Mukesh and the bangle makers

The second boy, Mukesh, lives in Firozabad, famous for its glass bangles. It is the centre of India's glass-blowing industry, and almost every family is engaged in making bangles. Families have spent generations working around furnaces, welding glass and making bangles for all the women in the land.

Mukesh's family is among them. About 20,000 children work around the hot furnaces in the industry, in dingy cells with no air and no light, without the light of day. It is illegal to employ children in such hazardous work, but the law is not enforced, and many children lose the brightness of their eyes, and even their eyesight, before they become adults.

In Mukesh's home, a frail young woman is cooking the evening meal for the whole family; she is the wife of Mukesh's elder brother. His father, an old bangle maker, has worked hard all his life, first as a tailor and then as a bangle maker, but has failed to renovate the house or send his two sons to school. All he has managed is to teach them the art of making bangles.

Mukesh's grandmother has watched her husband go blind with the dust from polishing the glass of bangles. 'It is his karam, his destiny,' she says. 'Can a god-given lineage ever be broken?' Born in the caste of bangle makers, they have seen nothing but bangles.

The families are trapped in a vicious circle: the sahukars (moneylenders), the middlemen, the policemen, the keepers of the law, the bureaucrats and the politicians all combine to burden the child with a weight he can never put down. If the young men organise themselves into a cooperative, they fear they will be hauled up by the police, beaten and dragged to jail for doing something illegal. There is no leader among them to help them see things differently.

But Mukesh is different. He insists on being his own master. He dares to dream: he wants to be a motor mechanic, and will walk to a garage far from home to learn. But when the author asks about driving a car or flying a plane, he says nothing: he has never seen a plane fly close to his home. His dream is as big as the world he knows. Still, the fact that he dares to dream at all sets him apart.