NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 4 Vitamin-M (prose) — Check Your Understanding

His reaction is physical, wordless and tender — and that is what shows how much the day has changed him.

He arrives home “sick with worry”, and the relief comes before the sight: “the first thing he heard when he opened the front door was the gentle whirr of Grandpa snoring in his bedroom”. Then comes the passage that answers the question:

Three things in that passage do the work:

• He kneels. He does not stand at the door and check; he lowers himself to the level of the bed. It is the posture of care, not of supervision.
• He touches, cheek to cheek. All morning he has kept “a safe distance”, watching from behind bushes and cars. Now the distance collapses completely.
• He notices the small, unglamorous details — the creased skin “like lines on a map”, the smell of eucalyptus ointment and shaving cream. Earlier Grandpa was a responsibility to be tracked; here he is an old man with a face and a smell of his own.

Notice also that the hug gets no response — “Grandpa only grunted in his sleep.” Ravi is not performing affection for anyone. It is simply what he feels.

It is his way of remaining the giver in a house where everyone has decided he is a dependant.

• It reverses the roles the family has assigned him. All day he is the one who is fed, dosed, escorted and forbidden. On his birthday he hands out gifts to Ravi, to his daughter and to his son-in-law — “for Grandpa still considered them his ‘babies’”. In one phrase he restores the order of the family as he knows it.
• It is proof of the memory he is supposed to have lost. Vidya’s first reaction is to correct him — “But, Papa, Ravi’s birthday was three months ago. Have you forgotten?” — and his reply turns the accusation round: “No. But you know I always give a gift to every child in the house on my birthday. Have you forgotten?” She then “darted a stricken look at the calendar on which she had, at the beginning of the year circled the date in red and written ‘Papa’s birthday’.”
• It fits everything else we know of him. He hands his own yellow cap to a stranger in the barber shop “because it was such a hot day”. “That was typical of Grandpa, always generous.” Giving is not a birthday performance; it is his character.
• It is dignity, not display. A person who can still give is not a burden. This custom lets him keep, on one day a year, the standing he had every day in his own brick house.

He gave it as a joke with a point in it — the gentlest possible way of telling Ravi, I knew you were behind me all morning, and you were not very good at it.

The book is The Best Detective Stories, and the words that come with it are precisely aimed:

What it suggests about his awareness: he knew all along, and the evidence runs right through the story.

1. He suspected before he even left: “Has she told you not to let me go out on my own? Told you to keep me a prisoner here, has she?”
2. He extracted Ravi’s permission with a lawyer’s move — “‘Good,’ said Grandpa craftily, ‘then you’ll have no objection to my going out.’”
3. The yellow cap. Giving away the one thing that marked him out, in the middle of a tail, is not coincidence — it is a decoy, and it worked perfectly.
4. To Vidya he said, “I had a quiet morning, but I don’t know about Ravi. He just disappeared.” He knew where Ravi had been; he simply declined to say so.
5. The word “solemnly”. Nobody says a line like that seriously unless they are enjoying it enormously.

And he never accuses Ravi outright. He does not tell his daughter, does not scold, does not take away the boy’s dignity — which is exactly the courtesy the family has not been showing him.