Answer any four of the following questions in 30 – 40 words each :

(a) What is the poet’s childhood fear? (My Mother at Sixty-six)

(b) Why did the peddler accept the invitation extended by Edla having already declined the one from her father?

(c) Why did Gandhiji not take C.F. Andrew’s help during the Champaran campaign?

(d) Mr. Lamb and Derry were both suffering from similar problems. Comment.

(e) Why did Jack feel irritated with his daughter again and again?

(f) How was the hundredth tiger made available to the king?

(a) The poet’s childhood fear in the poem, My Mother at Sixty-Six, is that of having to lose her mother or her company. Through the poem, the poet has tried to show how the time is nearing when her fears will turn into reality, and this makes her feel sad and anxious at the same time, for her mother has already stepped into her old age and is nearing her last days. Her childhood fear seems to grip her again.

(b) The peddler accepted the invitation extended by Edla even though he refused the same when her father offered it to him, because Edla was very kind and compassionate towards him and managed to convince him into staying with them by winning his confidence. She assured the peddler that he would be given the freedom to leave the house just like he has the choice to enter it. Besides, she requested him to only stay over for the Christmas eve which the peddler couldn’t refuse because of her loving and caring manners.

(c) Gandhiji refused to take C.F. Andrew’s help during the Champaran campaign because he wanted to teach his Indian brothers a lesson in self-believe and independence. He did not want them to take any help from an Englishman in whatever struggles they were facing and hoped to fulfil his targets by way of independence and strength alone.

(d) Mr. Lamb and Derry had similar problems in life if one is to see their physical conditions. While Derry faced constant humiliation, rejection and isolation because of his burnt face, Mr. Lamb was a secluded, mocked and laughed at man with no connections with the outside world because of the loss of a limb. They both had physical deformities when it came to themselves, and they both faced similar emotional trauma at the hands of people who mattered and people who didn’t.

(e) Jack felt irritated with his daughter again and again because of several factors. Firstly, she refused to sleep in naps and wanted to be told a story, which was somewhat irritating to Jack as he also had to help his wife with the woodwork downstairs. He didn’t want her to do all of it alone as she was six months pregnant. Besides, Jack’s daughter Jo kept making faces, at times with insincerity while Jack narrated the story. She also wanted a different ending to the story he narrated because she was used to hearing only happy endings. All these reasons made Jack irritated with her over and over again.

(f) The Maharaja was of the mind that he had already killed the hundredth tiger, but trtuth was otherwise – the tiger was injured but not dead. Since the hundredth tiger could not be killed by the king despite multiple attempts, his ministers devised a scheme to let the king have the hundredth kill. They killed an old tiger themselves and presented it to the king as the one he had hunted, and the king believed them. He thought he had finally reversed the prophecy of his death in this manner.