The Significance of the Title

The title "Lost Spring" is compact but deeply meaningful, and it holds the whole spirit of the chapter.

Spring is the season of blossoming, freshness and new life — the time when the world is young and full of promise. In the title it is used as a metaphor for childhood, which is the springtime of a human life, the season meant for play, learning, growth and hope. To call it "lost" is to say that this precious season has been taken away from the children of the story before they could enjoy it.

For Saheb and the ragpickers, the spring of childhood is lost to the daily struggle for survival among heaps of garbage and, finally, to the drudgery of a job that strips away even the little freedom they had. For Mukesh and the children of Firozabad, it is lost to the heat and darkness of the glass furnaces, to failing eyesight and to a life of labour fixed by caste and poverty. In both cases the years that should have been bright with possibility are instead consumed by work, want and exploitation. The book from which the chapter is drawn even carries the subtitle "Stories of Stolen Childhood," underlining that this loss is not natural but a theft — childhood robbed by an unjust social order. …