NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 2 The Pot Maker — Check Your Understanding

No, it is not easy at all — and the story proves it twice over: once through Arenla’s complaint, and once through Sentila’s year of failure.

Arenla lists the labour step by step: “The riverbank, where the grey and red clay required for making pots is found, is sixteen kilometres from here. I need to climb down a sheer drop to the riverbank and my back aches from carrying the heavy load uphill all the way to the village. Pounding the stubborn clay inside bamboo cylinders to soften it, is also tedious. So many times, I’ve dropped the mould out of sheer exhaustion and have had to start all over again.”

The difficulty is not only physical. It is also a matter of fine judgement: the pots need “a final touch up to retain the required shape and to test the consistency”, and at the kiln “one had to tend the fire carefully as over firing or under firing would ruin the entire batch”. Months of work can be lost in one bad firing.

And it cannot be picked up quickly. Sentila trains under her own mother for “almost a year” and is “unable to learn anything” — she cannot even hold the lump of dough properly.

Yes — and by the end of Part I the story has already planted every reason to expect it.

• The wish is old and steady, not a whim. “Ever since Sentila became old enough to accompany her mother to the fields and forests, she began to dream of becoming a pot maker.”
• She acts on it without being told to. On days she could stay at home, “Sentila approached expert potters to learn the skill” — and kept going even when the potters “were at first amused by the little girl’s insistence”.
• She learns by watching, which is how this craft is passed on. She notices the exact things a beginner would miss: how the left hand goes into the lump, “how deftly they rotated the lump”, the “regular tap, tap of the spatula”.
• The whole village is now on her side. The council has warned Mesoba that it is Arenla’s “duty to teach her daughter the skill”. The one obstacle — her mother’s refusal — has been removed by the community.

What she still lacks is not desire but teaching and confidence, and Part II supplies both through Onula.

Yes — but for different reasons, and with different degrees of willingness.

Mesoba already supports her, and does so publicly. Summoned by the village council, he does not blame his wife or his daughter; he shields both and then commits the family in front of the elders: “Arenla has never said that she will not teach our daughter pot making; it is only that we wanted her to grow stronger after her illness. You will soon see Sentila making the best pots in the village.” That last sentence is a promise made in the open — it cannot be quietly withdrawn.

Arenla’s support, when it comes, will be reluctant. Her objection was never to her daughter; it was to the craft itself: “it has brought no joy to me and only a pittance for my troubles.” She was trying to spare Sentila the sheer drop and the aching back. But she is a dutiful member of the community, and the council has reminded her that the skill “did not ‘belong’ to any individual”. She will teach because it is her duty — which is why, in Part II, she teaches correctly but coldly, sitting “in a corner” and watching the girl fail.