Glimpses of India: Class 10 First Flight · Chapter 5

5.1 Before you read

Close your eyes and think of India. You might picture snowy peaks, a packed railway platform, a temple courtyard or a fishing boat at dawn. This unit opens three small windows on that vast country. Each is a short piece about one region and one everyday thing that shapes life there: bread in Goa, coffee in Coorg and tea in Assam. A poem, 'The Trees' by Adrienne Rich, closes the unit.

5.2 A Baker from Goa

The first glimpse is a pen-portrait: a short, affectionate sketch of one figure, the traditional village baker of Goa, known as the pader. The piece is usually credited to Lucio Rodrigues. The writer looks back at his childhood, and the charm lies in how fondly he recalls ordinary mornings. Watch for his tone: it moves between longing, hope and gentle fun.

5.2.1 Part 1: Mornings with the pader

A craft that outlived the rulers. The writer opens with a contrast. His elders miss the Portuguese era and its famous bread, yet the craft itself has outlasted the rulers. Goan villages still have their bakers, the old ovens are still fired every day, and the trade often passes from father to son. In some places the sound of the baker's bamboo staff still announces him in the morning.

Twice a day. In the writer's childhood the baker passed the house twice daily: going out with a full basket in the morning, and coming back with an empty one. The children leapt out of bed at the sound of his staff. They did not care about the loaves, which the maid bought for the family. They wanted the ring-shaped bread-bangles and, on lucky days, a special sweet bread.

A noisy, cheerful entrance. The writer remembers each visit as a small performance: the basket balanced on the baker's head, the jingling jhang, jhang of his staff striking the ground, a polite greeting for the lady of the house, and the loaves handed over to the servant. Shooed away, the children would still find a perch from which to peep into the basket, and the writer says he can still smell that bread.

A joke about brushing. The writer adds a cheeky memory: the children did not bother to brush before grabbing their bread. Why pluck a mango leaf to scrub your teeth, he asks, when a tiger never brushes and a cup of hot tea washes everything clean? He is smiling at his younger self, not giving advice.

5.2.2 Part 2: Bread, dress and accounts

Bread for every occasion. Next the writer shows how deeply bread runs through Goan life. A wedding gift is incomplete without bol, a sweet bread. A party or a feast feels empty without loaves. A mother preparing for her daughter's engagement needs sandwiches, and Christmas and other festivals call for cakes and bolinhas. So a village simply cannot do without its baker's oven (Fig. 5.3).

The baker's dress. Bakers once wore a kabai, a one-piece frock that reached the knees. By the writer's childhood they had switched to a shirt with trousers that stopped near the knee: longer than shorts, shorter than full pants. The style lives on in a joke. Even now, a man in knee-length shorts may be teased that he looks like a pader.

Accounts and comfort. The pader usually collected his money once a month, and the running account was kept as pencil marks on a wall. Baking paid well in those days. The baker's family never went hungry, and their round, well-fed bodies were proof of it. Even today, a plump person with a jackfruit-like figure may be compared to a baker.

5.2.3 Thinking about the text: the writer's tone

Tone is the writer's attitude, which you hear in the way a sentence is said. In this pen-portrait the tone keeps shifting, and that keeps the piece lively. To name a tone, ask: how does the writer feel about what he is saying?

Notice that a single paragraph can hold two tones. The writer can be nostalgic about his childhood and, in the next breath, joke about it. That mix is typical of a good memoir.

5.2.4 Writing: from notes to a picture

The textbook's writing tasks on this piece train two skills: turning notes into a paragraph, and telling a personal, vivid description from a flat, factual one.

Two ways to write about the same subject. The textbook sets a passage from this piece beside a short factual report on Goan bakers and asks what makes them different. The facts may overlap, but the writing does different jobs.

5.2.5 Group discussion: bakeries and fading crafts

5.3 Coorg

The second glimpse is a travel essay, written to make you want to visit. It is usually credited to Lokesh Abrol. Notice how it mixes hard facts (where Coorg is, when to go, how to get there) with lively, almost poetic description.

5.3.1 Land, weather and people

Where it is. Coorg, officially Kodagu, is a hilly district of Karnataka lying between Mysuru and the coastal city of Mangaluru. The writer opens with a burst of praise, describing it as a slice of heaven on earth, home to a proud warrior people, beautiful women and wild animals.

Forests, spices and coffee. Coorg is a land of evergreen rainforest, spice gardens and coffee estates. The monsoon is so heavy that few tourists come then; the pleasant season runs from September to March, when the air smells of coffee and old colonial bungalows sit half hidden under the trees.

Who the Kodavus are. The people of Coorg, the Kodavus, are described as fiercely independent. Nobody knows their origins for certain, and the essay offers two theories. One legend says some of Alexander's soldiers travelled down the coast and, unable to return home, settled here and married local women. The other theory points to Arab roots. The Kodavus' traditional long black coat with an embroidered belt, the kuppia, looks much like the kuffia of the Arabs and Kurds. Either way, their martial customs, weddings and religious rites differ from mainstream Hindu practice.

Hospitality and valour. Coorgi families welcome guests and love telling stories of the courage of their fathers and sons. The essay notes that the Coorg Regiment is among the Indian Army's most decorated, and that General K. M. Cariappa, the first Indian to lead the Indian Army, was a Kodava. It adds that the Kodavus enjoy a rare legal privilege: they may keep guns without a licence, a right no other community in India has.

5.3.2 River, adventure and wildlife

The river. The Kaveri draws its water from Coorg's hills and forests. Its clear water teems with mahseer, a large freshwater fish. Kingfishers dive for a meal, and squirrels and langurs let half-eaten fruit fall just to enjoy the splash. Mahouts scrub their elephants clean in the shallows.

Adventure. Even the laziest visitor, the writer jokes, turns into a thrill-seeker here. Rafting on the river, canoeing, rock climbing, rappelling and mountain biking are all on offer, and many walking trails draw trekkers.

Wildlife and views. Birds, bees and butterflies keep walkers company, while langurs, macaques, the slender loris and Malabar squirrels watch from the treetops. Wild elephants are another matter: the writer prefers to keep out of their way. A climb up the Brahmagiri hills opens a sweeping view of misty Coorg. A rope bridge leads to Nisargadhama, an island in the Kaveri, and at nearby Bylakuppe, one of India's largest Tibetan settlements, visitors may meet Buddhist monks in their bright robes. The essay ends by suggesting that such surprises reveal the heart of India.

The fact file. A box at the end gives practical details: the gateway town is Madikeri, the district's headquarters, and the box lists the nearest airports, railheads and road routes from Bengaluru. Such boxes are common in travel writing. The essay persuades; the fact file informs.

5.3.3 Thinking about the text: vivid phrases

The textbook asks you to find phrases in the essay that mean the same as some plain wording. Travel writers avoid flat phrases like people say or it rains a lot. Below are lively English expressions of the same kind, with our own example sentences. Learn them, then hunt for their cousins in paragraphs 2 to 7 of the essay.

5.3.4 Collocations

Some words keep company with particular partners. We say heavy rain, not strong rain, and strong tea, not powerful tea. Such natural word partnerships are called collocations. They are not rules of grammar but habits of fluent speakers, so the best way to learn them is to notice them while you read.

Try two quick tests. Fast food and a quick shower sound natural, but quick food and a fast shower sound odd. Make a mistake is right; do a mistake is a common error in Indian English.

5.4 Tea from Assam

The third glimpse is a short story with a travel feel, usually credited to the Assamese writer Arup Kumar Datta. Two school friends travel by train to a tea estate in Upper Assam, and through their conversation we learn a little history, and a couple of legends, about tea.

5.4.1 The journey and the legends

Who and where. Pranjol, who comes from Assam, studies in Delhi with his classmate Rajvir. Pranjol's father runs a tea estate in Upper Assam, and Rajvir has been invited to spend the summer holidays there.

Tea on the train. At a station a vendor calls out, offering hot tea, and the boys buy two cups. Nearly everyone in the compartment is sipping tea too. Rajvir surprises Pranjol with a startling figure for the number of cups the whole world drinks every day.

A sea of green. As the train moves on, Pranjol returns to his detective novel. Rajvir loves detective stories too, but today the view wins. Rice fields give way to tea gardens. He sees low, neatly trimmed tea bushes spreading towards forested hills, tall shade trees standing among them, pluckers who look tiny from the train, and a smoking factory far off. The writer calls the bushes a sea, a metaphor that captures both their colour and their endless spread (Fig. 5.5).

Two reactions. Rajvir cries out in delight at his first tea garden. Pranjol, who grew up on a plantation, is unimpressed. He tells his friend that Assam has more tea gardens packed together than anywhere else on earth, so he will soon have seen plenty.

Legends of tea. Rajvir has read up on tea and shares two legends. In the Chinese one, an emperor who always boiled his drinking water noticed that leaves from the burning twigs had fallen into the pot and given the water a lovely flavour. Pranjol teases him for telling tall tales, so Rajvir offers an Indian one. The Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, angry at feeling drowsy while meditating, cut off his eyelids, and ten tea plants grew from them. Their leaves, brewed in hot water, drove sleep away.

A little history. Rajvir adds that the Chinese were drinking tea thousands of years ago, and that words like tea, chai and chini come from Chinese. When tea reached Europe in the sixteenth century, he says, people took it more as a medicine than as a drink.

5.4.2 Arriving at Dhekiabari

At the estate. The train reaches Mariani junction, where Pranjol's parents meet the boys. After about an hour's drive, the car swings off the main road, crosses a cattle-bridge and enters Dhekiabari Tea Estate, which Pranjol's father manages. Acres of tea bushes, all clipped to the same height, line the gravel road. Groups of pluckers in plastic aprons, bamboo baskets slung behind them, are picking the freshly sprouted leaves.

Rajvir's homework. When a tractor towing a trailer full of leaves passes, Rajvir asks Mr Barua whether this is the second flush, the sprouting season from May to July that gives the finest tea. Mr Barua is surprised and pleased that his guest has prepared so well. Rajvir politely replies that he hopes to learn a lot more during his stay.

5.4.3 Words built from a verb and a particle

Some English words are built from a verb and a small adverb or particle such as up, down, in, out, over, through or by. The particle may come first (upkeep) or last (breakthrough), and the new word's meaning is not always the sum of its parts (Fig. 5.6). Most of these words are nouns, but a few are verbs (undergo, overtake) or adjectives (downcast).

5.4.4 -ing and -ed adjectives

Many adjectives come in pairs ending in -ing and -ed: interesting / interested, exciting / excited. The -ing form describes the thing or person that causes a feeling: The match was thrilling. The -ed form (sometimes -en) describes the person who has the feeling: The fans were thrilled. Grammarians call these participial adjectives.

A common slip is I am boring when you mean I am bored. The first says that you make other people yawn! In the same way, a frightened dog is scared, but a frightening dog scares you (Fig. 5.7).

5.4.5 Speaking and writing: tea talk and an advertisement

The textbook gives a short magazine passage on how tea entered Indian life in the nineteenth century, how Indians at first distrusted it, and how the British took to it as a national habit. Read it, collect a few facts of your own about tea, and then try the role play and the advertisement below.

5.4.6 Three glimpses side by side

The three prose pieces are very different kinds of writing, yet together they show that India's variety lives in small, everyday things: what people eat and drink, what they wear and the stories they tell.

5.5 The Trees

What is a forest with no trees in it? And if the trees are not in the forest, where have they gone? Keep that riddle in mind as you read the unit's poem, by the American poet Adrienne Rich. It describes something impossible as if it were really happening, which gives it a dreamlike, slightly eerie feel.

The poem is in free verse: four stanzas of unequal length, with no rhyme scheme and no fixed beat. Sentences often run on from one line to the next, which lets the movement of the trees feel slow and then sudden.

5.5.1 Stanza by stanza

• Stanza 1 (the empty forest). The speaker announces that the trees kept inside a house are leaving for the forest. That forest has stood empty for days and nights, and the poet shows this through what has been missing: birds have had nowhere to perch, insects nowhere to hide and the sun no shade to rest in. By morning, she says, it will be full again.
• Stanza 2 (the struggle). All through the night the trees work to free themselves. Their roots pull loose from the gaps in the floor of the veranda, the leaves press towards the glass, the small twigs go stiff with effort, and branches long cramped under the roof shuffle forward. The poet compares them to patients just let out of hospital, still dazed, making for the exit.
• Stanza 3 (the silent witness). The speaker sits inside with the veranda doors open, busy with long letters that barely mention the forest leaving her house. The night air is cool and fresh, a full moon shines in a clear sky, and the scent of leaves and lichen drifts into the rooms like a voice calling.
• Stanza 4 (the break-out). Whispers fill her mind, though by tomorrow they will be silent. Then comes a sudden command to listen, and the sound of glass shattering. The trees stumble out into the night, the wind rushes to greet them, and the moon now looks "broken like a mirror", its pieces glittering in the top branches of the tallest oak.

5.5.2 What could the poem mean?

Read literally, the poem is impossible: trees cannot walk. So we read it as a poem of symbols. The textbook offers two readings, and both work.

Why is the speaker silent? She watches the trees leave but hardly mentions it in her letters. Perhaps the event is too strange to explain, or too unexpected and awkward to put into words. Perhaps she is quietly on the trees' side and does not want to stop them. In the second reading she may herself be someone who stays inside, writing, while others break free, which makes her silence thoughtful rather than careless.

Links to other poems. In 'A Tiger in the Zoo' (Unit 2), a caged tiger dreams of the jungle; Rich's trees act on that dream and escape. In Gieve Patel's 'On Killing a Tree' (Beehive, Class 9), people set out to destroy a tree, which survives hacking and dies only when its roots are pulled out and left to wither. Patel shows human cruelty and a tree's toughness; Rich shows nature's quiet strength turning into freedom.

5.5.3 Mood, tone and poetic devices

Mood and tone. The mood moves from quiet and mysterious (the empty forest, the roots at work in the dark) to calm and fresh (the moonlit night), and finally to sudden, thrilling release (the breaking glass). The speaker's tone stays calm and matter-of-fact, which makes the strange events feel even stranger.

The sun's feet. Picture sunlight slipping through leaves onto the forest floor. The poet imagines the sun as a being whose feet are its rays, which it rests in the cool shade. In the phrase "sun bury its feet in shadow", a forest without trees gives no shade, so even the sun has nowhere to rest.

5.5.4 Homophones and homographs

The textbook's box plays with words that look alike but mean different things. Two terms help here. Homophones sound the same but differ in meaning, and usually in spelling: sea and see, knight and night. Homographs are spelt the same but differ in meaning, and sometimes in pronunciation too. The box's examples are of this second kind.

Notice the pattern in the last row. Many two-syllable homographs stress the first syllable as a noun (PRE-sent, OB-ject, RE-cord) and the second as a verb (pre-SENT, ob-JECT, re-CORD).

5.6 Board exam practice

CBSE papers test this unit through extract-based questions, short answers of about 40–50 words and long answers of about 100–120 words. Keep your textbook open for the extract questions: each one points to a passage by page and content. Model answers show one good way to answer; the key points show what an examiner looks for.