NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 1 How I Taught My Grandmother to Read — Check Your Understanding

Book page 6–7 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

I. Complete the cause and effect table given below based on Part I of the story. Share your answers with your classmates and teacher. 1. Cause: ______ | Effect (i): The morning papers arrived late in the day and weekly magazines would come one day late. 2. Cause: The grandmother, Krishtakka, never went to school. | Effect (ii): ______ 3. Cause: ______ | Effect (iii): She was deeply interested in the story and discussed it with her friends. 4. Cause: The narrator went to a wedding for a week. | Effect (iv): ______ 5. Cause: ______ | Effect (v): The grandmother never went to school. 6. Cause: The grandmother regretted not going to school. | Effect (vi): ______

Answer

No.	Cause	Effect
1	The transport system in the village was not very good, so the bus that carried the papers, magazines and post reached late.	(i) The morning papers arrived late in the day and weekly magazines would come one day late.
2	The grandmother, Krishtakka, never went to school.	(ii) She could not read, so every Wednesday, when Karmaveera arrived, the narrator had to read the next episode of Kashi Yatre out to her.
3	(iii) She identified herself with the novel’s protagonist — an old lady longing to reach Kashi, a journey the grandmother too had never made.	She was deeply interested in the story and discussed it with her friends.
4	The narrator went to a wedding for a week.	(iv) Nobody read the new episode to the grandmother. She opened the magazine, saw the picture, understood nothing, “rubbed my hands over the pages wishing they could understand” — and was in tears when the narrator returned.
5	(v) “In those days people never considered education essential for girls” — and she had lost her mother, while her father was “a busy man” who had married again, so there was nobody to send her.	The grandmother never went to school.
6	The grandmother regretted not going to school.	(vi) She made sure that her children and grandchildren studied well — and finally decided to learn the Kannada alphabet herself at sixty-two.

Why the table is worth doing carefully: read the six rows downwards and you have the whole plot. A slow bus creates a weekly ritual; the ritual exposes a dependence; the dependence becomes unbearable the one week it is interrupted; and the shame turns into a decision. Nothing in the story is coincidence — each event is the effect of the one above it.

Q2.

II. Do you think the narrator expected to see her grandmother in tears when she returned to the village? If yes, why? If no, why not?

Answer

No, she did not expect it at all. The text says so directly: “I saw my grandmother in tears. I was surprised, for I had never seen her cry even in the most difficult situations.”

Two things make the shock complete. First, the narrator had been away enjoying herself — “We would eat and play endlessly, savouring the freedom because all the elders were busy” — so she came back in a holiday mood, expecting nothing to have changed. Second, her whole idea of her grandmother was of a woman who does not break: “a good-looking lady who was usually always smiling.” Tears did not fit that picture, which is why she asks twice, gets a nod and no reply, and then simply “forgot about it”.

Why Sudha Murty writes it this way: the reader is put exactly where the twelve-year-old is — unable to guess the cause. The delay between the tears in the afternoon and the explanation at night is what turns a small domestic scene into suspense.

Q3.

III. How might the narrator help her grandmother to fulfil her desire to learn to read and write?

Answer

By becoming her teacher — which is precisely what happens in Part II: “The next day onwards I started my tuition.”

The practical shape of that help is worth spelling out, because the story shows every step of it:

Start with the script, not with books. The grandmother’s goal is the Kannada alphabet — letters first, then words, then a whole novel.
Fix a daily time and stick to it. The lesson happens every day, and the homework is the real work: “She would read, repeat, write, and recite.”
Set a deadline the learner chooses. Saraswati Puja day during Dassara — a date with meaning, so the target is felt, not imposed.
Give her something real to read at the end. The narrator secretly buys Kashi Yatre, now published as a novel. The test is the thing the grandmother wanted in the first place.
Treat her as a student, not as a grandmother. The narrator does correct and teach her; the roles are genuinely exchanged, which is why the ending works.

Tip: When a question begins “How might…”, you are being asked to predict. Answer with a method, and where the text later confirms it, say so — that is how you show you have read ahead as well as guessed well.

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