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NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 4 I Cannot Remember My Mother (poem) — Reflect and Respond

Book page 126 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.
I. Work in pairs. Discuss the memories from your childhood that you remember. List them and share with your classmates and teacher.
Answer

This is pair work, and the useful part is the listing: write short, concrete entries rather than sentences, so that patterns show up when you compare lists.

Method:
  • Give yourselves five minutes and write everything down without judging it. Aim for ten entries each.
  • Write each memory as a sensation, not a summary — not “holidays at my uncle’s house” but “the smell of wet coir matting when the fan was switched on”.
  • Then sort your list by sense: sound, smell, sight, taste, touch. You will almost certainly find that the earliest memories are smells and sounds and the later ones are pictures.
  • Compare lists with your partner and mark any memory that neither of you can date. Those are the ones worth reading the poem with.

Sample answer (a list one student might produce):

  • The cold of the red-oxide floor in my grandmother’s hall in summer.
  • The pressure cooker whistling three times before school.
  • Being carried home asleep from a wedding and half-waking at the gate.
  • The smell of a new school notebook when you press it open.
  • My mother singing the same two lines of a film song while plaiting my hair — I know the tune and I have never known the words.
  • Sitting on the back of a cycle, holding the seat, watching the road go backwards.
  • The taste of rainwater caught in cupped hands off the roof.
Why the book asks this first: almost nobody’s list is a list of events. It is a list of textures, smells and sounds, often without a date or a story attached. That is precisely the kind of memory Tagore’s poem is made of. Notice too how many entries in a typical list involve a mother or a grandmother without the person being the point — the tune, the plait, the food. The poem will do exactly that: it will keep the tune and lose the face.
Q2.
II. Discuss how children’s relationship with their mother can influence their emotions and memories.
Answer

Take a clear position and support it, rather than listing pleasant generalities. A strong discussion answer covers three points.

  • The earliest memories are formed before language, so they are stored as sensation. A child of two cannot narrate, but can register a voice, a smell, a rhythm of rocking. That is why what survives from the very first years is usually a lullaby or a smell rather than an incident — and why such memories feel certain even when they cannot be dated or explained.
  • A mother is a child’s first standard of safety, so her presence becomes attached to whatever surrounds it. The kitchen, a particular flower, a time of day or a song can go on producing calm for decades because they were present when calm was learnt. The feeling gets transferred to the setting. This is why grown adults are unexpectedly moved by a smell they cannot name.
  • The relationship also shapes how emotions are handled, not only what is remembered. A child who is comforted learns that distress passes; a child whose fear is dismissed learns to hide it. That pattern is carried forward into every later friendship.

And the honest complication: the influence is not automatic and not always warm. Children separated from a mother early — as Tagore was, and as the speaker of this poem is — may keep no image at all, and the relationship survives instead as fragments: a tune, a scent, a sense of being watched over. Some children remember chiefly absence. A good discussion should say this rather than pretend every memory of a mother is a happy one.

The link to the poem: Tagore’s speaker is the extreme case that proves the general point. He has lost the face entirely — “I cannot remember my mother” — and yet a hummed tune, the smell of shiuli and the stillness of the sky all reach him as her. If the relationship influenced only what we could recall, he would have nothing. The poem argues that it influences how the whole world feels.
Q3.
III. Match the words given in Column 1 with their meanings in Column 2. Column 1: 1. hover 2. hum 3. cradle 4. shiuli 5. morning service 6. gaze Column 2: (i) sing a tune with your lips closed (ii) a type of flower (coral jasmine) (iii) look steadily for a long time (iv) rituals conducted in a temple (v) linger or remain near a place (vi) a small bed for a baby
Answer
Column 1Column 2The line it belongs to in the poem
1. hover(v) linger or remain near a place“a tune seems to hover over my playthings”
2. hum(i) sing a tune with your lips closed“the tune of some song that she used to hum while rocking my cradle”
3. cradle(vi) a small bed for a baby“…while rocking my cradle”
4. shiuli(ii) a type of flower (coral jasmine)“the smell of the shiuli flowers floats in the air”
5. morning service(iv) rituals conducted in a temple“the scent of the morning service in the temple”
6. gaze(iii) look steadily for a long time“my mother’s gaze on my face / has spread all over the sky”
Did you know? The shiuli (also called parijat or harsingar, and in English coral jasmine or night-flowering jasmine) opens only after dark and drops its flowers before sunrise, so a Bengali child wakes in early autumn to find the ground under the tree already white. It flowers exactly at the time of Durga Puja. That is why Tagore can rely on it: the smell of shiuli means autumn morning, festival, childhood to his readers before the poem argues anything at all.
Look at the words the exercise has selected: two of them are sounds (hum), or near-sounds; two are objects of care (cradle, morning service); one is a smell (shiuli); and two — hover and gaze — are about something that stays near without touching. Between them they map the whole poem in advance: a mother who is present as sound, scent and a steady look, but never as a body.
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