NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 4 Vitamin-M (prose) — Critical Reflection

(i) C. nostalgic. Read only the extract. Grandpa “often spoke longingly” of a house he no longer lives in, and everything he names is in the past — the mango tree, the garden, the dusk silence. Longing for a remembered place is exactly what nostalgic means.

• A. regretful — he regrets nothing he did; he is not blaming himself.
• B. apologetic — there is no apology anywhere in the extract; the tone is the opposite, almost boastful (“Such a wonderful place…!”).
• D. wistful is the near miss, and you should be able to say why it is second best. Wistful means a vague, gentle sadness for something unlikely to happen. Grandpa is not vague — he is specific about a real house he owned, and his feeling is warm rather than faint. The exclamation marks give him energy, not melancholy.

(ii) Grandpa hated the busy and noisy city life because it was the exact opposite of the quiet, open home he had run for himself — a house with a mango tree and a garden, “so quiet that at dusk you can even hear a leaf fall”, whereas the city offered him only “noise and bustle” and a “poky little flat” in which he was not even allowed to step out alone.

(iii) He did not come by choice — he was brought. The extract itself gives the immediate cause: “Grandpa had slipped and fallen in the garden late one evening while he was pottering around and lain outside all night because there was no one at home to help him up.” After that night, as the story tells us, it “made Ravi’s mother lock up the tiny brick house and bring Grandpa to live with them”, because he was “getting too old to live on his own”. Grandpa’s own summary is blunt: “First you force me to come and live with you in this poky little flat.” So the reason is his daughter’s fear for his safety after a serious fall, not any change of heart in him.

(iv) D. pin drop silence. The phrase measures how quiet the place is by naming the smallest possible sound that can still be heard there. A falling leaf makes almost no noise, so if you can hear one, the silence is total — which is precisely what “pin drop silence” means. B is a trap: leaves do fall in autumn, but the sentence is about hearing, not about the season; nothing in the extract mentions autumn or the passing of time.

(v)

(i) C. calm. The extract supplies the adverb itself — “answered Grandpa coolly”. Coolly means without heat or agitation, which is calm. Test the others against the extract: he offers no apology (A); he is teasing rather than wounding, and takes care not to expose Ravi to his mother (B); and he is not puzzled — he is the only person in the room who knows exactly what happened (D). The contrast is placed right beside him: Grandpa is cool, while “Ravi just looked confused and embarrassed” and, a line later, his mother speaks “impatiently”.

(ii) Because every word Grandpa said was true, and Ravi could not defend himself with the truth. He had disappeared; he had spent the morning crawling out of a park, hiding behind a banyan tree and chasing a stranger’s cap. To explain where he had been, he would have had to confess that he let Grandpa go out alone and then spied on him — breaking his promise to his mother twice over. On top of that, the wording is too precise to be accidental (“instead of staying at home to look after me like you told him to”), so Ravi realises, in that moment, that Grandpa knows. He is caught between a lie he cannot tell and a truth he dare not tell.

(iii) Ravi’s mother was impatient because she assumed her father’s memory had failed him yet again — she thought he had forgotten that Ravi’s birthday was over three months ago and was giving a gift for no reason, which to her was one more proof that he needed the “Vitamin-M” she had joked about that morning.

(iv) FALSE. Answer strictly from the extract and the reply that follows it. Grandpa had not forgotten anything — the gift had nothing to do with Ravi’s birthday. His answer is, “No. But you know I always give a gift to every child in the house on my birthday. Have you forgotten?” It is his own birthday, and it is his daughter who has forgotten, though “she had, at the beginning of the year circled the date in red and written ‘Papa’s birthday’.” The statement inverts the facts of the story.

(v) Because he knew exactly what kind of morning Ravi had had, and saying so outright would have given the boy away. “I don’t know about Ravi” is irony — the speaker says the opposite of what he means, and expects one listener to catch it. Grandpa had spotted the tail, shaken it off with the cap, and come home first; his “I don’t know” is really I could tell you every step of it. He uses it for three purposes at once: to enjoy his small victory, to warn Ravi that his secret is not a secret, and — most importantly — to avoid reporting him to his mother. It also does something for Grandpa himself: a man who can time a joke that precisely is not a man whose memory has gone.

The story sets up the charge in its first paragraph — the wish for a memory pill for “old people” — and then quietly demolishes it. Two pieces of evidence are enough, and these are the strongest.

1. His recall of chess history is exact and detailed. Playing with Ravi he says, “That’s the opening move Karpov made when he played against the computer,” and “You’re making the same mistake that Bobby Fischer made in his historic match against Spassky.” These are specific games, specific players, specific moves. Ravi himself is struck by it: “How can he remember all those thousands of chess games and still forget the names of people he meets often!”
2. He remembers his own birthday and the family custom attached to it, when his daughter does not. He arrives with gift-wrapped parcels for Ravi, for Vidya and for Ravi’s father, and explains, “you know I always give a gift to every child in the house on my birthday.” Vidya 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’.” She had written it down and still forgot; he had not written it down and did not.

A third, if you want it: he leaves the flat alone in a city he dislikes, walks to the park, the tea stall, the barber shop and the bus stop, crosses a busy road and gets home before Ravi does — and then recalls the morning well enough to tease his grandson about “trailing a suspect”.

Two traits each, with the line that proves them.

Because every single item on that menu was banned at home for the sake of Grandpa’s health, and Ravi was the one in charge of him that day.

Ravi’s worry has two layers. The first is genuine concern: Grandpa had been hospitalised only a month earlier after a mix-up with his medicines, so a restricted diet is not fussiness. The second is self-preservation — his mother had left him with one instruction, and if anything went wrong the fault would be his. His own body registers the panic: “Ravi himself felt hot, bothered and close to fainting by the time Grandpa finished his snack.”

No — it was extremely difficult, and the story is deliberately built as a chain of small disasters, each worse than the last.

• At the park: he had to “crouch behind a bush trimmed in the shape of an elephant”, was spotted at once by a small child (“Are you playing hide and seek? I can show you a better place to hide”), was then threatened by the child’s mother with an umbrella, and finally suffered “the ultimate humiliation… when Ravi had to crawl out of the park on all fours, ducking behind the benches, creeping behind the bushes”.
• At the tea stall: hiding behind a banyan tree put him among the vendors, who assumed he was a rival hawker — “This area is booked by us… There’s no room for any new vendors” — and “a group of them surrounded Ravi”. He had to give up his position and duck behind a shiny silver car instead.
• Crossing the road: he watched Grandpa “zigzagging through the trafÏc”, heard “the screech of brakes”, and shut his eyes in panic.
• At the barber shop: he dived into the wrong door and was “evicted a moment later amidst a volley of feminine shrieks because it happened to be a Ladies’ Hairdressing Salon”.
• At the bus stop: he had to sprint and jump on to a moving bus and then push his way to the front, panting.

Physically he was “hot, bothered and close to fainting”; socially he was scolded, surrounded and thrown out; and at the end of all of it he had been following the wrong man.

In favour. He shows the two qualities that matter most in a tail — persistence and an eye for detail. He never abandons the chase, even when it means sprinting after a moving bus: “Sprinting for the bus and jumping on to it seconds before it started would have deterred a lesser detective, but not Ravi.” And in a crowded bus, with the wrong head in front of him, he still picks out the one clue that any casual observer would miss: “But wait, the cap had a coffee-strain on its rim just like Grandpa’s!” He also thinks about the person he is following, not only the task — he keeps “a safe distance” precisely so that Grandpa will not be hurt.

Against. He is seen by almost everyone he tries to hide from. A small child spots him instantly and offers him a better hiding place; the boy’s mother threatens him with an umbrella; the vendors surround him; a whole salon evicts him. Worse, he commits the basic error of tracking the disguise instead of the man — he follows a yellow cap on to a bus and finds “a total stranger”. He loses his subject completely, and has to go home not knowing where his grandfather is.

The story itself delivers the verdict, and it is on the side of the second argument: Grandpa gives him The Best Detective Stories so that he can “pick up some really good tips… How to avoid getting fooled when one is trailing a suspect”.

Yes — almost certainly from the start. The writer never says so directly, so the answer has to be assembled from what Grandpa does. Five pieces of evidence, in the order they appear:

1. He suspects the arrangement before he leaves. “Has she told you not to let me go out on my own? Told you to keep me a prisoner here, has she?” He knows his daughter and he reads Ravi’s guilty face.
2. He gets Ravi’s permission by a trick. “‘Good,’ said Grandpa craftily, ‘then you’ll have no objection to my going out.’” The adverb is the writer’s hint: this is a lawyer closing a loophole.
3. The cap. He gives his bright-yellow cap — his one distinguishing mark, coffee stain and all — to a stranger in the barber shop, on a man wearing “a white pyjama and shirt, which was Grandpa’s standard attire”. As a kindness it is entirely in character; as a manoeuvre it is a perfect decoy, and it works.
4. His report to Vidya. “I had a quiet morning, but I don’t know about Ravi. He just disappeared instead of staying at home to look after me like you told him to.” He knows the boy left, and knows why.
5. The gift and the line that goes with it, delivered “solemnly”: a book of detective stories with “tips… on how to avoid getting fooled when one is trailing a suspect”. There is no innocent reason to say that sentence on that evening.

And the last line keeps the case just short of proved: Ravi is left “trying to decide whether the twinkle in Grandpa’s eye was an innocent gleam or a mischievous one.”

Ravi’s mother, Vidya, needs it far more than Grandpa does — and the story is constructed to make exactly that point.

She opens the story wishing for the pill: “I wish… that somebody would invent a memory — Vitamin-M, they could call it, and we could give it to old people to help them improve their memories.” By the last page her father hands the wish back to her: “My daughter needs some Vitamin-M, I think—for her memory.” The proof is already on her own wall — she had “circled the date in red and written ‘Papa’s birthday’” at the beginning of the year, and she still forgot it. Grandpa, who is supposed to be the forgetful one, remembered without any calendar, and had gifts ready for all three of them.

But the deeper answer is that what she has forgotten is not a date. She has forgotten who her father is: a man who practised law, who ran his own home for ten years after his wife died, who plays chess well enough to quote Karpov and Fischer. She still loves him — she worries, she arranges his medicines, she goes out to work — but she has stopped seeing him. A memory pill would not fix that; only attention would.

This is a personal-experience question, so it must be answered with one specific incident, not with general statements about society. The examiner is looking for: the situation, whose opinion was ignored, the reason given (age), and what you concluded from it.

Sample answer: Last year my family was deciding whether to repair our old ceiling fan or buy a new one. My grandfather, who worked as an electrician for thirty years, said the fan only needed a new capacitor. My uncle did not even reply to him; he turned to my father and said, “Appa is from another time, these old motors are finished.” They bought a new fan. Two weeks later the mechanic who came to fit it looked at the old one lying in the store room and said the capacitor had gone, exactly as my grandfather had said. What struck me was not that my grandfather was right, but that nobody had thought it worth listening to him in the first place — his experience was treated as out of date simply because he was. I have seen the same thing from the other side too: when I suggested at a housing-society meeting that we compost our wet waste, one member laughed and said, “School students should study, these things are for elders.”

Reading Vitamin-M made me recognise both moments. Ravi’s mother is not cruel — but she talks about her father’s memory while he is sitting three feet away, and uses “an over-loud tone… as though she were speaking to a child”. Bias by age rarely looks like hostility. It usually looks like not bothering to ask.