After lining up in little circles outside their schools to get their temperatures checked and hands sanitised, primary and middle school children in Delhi walked into their schools after more than 19 months on Monday. While most private schools are waiting till after Diwali to re-open for the younger children, government schools opened for them on Monday to moderate turnout. The neat organisation of their entries gave way to little groups as friends called out to each other to meet after all these months. For 11 year-old Satyam, it was the first time he had been to his government school at Lajpat Nagar and for him it was an opportunity to make new friends. “I didn’t like it at home, I didn’t have anyone to talk to. My parents would go out to work and my younger brother is small, he’s in class II. I met some of my old friends after a long time on my birthday last month. I had called them home. I’m happy that I can make new friends now,” he said, pointing to a new friend he had already made, Shivam. A group of class VII boys in a neighbouring classroom listed all the games they want to play with their friends now – football, cricket, pakdam-pakdai – when their teacher reminded them that they would not be allowed to play these now during their break-time because of Covid protocol. “Okay ma’am, then we will play Atlas,” said Kartik. Like other children, for Dipali, a class VIII student at a government school in Chirag Enclave, the primary attraction of coming back to school were her friends. “I had missed my friends a lot. There were boys in my locality who would play in the gully but my friends and I weren’t doing that. I was at home, attending my classes, watching TV, sleeping, and going for tuition classes,” she said. “I picked up one new skill: learning how to type fast on my phone,” giggled her friend Marukh. Some children were still getting used to being in school after the extended closure. Ten-year-old Sabra in the Lajpat Nagar school found herself missing her mother after having been with her all day for one-and-a-half years. For the children of the Chirag Enclave school, the first day was a re-introduction to their school. In an orientation in the auditorium, each of their teachers introduced themselves to their students, many of whom had only ever seen them on a phone screen. Restlessness caught on quickly among the children, so a game of antakshari was held for them. This was followed by a tour of the school campus for them in small groups, and the day wound up with a screening of Taare Zameen Par. At a school in Ambedkar Nagar, School Management Committee members, who are also mothers of boys in the school, checked in on the class VI and VII students who were attending the school for the first time. According to the school’s head, this was so that “they don’t feel like they’re being thrown into some strange jungle”. In every classroom in schools, the rules were re-iterated to students: keep your mask on at all times, keep your distance, do not share your lunches. “Do you know how much distance you need to keep?” asked Bijesh Sharma, principal of the Lajpat Nagar school as a class of ‘Out of School Children’ was being taught in the school’s Special Training Centre. “Do gaj ki doori,” replied 8-year-old Nishita Suri. “Do you know how much that is?” he asked, and was met with embarrassed silence. “Just try and keep as much distance as you can,” he told the class.
