Natrajan Subramanian could not figure out why he couldn’t go to school. He kept grabbing his school satchel and made for the door. His mother Pushpa finally had to call his teacher and make her talk to Natrajan.

Natrajan is a non-verbal autistic child. For many like him the lockdown has been a major disruption in routine.

For children like him any disruption in routine is most distressful. Cooped at home, he was ready to tear his hair when his teacher asked Pushpa to create a school-like atmosphere for him at home.

So Pushpa emptied out a room, put a desk and chair in it complete with a blackboard. Natrajan enters the room all dressed in school gear complete with his satchel and works on the worksheets and tasks WhatsApped by his teacher, Urna Bose, at Hanshi Khushi .

With his mother’s assistance, Natrajan not only completes the worksheets but also helps his mother with household chores like changing pillow covers, watering the plants and generally pottering around the house. “I take him to the terrace in the evenings for a walk and some fresh air. This helps a lot too,” said Pushpa. It hasn’t been easy either for the child or the parents.

The lockdown was so sudden that these children could not be prepared, said Bose, a special educator who co-founded Hanshi Khushi, a centre for persons with special needs.

Much the same is happening with children at A Pleasurable Training Centre (APT), a school for mentally-challenged children. “We have about 65 children with autism, hearing impairment a majority with mental retardation. The main difficulty was to make them understand the lockdown. They missed school and their teachers, for the school was their second home and they shared a very special relationship with their teachers,” said Tapati Dutt of APT.

It is this dependence on teachers that makes parents call them up whenever the going gets tough.

Ratnadeep, a seven-year-old autistic child from Bansdroni, missed his two hours of football practice every day.

“That was a way to spend his energy, and doctors had advised it as therapy for him,” said Ratnadeep’s mother Anima.

During the lockdown, he had no option but to run around in his small apartment. Anima, too, tries to create a school out of her one-room apartment for her children.

“I finish my household chores in the morning and from 9.30am both my sons are attending classes.” Ratnadeep’s elder brother, a regular child, attends his online classes in one corner and Ratnadeep does his homework in another. “Studying along with his brother makes him happy,” said his mother.

But the irony is these children have got into a routine of being at home; so, when school reopens, it will mean yet another disruption.