hip-hopped our way through the drizzle to our desks where we rescued what we needed. It turns out all I really care about is my computer and my journals. If the rest of it had been swept away into the hole in the floor where we dumped all the water, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

The new vice principal found a megaphone left over from Sports Day and asked the teachers to congregate in the hallway for the morning meeting. The Music Man, hounds tooth pants rolled up to the knees, afraid to leave the room unattended, set out a fleet of buckets to catch new drips. “We will have a normal schedule,” she said, as sky grumbled and copy machine filled up with water. “Sensei, please check the students made it safely to school.”

Those of us not teaching in the first period headed back into the fray. A few large squeegee brushes were found in an old broom closet, and we used these to push the water toward the hallway. Then, the maintenance man came running up with a shovel and a hammer and he pried open a four-foot square hole in the floor next to the vice- principal’s desk. It was full of murky water and a few bright blue cords that hummed in the water like electric eels. The Sensei squeezed out washcloths, packed them around the desks like sandbags, and pushed water in this channel all the way to the huge hole. The male P.E. teachers, still shirt-less, carried buckets of dirty water to the courtyard’s garden, where they dumped them into the bushes. I walked around the room unplugging every computer, Ethernet and other cable I could find, trying to keep us all from being electrocuted. And so we toiled, in the dark room, until the rain started to let up.

I had class for the next two periods, and I looked a little bedraggled. “Why is your hair so wet? The students would ask and I’d tell them a little about the process of flood-cleanup, and how the wood floors in the teacher’s room were getting the best cleaning of their lives. Eventually I went back down to the teacher’s room where they’d tacked up blue tarps over a third of the room in such an elaborate way that any caught drips would be funneled down to the base of a few potted plants. If I weaved and limbered myself up just so, I could make it to my desk where I was shrouded in a bright blue light reflecting off the tarps strung around me like a tent. A few Sensei moved their desks out to the hallway where they conducted business like shipwreck survivors, in a sea of drying chairs with the washcloths for sails.

Then, after English club, all the desks were moved back and book stacks restored and aside from the still gaping hole in the floor (which now showed only wet dirt), the room looked back to normal. The blue tarps were disassembled and packed. The potted plants were set up around the tea station. Someone plugged in the microwave. The lights were popped back into place and turned on. Permanent damage seems to have been done to the copy machine, which is covered in a sheet of clear plastic, its inky belly open and showing what it’s made of.

I’ve been Internet-less all morning, which I’d assumed was a result of someone being afraid to flip a still-wet switch. As it turns out, one of the black cables I unplugged powers the Internet for our entire block of teachers, and when I re-assembled, I just set it to the side, unsure what it was for. Just another case where trying to prevent people from being electrocuted only fouls up the regular routine.