• Kavita Poddar gets into her car, armed with a paintbrush and a bottle of acrylic paint, at 10 minutes to seven in the morning and tells the driver: "Chalo school." Poddar passed out of the school 50 years ago.
• Reema Jalan, who works in a private firm, and her lawyer husband Vikash get up at five in the morning to drive to school from their Tollygunge home while their daughter Sunakshi is asleep.
The school: Modern High School for Girls.
The mission: paint the school's wall for a couple of hours every morning for a week.
"Don't bunk tomorrow," Reema quoted her daughter Sunakshi, a Class III student, as telling her when she returned home from office around midnight on Tuesday.
A group of alumni and parents have taken it upon themselves to paint the walls.
Since parents have to cover a 20ft high wall, mothers are seen perched atop a bamboo scaffolding, painting the wall as curious eyes from cars and buses passing by on Syed Amir Ali Avenue follow them.
"We have to be careful while climbing a ladder to reach the top of the scaffolding. And then we hear voices below saying, 'people on the first floor... don't drop any paint on us', it is so much fun," smiled Anshumala Tarafder while painting the wall blue.
All the women and Vikash Jalan - the lone male member in the group - reach the school daily at 7am though their daughters, barring a few, are on a session break.
The school authorities floated the idea about a month ago on the school website and parents showed a lot of interest, said Amita Prasad, vice-principal, Modern High School for Girls.
"We got plenty of emails from parents. After getting a positive response from them, we approached the alumni who were equally enthusiastic about the idea. In fact, they are from various batches and hardly know each other," Prasad said.
Students had painted a portion of the wall last year and the school initially thought of asking students to paint other portions, she said. "We then thought of throwing it open to parents and the alumni."
Both the parents and the alumni have among them people who are trained painters.
"Some of us know painting... then there are some who are interested in painting but haven't practised for years," said Himsikha Palit, who is the coordinator of the parents group. "We had a meeting with the school... I conceptualised the design, told them how to mix colours and assigned each one a task." Palit has been learning painting for six years.
The parents have children in various classes - from kindergarten to Class IX.
Among the alumni, there's a group spanning three generations: Vedika Sethia, 19, passed out in 2015, her mother Madhu, 44, in 1991 and her grandmother Manjula Rampuria, 68, in 1967.
Kavita Poddar, who passed out of the school in 1966, said there was a thrill in doing something together. "And you get extra energy when you do something for your school," she said.
"It sure does," said Anu Ranjita (Class of 1991), who drives her red Hyundai Verna from Rajarhat to Ballygunge and then to Sector V (after completing her quota of the day's painting) where she works in a college.
"It takes about 40 minutes to drive back... I freshen up in office. Painting is my hobby; and what better opportunity than to do something for my school," she said.
The alumni are painting a street scene while the parents have chosen the Earth Day theme with ideas from Nandalal Bose's drawings in Tagore's Sahaj Path apart from a session of birdwatching conducted in the school recently, Palit said.
Mona Shah, whose daughter Sarah is in Class V, said she did rangolis at home but this was a "much bigger canvas". "We need to do it together. I used to wonder how people painted on high walls. But three days into it and I am confident and comfortable getting up on the scaffolding."
The project has given some parents the confidence to paint their home walls. "I can now dare to do a painting on one of the walls in my daughter's room," said Indrayani Sen, whose daughter is in kindergarten.
