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What comes to your mind when you see the word LOST?

I assume you may say to lose something, you may think of the
words gone, death.

What about the word SPRING?

You may say freshness, season, flowers, rebirth, growth.

How about the word childhood?

Again, I assume you may say playfulness, toys, growth,

innocence, carefree.

Let‟s put them together. Please read what you see in the
picture.

Spring is the time of growth, and so is childhood, so we

can liken spring to childhood and vice versa. Let‟s bring back

lost and spring.

Lost is to be deprived, to lose.

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Spring is the season of growth, earth provides so there‟s a

gain.

So we have lost and gain. Today‟s lesson is called Lost

Spring, therefore we now know what the lesson is about, it‟s

about lost spring or lost childhood, childhood being deprived

or taken away.

Let‟s begin.

LOST SPRING

STORIES OF STOLEN CHILDHOOD

ANEES JUNG

About the author: Anees Jung was born in 1964 in Rourkela,

Jharkhand. She is an Indian author, journalist and columnist

for newspapers in India and abroad. Her most known work is

Unveiling India (1987).

This lesson is an excerpt from her book titled Lost

Spring: Stories of Stolen Childhood.

In this book, she investigates and explores the never -

ending poverty and traditions sanctified by caste and religion

which condemn these children to a life of exploitation. She

talks about the deplorable condition of poor children who are

deprived of childhood simply because of their socio-economic

conditions.

This lesson shows the difficulty of the street children

and how they are forced into labor early in life and denied of
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education. It is divided into two parts. Let‟s begin with the

first part which is about a young boy called Saheb.

It begins with the line „Sometimes I find a Rupee in the

garbage‟. These words were uttered by Saheb, a rag picker.

The story starts with Anees Jung‟s encounter with a young

boy called Saheb, a rag picker. Saheb would always be busy

scrounging for gold in the garbage dumps. Gold here are rags,

waste, anything thrown away by people that could be useful to

him like bottles, containers, mugs, plates, old clothes, toys,

old books as well and so on. For a poor boy like him, they are

considered gold. The author would meet him every morning and

Saheb as usual would be caught searching randomly for anything

of worth and value in the garbage dumps.

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We are told that Saheb came from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Many

storms swept away their fields and homes and that is why they

had to leave their country and came to the big city to look

for gold, meaning for livelihood.

On one of the morning encounters and while Saheb was

engaged in his daily task, the author asked him why was he

always scrounging in the garbage dumps.

Saheb told the author that he had nothing else to do. So

the author asked him to go to school instead because children

are supposed to go to school and not loiter around the streets

or in the garbage dumps. Anees Jung realized she uttered those

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words carelessly with confidence asking him to go to school

without thinking or considering the young boy‟s predicament.

It was rather hollow and inappropriate she felt. Saheb said

his reason for not attending school was because there was no

school around and that if they build one; he‟d be interested

to enroll. The author then jokingly asked him if he‟d be

interested if she started a school. To this, there seemed to

be a glow and radiance in his face and he said he would

certainly join.

After a few days, the author saw Saheb running towards

her asking if her school was ready. Anees Jung was quite

ashamed because she ignited the interest in this little boy

when she had no intentions of building one, she then told him

that it would take a long time to build one. She was

embarrassed for not keeping up with her promise but Saheb

would not be heartbroken anyway because „promises like hers

abound in every corner of his bleak world‟ meaning that Saheb

and his people were used to such promises where people or

people with powers promised to help them, such promises

abound, were in plentiful in every corner of their sad,

desolate, empty, miserable, bleak world. They were used to it

just as we are used to promises that go unfulfilled.

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So after knowing him for months, she found out that his

name was Saheb-e-Alam and she was shocked at such a name

because it meant „lord of the universe‟ and Saheb didn‟t know.

Also he would find it hard to believe with the kind of life he

lived, he‟d probably be lord of the garbage, *don‟t mention

lord of the garbage in the exams, it is just for you to

understand the irony.

Unaware of what his name meant, Saheb would roam the

streets with his friends barefooted, they would be all around

the streets like the morning birds and disappear at noon.

Eventually, the author came to recognize each of the boys

and one day asked one of them why did they not wear chappals?

The boy told her that his mother did not take them down from

the shelf. Another boy who wore shoes that did not match
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responded to her and said that even if his mother brought the

shoes down from the shelf, he would throw them away. This

perhaps shows the fact that they were used to being barefoot.

A third boy expressed his desire for shoes; he had never owned

a pair ever. Travelling across the countries, Anees Jung had

seen children walking barefoot in cities and on village roads.

She was told that walking or staying barefoot was a tradition

and not due to lack of money but she wondered if this was just

an excuse to explain the never ending state of poverty.

The author is reminded of an encounter she had with a

man from Udipi who told her that as a young boy he really

wanted a pair of shoes and when he went to school, he would

stop at an old temple where his father was a priest and pray

for a pair. 30 years later, she visited the place again and

the temple. It had become old and since people no longer

visited the place it had become desolated, barren and no

longer in use. However, in the backyard where the new priest

lived, she saw red and white plastic chairs, and there was a

boy in uniform panting who had come back from school wearing

socks and shoes threw his school bag on a folding bed. Looking
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at the boy, she remembered the prayers of the boy from Udipi

when he finally got a pair of shoes, he told the goddess to

never let him lose them. The goddess had granted his prayer

because now sons of priests could wear shoes but the condition

of rag pickers remained the same even after all these years,

they remained shoeless. While for the priests, there was a

financial improvement but there was none for the rag pickers,

they remained poor as ever.

Anees Jung‟s acquaintance with the rag pickers led her to

Seemapuri, a place on the border of Delhi yet miles away,

metaphorically. Delhi is supposed to be very developed and

advanced and Seemapuri being just outside Delhi is expec ted to

have the same status being so close yet the difference in

status, power and wealth was such that it felt Seemapuri was

far away from Delhi. Those who lived there were squatters; a

squatter is a person who unlawfully occupies an uninhabited or

unused place, they came from Bangladesh back in 1971 and if

you remember I told you the reasons why they had to leave

their country-the many storms destroyed their fields and

homes. Now, Saheb‟s family was one of the families of

squatters living at Seemapuri. When they came, Seemapuri was a

wilderness (a neglected or abandoned area, a wasteland), even

though it continued to be so but it was no longer empty, there

were 10,000 rag pickers living there, there were houses that

were poorly built, of mud, with roofs of tin and tarpaulin

(heavy waterproof cloth used as a covering.), without sewage,

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drainage or even running water. They have lived there for more

than 30 years without an identity or permits but with ration

cards that enabled their names on voters‟ lists, so they were

enrolled and that allowed them to buy grain.

Why did they live without a permit? They did so because

to them food was more important for survival, to live than an

identity, or a permit. They felt that if at the end of the day

they could feed their starving families and that they could go

to bed without an aching stomach, they would rather live there

than in the fields that were empty, destroyed that gave them

no grain, no food at all. These families pitched their tents

wherever they could find food and then they become transit or

temporary homes, therefore they kept moving.

Survival in Seemapuri meant rag-picking. Just as the

parents, the children were also partners in the business-the

business of rag picking. Saheb would sometimes find a rupee or

even a ten-rupee note. Whenever this happened, it would excite

the children and they would look for more.

Please remember that garbage to the rag pickers is gold,

it is food, and it is a means to survive. For the children, it

is something exciting, more of treasure hunting. For the

children it is wrapped in wonder, it’s always a joy and a

wonder to them looking through the dumps, there is an element

of suspense and surprise finding anything useful is like

finding treasure while for the elders, it is a means of

survival, a means to keep them alive.

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One winter morning, the author saw Saheb standing by a

fenced gate of a neighbourhood club. He was watching two young

men dressed in white playing tennis, he said that he liked the

game but he was only content with the fact that he could watch

as he knew he would never be able play it. He would however be

allowed to play on the swing when no one was around.

The author noticed that Saheb was wearing shoes; he wore

tennis shoes which were discarded by some rich boy probably

because it had a hole in one of them.

For Saheb to finally wear shoes was a dream come true but

to play tennis was beyond impossible.

There‟s a change in the story here, one morning Anees

Jung saw Saheb on his way to the milk booth. He had a steel

canister in his hand and not a garbage bag. He was now working

at a tea stall where he was paid 800 rupees along with all his

meals, when the author asked if he liked his new job, he

seemed to have lost his carefree look. The canister he carried

was way heavier metaphorically than his plastic or garbage

bag, as a rag picker he was his own master, he was a free boy,

but he lost all that and was under someone, he had lost his

freedom or the carefree life, he was no longer his own master,

the burden had become heavier.

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The second part of the story is about a young boy called

Mukesh. This part starts with „I want to drive a car‟, the „I‟

here is the young boy; he had an intense desire to drive a

car, to become a motor mechanic. On her encounter with Mukesh,

Anees Jung asked him if he knew anything about cars.

Mukesh looked straight into her eyes with the confidence

of a young man and said he would learn to drive one. His dream

looms like a mirage amidst the dust of streets that fill his

town of Firozabad, famous for its bangles. This means that his

dreams were far away from reality even though the boy was

confident, in the end he would give away to his fate.

Mukesh lived in Firozabad which was famous for glass

bangles. All the families at Firozabad were engaged in making

bangles, and such was his fate too. It was the centre of

India‟s glass-blowing industry where families there for

generations had been making bangles, working around furnaces,

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welding glass, and making bangles that it seemed they have

made it for all the women in the land, for generations. (They

made so many bangles that it seemed that they made bangles for

all the women of the world.)

Mukesh‟s family was amongst them. They were not aware

that it was illegal for children to work in glass furnaces

with high temperatures, where it was hot, with dark and closed

rooms without ventilation. The author felt that if the law was

enforced, it would rescue all those twenty thousand children

from the inhuman places where they were forced to work hard,

to slog during the daytime which eventually hampered their

visions and often ended up losing their eyesight.

Mukesh was happy to take the author to his rebuilt home,

they walked down the lanes that were full of garbage and it

gave a foul smell, they walked past homes that were falling

apart with wobbly doors, without windows, the houses were

crowded with families and animals coexisting like in primitive

state.
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Mukesh stopped in front of one such door, hit it hard

with his foot and pushed it open. They entered a half built

hut. In one part of the house that was thatched with dead

grass was a firewood stove over which sits a large pot of

sizzling spinach leaves.

On the ground were more chopped vegetables kept in large

aluminum platters. There was a frail and weak looking young

woman, who was preparing the evening meal for the family; she

was the wife of Mahesh‟s elder brother. Although she was not

much older than Mukesh, She was already respected as the

daughter-in-law of the family or the bahu. She was a

responsible person who took care of three men in the house-

her husband, Mukesh and their father. As Mukesh‟s father

entered the house, she hid behind the wall and pulled her veil

closer to her face; this was a custom that daughters-in-law

must do so before male elders.

Mukesh‟s father though being the elder who commanded more

respect in the house was but a poor bangle maker who worked

hard and toiled for years first as a tailor than a bangle

maker. He failed to renovate the house or to even provide

education to his two sons. All that he could give was passing

on what he knew best-the art of making bangles.

Mukesh‟s grandmother on her son being a bangle maker

justified by saying that it was his karam, he was destined to

make bangles. She had seen her husband become blind due to the

dust from polishing the glass bangles. She said that their
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family acquired this art of bangle making from God and so it

was their duty to carry on the tradition. Being born in a

caste of bangle makers, all their lives they have only seen

bangles. There were bangles everywhere-in every house, in

their yard and every streets of Firozabad. There were huge

spiral bunches of bangles in different colours like sunny

gold, paddy green, royal blue, pink, purple and every colour.

Further, the writer says that there were bangles in the

neglected yards also.

The author now describes the atmosphere where these

bangle makers work. They were small, dark huts where children

with their parents would sit next to lines of oil lamps whose

flames were flickering (unsteady) would join the pieces of

coloured glass into circles of bangles. (Do you remember the

video I made you watch? You can relate now.) These children

spent more in the dark than day, their eyes are not adapted to

bright sunlight and therefore they end up losing their

eyesight before they could even become adults.

The author then tells us about Savita, a young girl who

wore a drab(dull) pink dress. She sat beside an elderly woman

who was joining or soldering pieces of glass.

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Her hands moved like the tongs of a machine. The author

wondered if Savita knew the sanctity and sacredness of the

bangles she helped in making. They were considered a good

omen; they symbolized an Indian woman‟s suhaaag, a woman‟s

wifehood, the auspiciousness in marriage. She believed that

Savita would understand this auspiciousness when she would

become a bride when she would be covering her head with a red

coloured veil, hands dyed red with henna, and wearing red

coloured bangles on her wrist just like the elderly woman

sitting next to Savita who also became a bride many years ago.

The elderly woman was still wearing the glass bangles but

her eyes had lost the power to see. “Ek waqt ser bhar khana

bhi nahin khaya,” she said in a voice drained of joy, her

voice lacked enthusiasm and energy. (Ser is a unit of

measuring quantity.) These families have not eaten meals to

their hearts‟ content because of poverty and she said she

reaped it; it was the outcome of belonging or being born in

such a family. The woman‟s husband said that he did not know

anything other than making bangles and all that he had done in

life was only being able to make a house for the family to

live in which according to the author was quite an

accomplishment as the others could only dream of providing a

home for their families.

This problem of not having money or food to eat except

making bangles echoed in every household. The young men echo

the lament of their elders; these young men also went through
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the same fate what generations have had to. With the passage

of time, no improvements or developments had been made in

Firozabad. Years of mind-numbing toil killed all initiative

and the ability to dream. For years they worked so hard and

have only engaged themselves in the profession of making

bangles that they have lost any ability to do something new or

different or to even dream, all that they been doing have numb

their minds to think of any new possibility.

The author made a suggestion to a group of young men

asking them to organize themselves and form a cooperative

since these men have fallen into the hands of the cruel

middlemen who had trapped their fathers and forefathers. The

men said that if they dared to do anything, they would be the

ones caught, dragged and beaten up by the police and sent to

jail for doing something illegal. Their acts would be termed

to be unlawful. They did not have a leader amongst them who

could help them look at things differently. They were all

tired men and women. All they could do was to complain which

was a continuous process. Their poor condition led to absence

of concern for their problems.

As she listened to them, she could see two separate

worlds – one was a family who were caught in the web of

poverty, burdened by the stigma of caste in which they were

born too, it suffocated them as they could not get out of it,

they had to follow their profession they were born into and

the other never-ending cycle of sahukars, the moneylenders,

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middlemen, policemen, law keepers, bureaucrats, the government

officials and politicians. Both of these worlds had forced and

imposed the baggage, the burden on the children to follow the

family traditions and profession. The future was already

decided for them, they don‟t get to choose or have a say.

Please understand that the children‟s future are already

decided and so they get into the profession and become a part

of the vicious cycle even before they realize it. To do

anything else would mean to dare and daring was not part of

their growing up, it would only mean to challenge these two

worlds and these children were not taught to go against the

system.

The author however could see that Mukesh had the spark in

him, of being different. He repeated saying he wants to be a

motor mechanic and will learn it at the garage. The garage

however was a long way from his home; Mukesh insisted that he

would walk. She then asked him if he dreamt of flying planes.

He then became suddenly quiet and then could only say no, he

said so as he stared at the ground silent realizing that it

was beyond his reach. He was content to only dream of cars

that he saw moving rapidly down the streets of his town. Not

many planes flew over Firozabad. His dreams were confined to

him alone.

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This chapter tells us stories of the author‟s

interactions with children from deprived backgrounds, their

poor condition and life. I hope the story touches you and

makes you feel grateful and to do better in life so you can

bring a change.

So, do you see now „LOST SPRING‟ as in the spring, the

childhood of the children are lost, children are deprived of

childhood, of growth. Spring is snatched from them, the

joyful, carefree, innocent stage.

If a question comes where you need to justify the title, you

should be able to do it now.

All the best. 

The following questions came during the board exams of various

years. Please prepare on all of them.

QUESTIONS

a) “I now work in a tea stall down the road.‟

(i) Who worked in the tea stall?

(ii) How much was he paid?

(iii) Did he like the job? Support your answer with

evidence from the text.

(b) Who is Mukesh? How is he different from all the other

children? What is his dream? He has a plan to make his

dream a reality. What is it?

© In what way do the two boys, Saheb and Mukesh, represent

„stolen childhood‟?
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(d) “He is content to dream of cars that he sees hurtling

down the streets of his town.” Lost Spring is a story

about the underprivileged children of India who live in

abject poverty and yet cling to their dreams for a better

life. Do you agree?

(e) In what conditions do the bangle makers of Firozabad

live? Why cannot they come out of their state of poverty?

(f) Did the author visit Mukesh‟s home? Narrate his

experiences briefly.

(g) How do you know that the women of Seemapuri are

practical people?

(h) (i) What was the new idea put to the bangle makers by

the author?

(ii) How did they react to the idea?

(iii)Why did they react in this manner?

(j) Describe the conditions that the bangle makers of

Firozabad live in. Why cannot they leave that trade and

come out of their poverty?

(k) (i)Name the two boys who represent stolen childhood in

Lost Spring.

(ii) What do their families do for their livelihood?