Chapter 2 Solutions — Lost Spring

The text points to natural disasters as a primary push factor. Saheb's family left Dhaka because storms swept away their fields and homes, leaving them with nothing to sustain themselves in their village.

Economic hardship is another key reason. The fields gave them no grain, so survival itself drove them away. As the women of Seemapuri put it, if they could feed their families and sleep without hunger in the city, they would rather be there than on land that yielded nothing.

Beyond the text, one may infer that the lure of the city — the hope of finding work, earning wages, and accessing services such as schools and hospitals — also draws rural families to urban centres. The promise of even marginal improvement over subsistence farming is enough to set entire communities in motion.

The result, as the text shows, is not prosperity but displacement: the migrants end up as squatters in places like Seemapuri, living in mud structures without sewage or running water, surviving through rag-picking rather than the 'gold' they had hoped to find.

The text describes several serious hazards. Children and adults work in dingy cells without air or light, in extremely high temperatures around glass-blowing furnaces. Prolonged exposure to this heat damages the body and drains workers' vitality.

The most lasting harm is to eyesight. The workers sit in dark hutments next to flickering oil lamps, welding coloured glass into bangles. Their eyes become more adjusted to the dark than to light outside, and as a result many workers lose their eyesight before they reach adulthood. Mukesh's grandmother watched her own husband go blind from polishing glass.

Working in such conditions is also illegal for children, yet the law is never enforced. The text notes that 20,000 children slog their daylight hours in hot furnaces, 'often losing the brightness of their eyes'. They are denied schooling, sunlight, and a healthy childhood — the 'lost spring' of the title.

The literary device here is irony (specifically verbal/situational irony). 'Saheb-e-Alam' means 'lord of the universe', yet the boy who bears this grand name is a barefoot ragpicker scrounging through garbage dumps for survival. The glaring gap between the exalted meaning of his name and the wretchedness of his actual condition creates a powerful ironic effect that highlights the cruelty of his circumstances.