नमस्कार.
Hope you have solved the assignment on 'THE LAST LESSON', today will study
'Lost Spring',Stories of Stolen Childhood
by Anees Jung, together.
Focus points;
SAHEB-E-ALAM'S PROFILE
“Why do you do this?” Saheb, every morning scrounging for gold in the garbage dumps.
Saheb left Set amidst the green fields of Dhaka. 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.
“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.
“Is your school ready?”
But promises like mine abound in every corner of his bleak world.
Saheb-e-Alam,” means lord of the universe. He roams the streets with his friends, an army of barefoot boys who appear like the morning birds and disappear at Noonan.
“Why aren’t you wearing chappals?” I ask one.
“My mother did not bring them down from the shelf,” he answers simply.
“I've 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.
Young boys like the son of the priest now wore shoes. But many others like the ragpickers in my neighbourhood remain shoeless.
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. In structures of mud, with roofs of tin and tarpaulin, devoid of sewage, drainage or running water.
Seemapuri means rag-picking,t 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.
10,000 ragpickers, living 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,”
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.
Garbage, for children,it is wrapped in wonder, for the elders it is a means of survival.
Badminton “I like the game,” he hums, content to watch it standing behind the fence. 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,”
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 “I am paid 800 rupees and all my meals.”
Does he like the job? His face, has lost the carefree look.
The steel canister seems heavier than the plastic bag he would carry so lightly 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!
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.
MUKESH'S PROFILE
“Mukesh wants to drive a car”
He 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,”
Mukesh’s family is among the generations working around furnaces, welding glass, making bangles for all the women in the land it seems.
None of them know that it is illegal for 20000 children like him to work in the glass furnaces with high temperatures, in dingy cells without air and light,slogging their daylight hours, often losing the brightness of their eyes.
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.
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. W
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 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 k a r a m , 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 a 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.
“Ek waqt ser bhar khana bhi nahin khaya,” She has not enjoyed even one full meal in her entire lifetime — that’s what she has reaped!
One wonders if he has achieved what many have failed in their lifetime. He has a roof over his head!
“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.
The other, a vicious circle of 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.
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 wayfrom his home. “I will walk,”
NOTE:
The story of these two ill-fated impoverished boys living in the unhygienic, uncared part of Delhi NCR, Seemapuri casts light on the unfortunate people crushed between the lost citizenship and iniquitous poverty.
They have variegated unsolved issues, they don't have their own identity, though their names could be found on electoral roll records and even if they possess the ration cards ,they live in exile.
They are cursed fates, their never ceasing worst war is just meant for two times meal. Even if they could fill themselves, they feel most lucky on this planet. They could not even think of a Pucca roof on their heads. Generations after generations have become the living example of utmost injustice, petulent perversity.
When nations fail in maintaining and nurturing their subjects wholeheartedly, then it becomes an universal challenge. Many a times such unattended poverty-stricken populace migrates illegally to the neibouring countries. There they become the national challenge and remain buried under felonious identity. They bear all the mutilation and exploitation. They live a degringolade life worst than stray animals.
The vicious nexus of the sahukaras, the local politicians, the Middle-men act their shameless leverages on these ill-fateds.
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