Lost Spring

By
Anees Jung
About the author
Anees Jung was born in Rourkela, India in [Link] is an author,
journalist and columnist who writes for major newspapers in
India and abroad. Her father, Nawab Hosh Yar Jung, who was a
renowned scholar and poet, worked as the musahib (adviser)
to the last Nizam (prince) of Hyderabad State. Her mother
and brother are also well-known Urdu poets.
Her most noted work, ‘Unveiling India’ (1987) was a detailed chronicle of the lives of women in
India. She went on to write many subsequent books on the same topic. She spoke to women
about their everyday lives, and wrote books like ‘Night of the New Moon: Encounters with
Muslim women in India’ (1993) and Seven Sisters (1994). Her book ‘Breaking the Silence (1997)
includes conversations on women’s lives from around the world.
 ACTIVITY

A. What are the four main

seasons and relate those four
seasons to the four age groups
( childhood, youth, middle
age, old age)

B. Focus on the spring season

and its characteristics.
 DISCUSSION
- The importance of education for us and the nation’s growth.

- Solving societal problems like corruption.

- Abolition of child labour; causes and consequences of it.

- Is child labour preventable?

- The “real” members of the society who are responsible for the backwardness of the poor people.

- The importance of living independent and being their own master.

- Why all traditions are not good and importance of breaking the bad traditions.
Theme
There is a tint of irony in this lesson. Spring signifies a season full of colour, happiness,
freshness and growth. Similarly, childhood is often used as a metaphor for spring, as it
marks a time full of joy, innocence, energy and growth. But for these children their
childhood is anything but spring-like. Lost spring here is lost happiness.
This lesson talks about children being forced to live a life of poverty and exploitation. The
writer is concerned about the exploitation of children in jobs like rag- picking and bangle
making. The main two protagonists of the chapter, Saheb-e-Alam and Mukesh don’t get
to live their childhood as they have to carry the burden of poverty and illiteracy. The
result is back-breaking hard work , dismal working conditions, acceptance of poverty and
exploitation as destiny, social stigma and hollow promises of the policy makers. Another
noteworthy point is the importance of determination and hard work in life which is the
only key to success.
These children are not given the opportunity of schooling
and are compelled to start working early in life. The author
strives hard to eliminate child labour through her book. She
propagates the education of children and enforcement of
strict laws against child labour by the government. The
callousness of society and the political class to the sufferings
of the downtrodden are shown. The message is to put an end
to child exploitation and let all children enjoy their days of
spring and joy. There is a dire need to provide these children,
opportunity to dare, dream and do and a life of dignity.
PRE-READING ACTIVITY
Some questions based on the picture in the previous slide

1. Where are the boys and what are they doing?

2. Can you guess what they are scrounging for?
3. What will they do with it?
4. Broken/ disposable pieces of glass, pieces of plastic material are some objects,
can you add some more? What can they find here?
5. In which season do trees blossom with flowers?
6. To which stage of life can we compare the season “Spring”?
7. By looking at the picture which season comes to your mind?
‘Sometimes I find a Rupee in the garbage’

“Why do you do this?” I ask Saheb whom I encounter every morning

scrounging for gold in the garbage dumps of my neighbourhood. Saheb
left his home long ago. Set amidst the green fields of Dhaka, his home is
not even a distant memory. There were many storms that swept away
their fields and homes, his mother tells him.
That’s why they left, looking for gold in the big city where he now lives.
“I have nothing else to do,” he mutters, looking away.
“Go to school,” I say glibly, realising immediately how hollow the advice must sound.
“There is no school in my neighbourhood. When they build one, I will go.”
“If I start a school, will you come?” I ask, half-joking.
“Yes,” he says, smiling broadly. A few days later I see him running up to me. “Is your school ready?”
“It takes longer to build a school,” I say, embarrassed at having made a promise that was not meant. But
promises like mine abound in every corner of his bleak world.
After months of knowing him, I ask him his name. “Saheb-e-Alam,” he announces. He does not know
what it means. If he knew its meaning — lord of the universe — he would have a hard time believing it.
Unaware of what his name represents, he roams the streets with his friends, an army of barefoot
boys who appear like the morning birds and disappear at noon. Over the months, I have come to
recognise each of them.
“Why aren’t you wearing chappals?” I ask one.
“My mother did not bring them down from the shelf,” he answers simply.
“Even if she did he will throw them off,” adds another who is wearing shoes that do not match. When
I comment on it, he shuffles his feet and says nothing. “I want shoes,” says a third boy who has never
owned a pair all his life. Travelling across the country I have seen children walking barefoot, in cities,
on village roads. It is not lack of money but a tradition to stay barefoot, is one explanation. I wonder
if this is only an excuse to explain away a perpetual state of poverty.
I remember a story a man from Udipi once told me. As a young boy he would go to school past an old
temple, where his father was a priest. He would stop briefly at
the temple and pray for a pair of shoes. Thirty years later I visited
his town and the temple, which was now drowned in an air of
desolation. In the backyard, where lived the new priest, there
were red and white plastic chairs.
A young boy dressed in a grey uniform, wearing socks and shoes, arrived panting and threw his school
bag on a folding bed. Looking at the boy, I remembered the prayer another boy had made to the goddess
when he had finally got a pair of shoes, “Let me never lose them.” The goddess had granted his prayer.
Young boys like the son of the priest now wore shoes. But many others like the rag pickers in my
neighbourhood remain shoeless.
My acquaintance with the barefoot rag pickers leads me to Seemapuri, a place on the periphery of Delhi
yet miles away from it, metaphorically. Those who live here are squatters who came from Bangladesh
back in 1971. Saheb’s family is among them. Seemapuri was then a wilderness. It still is, but it is no longer
empty. In structures of mud, with roofs of tin and tarpaulin, devoid of sewage, drainage or running water,
live 10,000 rag pickers.
They have lived here for more than thirty years without an
identity, without permits but with ration cards that get their
names on voters’ lists and enable them to buy grain. Food is
more important for survival than an identity. “If at the end of
the day we can feed our families and go to bed without an
aching stomach, we would rather live here than in the fields
that gave us no grain,” say a group of women in tattered saris
when I ask them why they left their beautiful land of green
fields and rivers.
Wherever they find food, they pitch their tents that become transit homes. Children grow up in them,
becoming partners in survival. And survival in Seemapuri means rag-picking. Through the years, it has
acquired the proportions of a fine art. Garbage to them is gold. It is their daily bread, a roof over their
heads, even if it is a leaking roof. But for a child it is even more.
“I sometimes find a rupee, even a ten-rupee note,” Saheb says, his eyes lighting up. When you can find a
silver coin in a heap of garbage, you don’t stop scrounging, for there is hope of finding more. It seems
that for children, garbage has a meaning different from what it means to their parents. For the children it
is wrapped in wonder, for the elders it is a means of survival.
One winter morning I see Saheb standing by the fenced gate of the
neighbourhood club, watching two young men dressed in white,
playing tennis. “I like the game,” he hums, content to watch it standing
behind the fence. “I go inside when no one is around,” he admits.
“The gatekeeper lets me use the swing.”
Saheb too is wearing tennis shoes that look strange over his discoloured
shirt and shorts. “Someone gave them to me,” he says in the manner
of an explanation.
The fact that they are discarded shoes of some rich boy, who perhaps refused to wear them because of
a hole in one of them, does not bother him. For one who has walked barefoot, even shoes with a hole is
a dream come true. But the game he is watching so intently is out of his reach.
This morning, Saheb is on his way to the milk booth. In his hand is a steel canister. “I now work in a tea
stall down the road,” he says, pointing in the distance. “I am paid 800 rupees and all my meals.” Does he
like the job? I ask. His face, I see, has lost the carefree look. The steel canister seems heavier than the
plastic bag he would carry so light over his shoulder. The bag was his. The canister belongs to the man
who owns the tea shop. Saheb is no longer his own master!
“I want to drive a car”
Mukesh insists on being his own master. “I will be a motor mechanic,” he announces.
“Do you know anything about cars?” I ask.
“I will learn to drive a car,” he answers, looking straight into my eyes. His dream looms like a mirage
amidst the dust of streets that fill his town Firozabad, famous for its bangles. Every other family in
Firozabad is engaged in making bangles. It is the centre of India’s glass-blowing industry where families
have spent generations working around furnaces, welding glass, making bangles for all the women in
the land it seems.
Mukesh’s family is among them. None of them know that it is illegal for children like him to work in the
glass furnaces with high temperatures, in dingy cells without air and light; that the law, if enforced,
could get him and all those 20,000 children out of the hot furnaces where they slog their daylight
hours, often losing the brightness of their eyes.
Mukesh’s eyes beam as he volunteers to take me home, which he proudly
says is being rebuilt. We walk down stinking lanes choked with garbage,
past homes that remain hovels with crumbling walls, wobbly doors,
no windows, crowded with families of humans and animals coexisting
in a primeval state.
He stops at the door of one such house, bangs a wobbly iron door with his foot, and pushes it open.
We enter a half-built shack. In one part of it, thatched with dead grass, is a firewood stove over which
sits a large vessel of sizzling spinach leaves. On the ground, in large aluminium platters, are more
chopped vegetables. A frail young woman is cooking the evening meal for the whole family. Through
eyes filled with smoke she smiles. She is the wife of Mukesh’s elder brother. Not much older in years, she
has begun to command respect as the bahu, the daughter-in-law of the house, already in charge of three
men — her husband, Mukesh and their father.
When the older man enters, she gently withdraws behind the broken wall and brings her veil closer to
her face. As custom demands, daughters-in-law must veil their faces before male elders. In this case the
elder is an impoverished bangle maker. Despite long years of
hard labour, first as a tailor, then a bangle maker, he has failed
to renovate a house, send his two sons to school. All he has
managed to do is teach them what he knows — the art of
making bangles.
“It is his karam, his destiny,” says Mukesh’s grandmother, who
has watched her own husband go blind with the dust from polishing
the glass of bangles. “Can a god-given lineage ever be broken?”
she implies.
Born in the caste of bangle makers, they have seen nothing but bangles — in the house, in the yard, in
every other house, every other yard, every street in Firozabad. Spirals of bangles — sunny gold, paddy
green, royal blue, pink, purple, every colour born out of the seven colours of the rainbow — lie in
mounds in unkempt yards, are piled on four-wheeled handcarts, pushed by young men along the
narrow lanes of the shanty town.
And in dark hutments, next to lines of flames of flickering oil lamps, sit
boys and girls with their fathers and mothers, welding pieces of coloured
glass into circles of bangles. Their eyes are more adjusted to the dark
than to the light outside. That is why they often end up losing their
eyesight before they become adults.
Savita, a young girl in a drab pink dress, sits alongside an elderly woman,
soldering pieces of glass. As her hands move mechanically like the tongs
of a machine, I wonder if she knows the sanctity of the bangles she
helps make. It symbolises an Indian woman’s suhaag, auspiciousness
in marriage.
It will dawn on her suddenly one day when her head is draped with a red veil, her hands dyed red with
henna, and red bangles rolled onto her wrists. She will then become a bride. Like the old woman
beside her who became one many years ago. She still has bangles on her wrist, but no light in her
eyes.
“Ek waqt ser bhar khana bhi nahin khaya,” she says, in a voice drained of
joy. She has not enjoyed even one full meal in her entire lifetime —
that’s what she has reaped! Her husband, an old man with a flowing
beard, says, “I know nothing except bangles. All I have done is make
a house for the family to live in.”
Hearing him, one wonders if he has achieved what many have failed
in their lifetime. He has a roof over his head!
The cry of not having money to do anything except carry on the business
of making bangles, not even enough to eat, rings in every home. The
young men echo the lament of their elders. Little has moved with time,
it seems, in Firozabad. Years of mind-numbing toil have killed all
initiative and the ability to dream.
“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. “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. There is no leader among them, no one who could help them see things differently. Their
fathers are as tired as they are. They talk endlessly in a spiral that moves from poverty to apathy to
greed and to injustice.
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. Together they have imposed the
baggage on the child that he cannot put down. Before he is aware, he accepts it as naturally as his
father. To do anything else would mean to dare.
And daring is not part of his growing up. When I sense a flash of it in Mukesh I am cheered. “I want to
be a motor mechanic,’ he repeats. He will go to a garage and learn. But the garage is a long way from
his home. “I will walk,” he insists. “Do you also dream of flying a plane?” He is suddenly silent. “No,” he
says, staring at the ground. In his small murmur there is an embarrassment that has not yet turned into
regret. He is content to dream of cars that he sees hurtling down the streets of his town. Few airplanes
fly over Firozabad.
The two distinctive
worlds in the lesson
The problems of
migrant labour
What suggestions can you give to improve the condition?
Literary devices in the lesson

Irony: Occurs when there's a marked contrast between what is said and what is meant, or between
appearance and reality based on humour.
Poverty of Saheb and the richness of the tennis club.
‘Saheb – e- Alam’ which means the Lord of the universe is contrast to what Saheb is in reality.
‘Seemapuri’ means ‘place od abundant riches’ but in reality ‘Seemapuri’ is a slum.

Hyperbole - It is a way of speaking or writing in an exaggerated manner. (For example- I've told you to
stop a thousand times.)
‘Garbage to them is gold’.
Drowned in an air of desolation
Scrounging for gold
And survival in Seemapuri means rag-picking. Through the years, it has acquired the proportions of a
fine art.

Metaphors-A metaphor is a word used in place of another to suggest a likeness or is symbolic .

‘web of poverty’.
‘Drowned in air of desolation’.
She still has bangles on her wrist but not light in her eyes.
Antithesis-Seemapuri, a place on the periphery of Delhi yet miles away from it, metaphorically.
The steel canister seems heavier than the plastic bag he would carry so lightly over his
shoulders.

Similes - A simile is a comparison between two unlike things using the words "like" or "as.“
‘As her hands moved mechanically like the tongs of the machines’.

Contrast- (For example-The weather was snowy, yet it was not cold.)
For the children it is wrapped in wonder; for the elders it is a means of survival.
She still has bangles on her wrist, but not light in her eyes.
Questions to ponder

• “For the children it is wrapped in wonder, for the elders it is a means of survival.” What kind of
life do the rag-pickers of Seemapuri lead?

• ‘Garbage to them is gold’. How do ragpickers of Seemapuri survive?

• Describe the living conditions prevailing in Firozabad. Mention why the bangle making business
does not give bangle makers a comfortable life.
ANIMATION VIDEO – PART 1
ANIMATION VIDEO – PART 2