10.

Unaware of what his name represents, he roams the streets with his
Lost Spring(Stories of Stolen Childhood) friends, an army of barefoot boys who appear like the morning birds and
About the author disappear at noon.
 Anees Jung (1944) was born in Rourkela and spent her childhood and 11. Over the months, I have come to recognise each of them.
adolescence in Hyderabad. 12. “Why aren’t you wearing chappals?” I ask one.
 She received her education in Hyderabad and in the United States of 13. “My mother did not bring them down from the shelf,” he answers
America. simply.
 Anees Jung began her career as a writer in India. 14. “Even if she did he will throw them off,” adds another who is wearing
 She has been an editor and columnist for major newspapers in India and shoes that do not match.
abroad, and has authored several books. 15. When I comment on it, he shuffles his feet and says nothing.
 The following is an excerpt from her book titled Lost Spring, Stories of 16. “I want shoes,” says a third boy who has never owned a pair all his life.
Stolen Childhood. 17. Travelling across the country I have seen children walking barefoot, in
 Here she analyses the grinding poverty and traditions which condemn these cities, on village roads.
children to a life of exploitation. 18. It is not lack of money but a tradition to stay barefoot, is one
explanation.
‘Sometimes I find a Rupee in the garbage’ 19. I wonder if this is only an excuse to explain away a perpetual state of
1. Saheb whom every morning scrounging for gold in the garbage dumps of poverty.
my neighbourhood. 20. I remember a story a man from Udipi once told me.
2. Set amidst the green fields of Dhaka, his home is not even a distant 21. As a young boy he would go to school past an old temple, where his
memory. father was a priest.
3. There were many storms that swept away their fields and homes, his 22. He would stop briefly at the temple and pray for a pair of shoes.
mother tells him. That’s why they left, looking for gold in the big city 23. Thirty years later I visited his town and the temple, which was now
where he now lives. drowned in an air of desolation.
4. “Go to school,” I say glibly, “There is no school in my neighbourhood. 24. In the backyard, where lived the new priest, there were red and white
When they build one, I will go.” plastic chairs.
5. “If I start a school, will you come?” I ask, half-joking. 25. A young boy dressed in a grey uniform, wearing socks and shoes, arrived
6. “Yes,” he says, smiling broadly. panting and threw his school bag on a folding bed.
7. A few days later I see him running up to me. “Is your school ready?” “It 26. Looking at the boy, I remembered the prayer another boy had made to
takes longer to build a school,” I say, embarrassed at having made a the goddess when he had finally got a pair of shoes, “Let me never lose
promise that was not meant. them.”
8. But promises like mine abound in every corner of his bleak world. 27. The goddess had granted his prayer.
9. After months of knowing him, I ask him his name, “Saheb-e-Alam 28. Young boys like the son of the priest now wore shoes.
(meaning — lord of the universe),” he announces. 29. But many others like the ragpickers in my neighbourhood remain
shoeless.
30. My acquaintance with the barefoot ragpickers leads me to Seemapuri, a 47. “The gatekeeper lets me use the swing.” Saheb too is wearing tennis
place on the periphery of Delhi yet miles away from it, metaphorically. shoes that look strange over his discoloured shirt and shorts.
31. Those who live here are squatters who came from Bangladesh back in 48. “Someone gave them to me,” he says in the manner of an explanation.
1971. 49. The fact that they are discarded shoes of some rich boy, who perhaps
32. Saheb’s family is among them. refused to wear them because of a hole in one of them, does not bother
33. Seemapuri was then a wilderness ,structures of mud, with roofs of tin him.
and tarpaulin, devoid of sewage, drainage or running water, live 10,000 50. For one who has walked barefoot, even shoes with a hole is a dream
ragpickers. come true.
34. They have lived here for more than thirty years without an identity, 51. But the game he is watching so intently is out of his reach.
without permits but with ration cards that get their names on voters’ 52. This morning, Saheb is on his way to the milk booth. In his hand is a steel
lists and enable them to buy grain. canister.
35. Food is more important for survival than an identity. 53. “I now work in a tea stall down the road,” he says, pointing in the
36. “If at the end of the day we can feed our families and go to bed without distance. “I am paid 800 rupees and all my meals.”
an aching stomach, we would rather live here than in the fields that 54. Does he like the job? I ask. His face, I see, has lost the carefree look.
gave us no grain,” say a group of women in tattered saris when I ask 55. The steel canister seems heavier than the plastic bag he would carry so
them why they left their beautiful land of green fields and rivers. lightly over his shoulder.
37. Wherever they find food, they pitch their tents that become transit 56. The canister belongs to the man who owns the tea shop.
homes. Children grow up in them, becoming partners in survival. 57. Saheb is no longer his own master!
38. And survival in Seemapuri means rag-picking. “I want to drive a car”
39. Garbage to them is gold.
58. Mukesh insists on being his own master.
40. It is their daily bread, a roof over their heads, even if it is a leaking roof.
59. “I will be a motor mechanic,” he announces.
41. But for a child it is even more. “I sometimes find a rupee, even a ten-
60. “Do you know anything about cars?” I ask.
rupee note,” Saheb says, his eyes lighting up.
61. “I will learn to drive a car,” he answers, looking straight into my eyes.
42. When you can find a silver coin in a heap of garbage, you don’t stop
62. His dream looms like a mirage amidst the dust of streets that fill his town
scrounging, for there is hope of finding more.
Firozabad, famous for its bangles.
43. It seems that for children, garbage has a meaning different from what it
63. Every other family in Firozabad is engaged in making bangles.
means to their parents.
64. It is the centre of India’s glass-blowing industry where families have
44. For the children it is wrapped in wonder, for the elders it is a means of
spent generations working around furnaces, welding glass, making
survival.
bangles for all the women in the land it seems.
45. One winter morning I see Saheb standing by the fenced gate of the
65. Mukesh’s family is among them.
neighbourhood club, watching two young men dressed in white, playing
66. None of them know that it is illegal for children like him to work in the
tennis.
glass furnaces with high temperatures, in dingy cells without air and
46. “I like the game,” he hums, content to watch it standing behind the
light; that the law, if enforced, could get him and all those 20,000
fence. “I go inside when no one is around,” he admits.
 children out of the hot furnaces where they slog their daylight hours, 83. Born in the caste of bangle makers, they have seen nothing but bangles
often losing the brightness of their eyes. — in the house, in the yard, in every other house, every other yard, every
67. Mukesh’s eyes beam as he volunteers to take me home, which he street in Firozabad.
proudly says is being rebuilt. 84. Spirals of bangles — sunny gold, paddy green, royal blue, pink, purple,
68. We walk down stinking lanes choked with garbage, past homes that every colour born out of the seven colours of the rainbow — lie in
remain hovels with crumbling walls, wobbly doors, no windows, crowded mounds in unkempt yards, are piled on four-wheeled handcarts, pushed
with families of humans and animals coexisting in a primeval state. by young men along the narrow lanes of the shanty town.
69. He stops at the door of one such house, bangs a wobbly iron door with 85. And in dark hutments, next to lines of flames of flickering oil lamps, sit
his foot, and pushes it open. We enter a half-built shack. boys and girls with their fathers and mothers, welding pieces of coloured
70. In one part of it, thatched with dead grass, is a firewood stove over glass into circles of bangles.
which sits a large vessel of sizzling spinach leaves. 86. Their eyes are more adjusted to the dark than to the light outside.
71. On the ground, in large aluminium platters, are more chopped 87. That is why they often end up losing their eyesight before they become
vegetables. adults.
72. A frail young woman is cooking the evening meal for the whole family. 88. Savita, a young girl in a drab pink dress, sits alongside an elderly woman,
73. Through eyes filled with smoke she smiles. soldering pieces of glass.
74. She is the wife of Mukesh’s elder brother. 89. As her hands move mechanically like the tongs of a machine, I wonder if
75. Not much older in years, she has begun to command respect as the she knows the sanctity of the bangles she helps make.
bahu, the daughter-in-law of the house, already in charge of three men 90. It symbolises an Indian woman’s suhaag, auspiciousness in marriage.
— her husband, Mukesh and their father. 91. It will dawn on her suddenly one day when her head is draped with a red
76. When the older man enters, she gently withdraws behind the broken veil, her hands dyed red with henna, and red bangles rolled onto her
wall and brings her veil closer to her face. wrists.
77. As custom demands, daughters-in-law must veil their faces before male 92. She will then become a bride.
elders. 93. Like the old woman beside her who became one many years ago.
78. In this case the elder is an impoverished bangle maker. 94. She still has bangles on her wrist, but no light in her eyes.
79. Despite long years of hard labour, first as a tailor, then a bangle maker, 95. “Ek waqt ser bhar khana bhi nahin khaya,” she says, in a voice drained
he has failed to renovate a house, send his two sons to school. of joy.
80. All he has managed to do is teach them what he knows — the art of 96. She has not enjoyed even one full meal in her entire lifetime — that’s
making bangles. what she has reaped!
81. “It is his karam, his destiny,” says Mukesh’s grandmother, who has 97. Her husband, an old man with a flowing beard, says, “I know nothing
watched her own husband go blind with the dust from polishing the glass except bangles.
of bangles. 98. All I have done is make a house for the family to live in.
82. “Can a god-given lineage ever be broken?” she implies. 99. ” Hearing him, one wonders if he has achieved what many have failed in
their lifetime.
100. The cry of not having money to do anything except carry on the 118. “I want to be a motor mechanic,’ he repeats.
business of making bangles, not even enough to eat, rings in every home. 119. He will go to a garage and learn. But the garage is a long way
101. The young men echo the lament of their elders. from his home.
102. Little has moved with time, it seems, in Firozabad. 120. “I will walk,” he insists. “Do you also dream of flying a plane?”
103. Years of mind-numbing toil have killed all initiative and the ability He is suddenly silent.
to dream. 121. “No,” he says, staring at the ground.
104. “Why not organise yourselves into a cooperative?” I ask a group 122. In his small murmur there is an embarrassment that has not yet
of young men who have fallen into the vicious circle of middlemen who turned into regret.
trapped their fathers and forefathers. 123. He is content to dream of cars that he sees hurtling down the
105. “Even if we get organised, we are the ones of their elders. streets of his town.
106. Little has moved with time, it seems, in Firozabad. 124. Few airplanes fly over Firozabad.
107. Years of mind-numbing toil have killed all initiative and the ability
to dream.
108. “Why not organise yourselves into a cooperative?” I ask a group
of young men who have fallen into the vicious circle of middlemen who
trapped their fathers and forefathers.
109. “Even if we get organised, we are the ones who will be hauled
up by the police, beaten and dragged to jail for doing something
illegal,” they say.
110. There is no leader among them, no one who could help them see
things differently.
111. Their fathers are as tired as they are.
112. They talk endlessly in a spiral that moves from poverty to apathy
to greed and to injustice.
113. Listening to them, I see two distinct worlds— one of the family,
caught in a web of poverty, burdened by the stigma of caste in which
they are born; the other a vicious circle of the sahukars, the middlemen,
the policemen, the keepers of law, the bureaucrats and the politicians.
114. Together they have imposed the baggage on the child that he
cannot put down.
115. Before he is aware, he accepts it as naturally as his father. To do
anything else would mean to dare.
116. And daring is not part of his growing up.
117. When I sense a flash of it in Mukesh I am cheered.