‘I dream of saying: Alysha, why is your uniform so dirty today?’

Her shoes are unscuffed. Her backpack still has its plastic-y smell of newness. The uniform never even arrived. Seven-year-old Alysha D’souza has been in school for a year, but it’s as if her school life still hasn’t begun.

She was looking forward to having a big classroom to go to, with her own water bottle and tiffin to share. She’s now finished Class 1 and never sat at a bench, lost an eraser, or made friends on the bus.

“We’d placed an order for a uniform one size too big so it would last her an extra year,” says Alysha’s mother Janice D’souza, 37, an operations manager at an IT company in Mumbai. By the time schools reopen, it will probably be too small.

What hurts most, D’souza says, is that her child has lost what should have been her first brush with a sense of belonging and identity. The morning rush to get ready for school would have been her first taste of responsibility and formal routine.

Instead of waking up at 7 am and knowing which day of the week to wear her PE uniform, she’s spent a year in pyjamas.

It’s robbed D’souza of part of the experience of motherhood too. She and her husband Alwyn D’souza, 41, a learning and development manager, were looking forward to the stories their child would bring home, indicating how she was navigating her new world.

“Her uniform would have told me a lot about her day at school too,” D’souza says. “Maybe I’d find a wrapper in her pocket, an odd sketch pen mark on her skirt or muddy bottoms from all the playing.”

She’s not even thinking about the lack of cognitive and social stimulation, because she’d rather not dwell on the long-term impact of these years. What she can’t deny is the ways in which Alysha has changed. She worries about whether the internet is working. She’s learnt to keep her distance from neighbours and friends and to not touch objects brought in from the outside.

“School was meant to promote developmental growth, from speech to motor skills. But that’s completely replaced by a new sense of hyperawareness,” D’souza says. “This is an age where kids learn how to share and we’re encouraging no sharing. It feels so wrong.”

Alysha also hasn’t developed a language for many things, D’souza says. She’s not learning how to play and squabble, win and lose. What Alysha misses most is the classroom she was promised. “I like Google classes too,” she says, with all the resilience of a child. “But I want to sit with my friends, learn from the teacher in a real classroom.”

D’souza is waiting to say the words, “Why is your uniform so dirty today?” “I just tell myself, there’s always next year,” she says.