Summary of the Lesson

The chapter tells two connected stories of poor children whose childhoods have been stolen by poverty and forced labour.

Part I — The ragpickers of Seemapuri

The first part introduces Saheb-e-Alam, a young boy the narrator meets as he roams the streets scrounging through garbage. Saheb belongs to a community of ragpickers who live in Seemapuri, a crowded settlement on the outskirts of the city. Many of these families originally came from Bangladesh, leaving behind fields ruined by storms and floods in search of a bare living. They have no proper papers or security, but they survive because the rubbish of the city provides them with food, and occasionally with small unexpected finds.

The narrator learns that for these children garbage is not filth but a means of survival and even a source of small marvels; a coin or a usable object turned up in the heap can feel like a stroke of luck. Saheb himself, despite his hard life, is cheerful and full of longing — he dreams of things like going to school and playing games such as tennis, which he watches from outside a fenced club. His very name, which carries a grand meaning, stands in painful contrast to his ragged, barefoot condition.

Towards the end of this part, Saheb takes a job at a tea stall. He now earns a small wage and is given meals, yet the narrator notices that something has been lost. The carefree look has gone from his face. As a ragpicker he was at least his own master, roaming free; now he is bound to someone else's shop, carrying a heavy canister that is no longer his own. In gaining a wage he has lost his freedom, and his childhood has quietly slipped away.

Part II — The bangle-makers of Firozabad

The second part shifts to Firozabad, a town renowned for making glass bangles, and centres on Mukesh, a boy born into a bangle-making family. Whole families here spend their lives before hot furnaces, welding and shaping glass into the bangles that adorn women across the country. The work is exhausting and dangerous: labouring in dim rooms and searing heat, many workers, including children, gradually lose their eyesight, and they breathe air thick with dust and fumes.

The narrator describes the crushing poverty of these families. They live in cramped, unhealthy lanes, often without enough food, and generation after generation they remain trapped in the same trade. The people of Firozabad are held down not by poverty alone but by a whole system of oppression — the moneylenders who keep them in debt, the middlemen and traders who cheat them, and the officials, police and politicians who exploit them rather than protect them. Weighed down by this vicious circle, the elders have lost the will to change and have come to accept their lot as fate, telling themselves it is the destiny of their caste to make bangles. …