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

Spirals of bangles sunny gold, paddy green, royal blue, pink, purple, every colour born out of the seven colours of the rainbow lie in mounds in unkempt yards, are piled on four-wheeled handcarts,
pushed by young men along the narrow lanes of the shanty town. And in dark hutments, next to lines of flames of flickering oil lamps, sit boys and girls with their fathers and mothers,
welding pieces of coloured glass into circles of bangles. Their eyes are more adjusted to the dark than to the light outside. That is why they often end up losing their eyesight before they become adults.