Saheb, the ragpicker

'Lost Spring' by Anees Jung has the subtitle 'Stories of Stolen Childhood'. It tells of two boys, Saheb and Mukesh, whose childhood is lost to poverty.

Every morning the author meets Saheb, 'scrounging for gold' in the garbage dumps of her neighbourhood. She asks him why he does it. He says he has nothing else to do. His family came from Dhaka, in Bangladesh, years ago: storms swept away their fields and homes. 'That's why they left, looking for gold in the big city where he now lives.'

She asks why he does not go to school. There is no school in his neighbourhood, he says; when they build one, he will go. Half joking, she asks whether he will come if she starts a school. 'Yes,' he says, and a few days later he asks whether the school is ready. She feels embarrassed: she had made a promise she did not mean, like so many promises made to the poor.

His full name is Saheb-e-Alam, which means 'lord of the universe'. The irony is plain: he owns almost nothing, and he does not even know what his name means.

Many of the children go barefoot. Some say it is a tradition, not lack of money; one boy says his mother did not bring his shoes down from the shelf. The author feels that this 'tradition' is only an excuse for perpetual poverty. When one boy is given a pair of discarded shoes, they are a dream come true.

The bare feet remind her of a story a man from Udipi once told her. As a boy he walked to school past an old temple, where his father was the priest, and stopped each day to pray to the goddess for a pair of shoes. Thirty years later she visits the temple and sees the new priest's son arrive from school in a grey uniform, wearing socks and shoes. That boy's prayer has been answered, and boys like him now wear shoes. But many others, like the ragpickers in her neighbourhood, remain shoeless: for them, poverty passes from one generation to the next.

Saheb lives in Seemapuri, a place on the edge of Delhi that is yet miles away from it, in a metaphorical sense. About 10,000 ragpickers live there, in structures of mud, with roofs of tin and tarpaulin, with no sewage, no drainage and no running water. They have lived there for over thirty years without an identity, but they have ration cards that let them vote and buy grain. 'Food is more important for survival than an identity.' For the children, garbage is wrapped in wonder: they may find a coin, even a ten-rupee note. For the parents, it is a means of survival: 'Garbage to them is gold.'

One winter morning the author sees Saheb standing outside a neighbourhood club, watching two young men play tennis. He is wearing tennis shoes, discarded by a rich boy, with a hole in one, but they are a dream come true for him. Tennis itself is out of his reach.

Later Saheb takes a job at a tea stall, for 800 rupees and all his meals. He carries a steel canister of milk. It seems heavier than the plastic bag he used to carry so lightly over his shoulder, because the bag was his: he was his own master. The canister belongs to the man who owns the tea shop. Saheb has lost his carefree look: he is no longer his own master.