Summary of Lost Spring
About the author:
Lost Spring is written by Anees
Jung. She was born in Rourkela and spent her childhood in Hyderabad. Later on,
she went to USA. Her both parents were also writers.
In this story, she tried to share pathetic conditions
of poverty and child labour.
Summary:
I. “Sometimes I find a rupee in the garbage,’ is the
part of the story. The author comes across Saheb Alam every morning. Saheb left
his home in Dhaka long time ago. He is trying to sponge gold in the heaps of
garbage in the neighbourhood. The author asks Saheb why he does that. Saheb
mutters that he has nothing else to do. There is no school in his
neighbourhood. He is poor and works barefooted.
There are 10,000 other shoeless rag-pickers children
like Saheb. They live in Seemapuri, on the outer side of Delhi. Their houses
are in structures of mud, with roofs of tin and tarpaulin but devoid of sewage,
drainage or running water. They are squatters who came from Bangladesh back in
1971. They have lived here for more than thirty years without identity cards or
permit. They have right to vote. With ration cards they get grains. Food is
more important for survival than identity. Wherever they find food, they pitch
their tents that become transit homes. Children grow up in them, and become
partners in survival. In Seemapuri survival means rag-picking. Through the
years rag-picking has acquired the proportions of a fine art. Garbage to them
is gold. It is their daily bread and a roof over their heads.
Sometimes Saheb finds a rupee or even a ten-rupee note
in the garbage-heap. Then there is hope of finding more. Garbage has a meaning
different from what it means to their parents. For children it is wrapped in
wonder, for the elders it is a means of survival.
This morning Saheb is on his way to the milk booth. In
his hand is a steel canister. He works in a tea stall. He is paid 800 rupees
and all his meals. Saheb is no longer his master. His face has lost the
carefree look. He doesn’t seem happy working at the tea-stall.
II. ‘I Want to Drive a Car’, is second part of the
story. The author comes across Mukesh in Firozabad. His family is engaged in
bangle making, but Mukesh insists on being his own master. “I will be a motor
mechanic,” he announces. “I will learn to drive a car,” he says.
Firozabad is famous for its bangles. Every other
family in Firozabad is engaged in making bangles. Families have spent
generations working around furnaces, welding glass, making bangles for women.
None of them know that it is illegal for children like Mukesh to work in the
glass furnaces with high temperatures, in dingy cells without air and light.
They slog their daylight hours, often losing the brightness of their eyes. If
the law is enforced, it could get Mukesh and 20,000 children out of the hot
furnaces.
They walk down stinking lanes choked with garbage,
past homes that remain hovels with crumbling walls, wobbly doors and no
windows. Humans and animals, co-exist there. They enter a half-built shack. One
part of it is thatched with dead grass. A frail young woman is cooking evening
meal over a firewood stove. She is the wife of Mukesh’s elder brother and
already in charge of three men-her husband, Mukesh and their father. The father
is a poor bangle maker. Despite long years of hard labour, first as a tailor
and then as a bangle maker, he has failed to renovate a house and send his two
sons to school. All he has managed to do is teach them what he knows: the art
of making bangles.
Mukesh’s grandmother has watched her own husband go
blind with the dust from polishing the glass of bangles. She says that it is
his destiny. She implies that God-given lineage can never be broken. They have
been born in the caste of bangle makers and have seen nothing but bangles of
various colours. Boys and girls sit with fathers and mothers welding pieces of
coloured glass into circles of bangles. They work in dark hutments, next to
lines of flames of flickering oil lamps. Their eyes are more adjusted to the
dark than to the light outside. 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. She is soldering pieces of glass. Her hands move mechanically
like the tongs of a machine. Perhaps she does not know the sanctity of the
bangles she helps make. The old woman beside her has not enjoyed even one full
meal in her entire life time. Her husband is an old man with flowing beard. He
knows nothing except bangles. He has made a house for the family to live in. He
has a roof over his head.
Little has moved with time in Firozabad. Families do
not have enough to eat. They do not have money to do anything except carry on
the business of making bangles. The young men echo the lament of their elders.
They have fallen into the vicious circle of middlemen who trapped their fathers
and forefathers. Years of mind-numbing toil have killed all initiative and the
ability to dream. They are unwilling to get organised into a cooperative. They
fear that they will be hauled up by the police, beaten and dragged to jail for
doing something illegal. There is no leader among them. No one helps them to
see things differently. All of them appear tired. They talk of poverty, apathy,
greed and injustice.
Conclusion:
Here are two different worlds which are caught
in poverty. They are burdened with the stigma of caste in which they are born;
the other, a vicious circle of money-lenders, the middlemen, the policemen, the
keepers of law and politicians. Together they have imposed the baggage on the
child that he cannot put it down. 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.
The author is cheered when she senses a flash of it in Mukesh who wants to be a
motor mechanic.
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