NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 6 Twin Melodies (play by Mitra Phukan) — Learning Beyond the Text

Book page 191–193 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

I. Study the words given in brackets in the following dialogues taken from the text. What do you notice? • Iqbal: (a little loudly) Shruti! • Avinash: (very loudly) SHRUTI! • Nabin: (calmly but firmly) No is the answer. • Iqbal: (picking up a newspaper from his desk)... • Nabin: (getting up)... 1. Why do we not use inverted commas to convey the dialogues?

Answer

Because in a play script everything after the speaker’s name is speech — so there is nothing to separate it from.

Compare the two forms:

In a story, speech sits inside narration: Nabin sat down opposite her and said, “No is the answer.” The reader needs a signal showing where the narrator stops and the character begins — that signal is the inverted commas.
In a play, there is no narrator at all. The layout does the job: a name, a colon, and then the words. Nabin: No is the answer. Inverted commas would mark a boundary that has already been marked, and a page full of them would slow an actor down.

One consequence worth noticing: because a script has no ‘he said angrily’, everything a reporting verb would have told us must be put in brackets instead. That is why stage directions exist — they are the script’s substitute for narration.

Q2.

I. 2. Where do we use colons?

Answer

Immediately after the speaker’s name, to introduce that speaker’s words.

Iqbal: All ways are right ways, Shruti.
Nabin: No is the answer.
Peter: That’s the spirit!

Why a colon and not a comma or a dash: a colon means ‘what follows is the thing just announced’. The name announces who is about to speak, and the colon delivers the speech. It is the same use as in a list (Bring three things: a pen, a scale and a compass) — an announcement, then the contents. The colon also gives the eye a clean vertical break, which is why the names in a printed script line up in a column and the speeches in another. An actor can then find every one of his lines at a glance.

Watch the layout in your book: the character list at the start of Twin Melodies uses the same punctuation — “Shruti Sharma : A young aspiring violinist.” Name, colon, information.

Q3.

I. 3. What is written within the brackets? What do these convey?

Answer

Inside the brackets are the stage directions — and they are never spoken aloud. They fall into two kinds.

Kind	Examples from the play	What it conveys
Manner of delivery — how the line is to be said	(a little loudly), (very loudly), (calmly but firmly), (timidly), (with a slight mocking tone), (warmly)	Volume, tone and feeling — the information a reporting verb like ‘he snapped’ would carry in a story.
Action or movement — what the actor does	(picking up a newspaper from his desk), (getting up), (Sits down opposite to Shruti in an upright formal manner), (warmly placing his hand on her shoulder)	Business and movement on stage; sometimes character as well — sitting ‘in an upright formal manner’ tells you what kind of father Nabin is.

Why the brackets often matter more than the words: take Nabin’s answer to Shruti’s request. The words are “Sure, there’ll be a practice…”, which read as agreement. The bracket — (with a slight mocking tone) — reverses them into refusal. Without it an actor could play the line as a yes and destroy the scene. The same is true of the whole reversal in Act III: “Shruti’s father taps his feet and is seen evidently enjoying” is a stage direction, and it is where his change of heart actually happens.

Q4.

I. 4. How does it help the actors?

Answer

It tells the actor everything the printed words cannot: how to say the line, what to do while saying it, and who to be while doing it.

It fixes the tone before rehearsal begins. “No is the answer” could be roared or muttered. (calmly but firmly) settles it — quiet and immovable — so every rehearsal starts from the same reading.
It builds the rhythm of a scene. The three calls to Shruti rise in a deliberate ladder: Peter plain, Iqbal (a little loudly), Avinash (very loudly) and in capitals. An actor who ignores the brackets flattens a small comic crescendo.
It gives the body something to do. (picking up a newspaper from his desk) hands Iqbal a prop and a reason to move; (warmly placing his hand on her shoulder) gives Nabin an action that shows affection he would never state.
It carries the silences. (silence) after Shruti finally says the word ‘fusion’ is one of the strongest moments in Act II, and it contains no dialogue at all.
It marks the technique. (Aside) tells the actor to turn away from the group and speak to the audience; They practise in mime tells four actors to keep playing without sound while a private conversation happens on the other side of the stage.

The box in your book puts it exactly: brackets “serve to convey to the actor the manner in which to deliver the words, much like a reporting verb follows direct speech (for example: he shouted). Instead of using a reporting verb, we enclose the manner (for example: very loudly) within brackets. The words within brackets are not uttered aloud.”

Q5.

II. Did you know that there is an orchestra that made musical instruments from recycling junk or discarded waste items? There is one such orchestra, called the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, Paraguay, that was formed in 2012, and children are a part of it. They play musical instruments made from scrap materials collected from landfills.

Answer

The book gives the facts; the task is to see why they are placed at the end of this particular chapter, and then to take the idea further.

Fact given in the book	What it tells you
The orchestra is called the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, in Paraguay	Cateura is a neighbourhood built beside a landfill — the children live where the city’s waste is dumped.
Formed in 2012, and children are a part of it	It is a young orchestra of young players, not a museum project.
Instruments are made from scrap collected from landfills	Oil drums, packing crates, forks, X-ray film and baking tins are rebuilt into violins, cellos, flutes and drums.

Why it belongs in this chapter: the whole of Twin Melodies turns on a father who believed that only a certain kind of music, made in a certain approved way, was worth playing — and who learnt that he was wrong. The Recycled Orchestra makes the same argument in the loudest possible form: if a violin can be made from an oil drum and a fork, then music does not belong to the instrument, or to the money that bought it. The line most often quoted about the orchestra — that the world sends the children rubbish and they send back music — is Nabin Sharma’s lesson translated into another language.

Try this: find out what the orchestra’s founder, Favio Chávez, and the instrument-maker known as ‘Cola’ actually build with. Then look for the Indian equivalents already around you — the ghatam (an ordinary clay pot), the jaltarang (china bowls filled with water to different levels), the khartal (two pieces of wood), the bulbul tarang made from a typewriter keyboard. An instrument is any object somebody has taught to keep a pitch.

Q6.

III. Indigenous musical instruments are crafted from natural materials like bamboo, gourds, animal hides, and shells, reflecting a deep connection to the environment and cultural heritage. These instruments are diverse, ranging from percussion instruments like drums and rattles to wind instruments like flutes, etc. Find out more about such indigenous instruments that are used in your region.

Answer

This is a find-out task about your own region, so the answer must be local. What follows is the method, the checklist, and one worked example to show the level of detail expected.

Method — where to look:

Ask your music teacher and any older relative who has attended village weddings, harvest festivals or temple processions; instruments survive in ceremonies long after they leave the stage.
Visit a local instrument maker or repairer if there is one, and ask what he makes and from what. Craftsmen will tell you which wood, which skin, which season.
Look in the district gazetteer or the State handicrafts board’s pages, and at any folk-arts academy in your State.
Record the instrument yourself on a phone if you get the chance — a ten-second clip is worth a page of description.

What a good write-up must contain for each instrument: its local name; the material it is made of; how it is sounded (blown, struck, plucked, bowed, shaken); who plays it and on what occasion; and one sentence on its present condition — is it still being made, and by whom?

Sample answer (one entry, written to the level expected):

Field	Entry
Name	Pepa
Region	Assam — played chiefly during Bohag Bihu
Material	A buffalo horn forms the bell; the pipe is a thin length of bamboo with a single reed cut into it
How it is sounded	Blown. It is a reed pipe, so the player must use circular breathing to keep the note unbroken through a long Bihu song
Who plays it, and when	Young men in the Bihu dance troupe, alongside the dhol (drum) and taal (cymbals); its sharp, nasal cry is the signal that spring has begun
Present condition	Still made by hand in a few districts, but good horns are scarce and the number of makers has fallen; several Bihu committees now run classes to keep it alive

Why the ‘material’ column is the interesting one: an indigenous instrument is usually made of whatever the surrounding land produces — bamboo where bamboo grows, gourd where gourds grow, hide where cattle are kept, coconut shell along the coast. So a list of local instruments is also a small map of the local environment, which is exactly the connection the book asks you to notice.

Q7.

IV. In groups of five, select objects around yourself to create a rhythm. Present it in the class. Enjoy!

Answer

A classroom activity — here is how to make it sound like music rather than noise.

The one rule that decides everything: five people playing at once is cacophony — the word you met in this chapter’s vocabulary, “a mixture of loud unpleasant sounds.” It becomes rhythm only when each person has a fixed job in a fixed cycle. So build the piece in layers, not all together.

Method:

Choose a cycle and count it aloud — eight beats is easiest.
Sort your objects by pitch, low to high, and give each player one:
- Low — an upturned bucket or a desk drum, struck with the palm
- Middle — a book slapped shut, a wooden scale on a bench
- High — a steel tumbler tapped with a pencil, keys shaken
- Rattle — a pencil box half-filled with chalk pieces
- Voice — bols spoken, not sung: dha, tin, na, ge
Enter one at a time. Player 1 alone for two cycles, then player 2 joins, and so on. Each new layer must still leave the first one audible.
Give every player gaps. The silences are what let the pattern be heard — a part that plays on all eight beats hides everyone else.
End together on beat one of a cycle. A clean stop is what makes an audience clap.

Sample answer — an eight-beat pattern to start from (× = play, · = rest):

Player / object	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Bucket (low)	×	·	·	·	×	·	·	·
Book slap (mid)	·	·	×	·	·	·	×	·
Tumbler (high)	·	×	·	×	·	×	·	×
Pencil-box rattle	·	·	·	·	·	·	×	×
Voice (bols)	dha	·	tin	·	dha	·	na	·

Tip: practise the whole thing at half speed first. Almost every group that fails in class has tried to start fast. Get the pattern exact, then raise the tempo — and notice, as you do, that the rhythm has not changed at all.

Q8.

V. Read the book Rigmarole and Other Plays by Sai Paranjpye and enjoy the humour and wit. Rigmarole and Other Plays, a collection by Sai Paranjpye, includes the play ‘Rigmarole,’ which follows a silly King, his Council of nine Ministers, and a bed bug, leading to humorous events. Other plays in the collection, like ‘The Boy Who Wrote a Constitution,’ seek to educate children while entertaining them.

Answer

A reading suggestion rather than a question — but it is placed here for a reason, and it repays a little attention.

Why this book after this chapter: you have just read a play in which almost everything important is carried by stage directions and by how a line is said. Sai Paranjpye is a film-maker and playwright — she directed Sparsh and Katha — and her writing for children is built on the same craft: absurd situations played completely straight. Reading a second play so soon after the first is the quickest way to see which techniques belong to Twin Melodies and which belong to plays in general.

What to notice while you read — turn it into a short reading log:

How does she use brackets? Compare her stage directions with Mitra Phukan’s — are they longer, funnier, more detailed?
Where is the humour made? In the situation (a King, nine Ministers and a bed bug), in the language, or in the gap between how seriously a character speaks and how silly he is?
Does anyone use an aside? If so, is it used for a secret, as in Twin Melodies, or for a joke shared with the audience?
‘The Boy Who Wrote a Constitution’ teaches while entertaining. Find the point where the lesson appears — and judge whether the play stops being fun there or not.

Sample answer (how to record it, three or four lines): ‘I read Rigmarole. The joke that works best is that the Ministers debate a bed bug with exactly the seriousness of a real council — the humour comes from the mismatch between the tiny subject and the grand language. Paranjpye’s stage directions are longer than Mitra Phukan’s and often contain the joke themselves, so an actor could get a laugh without saying anything.’

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