NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 7 Carrier of Words (prose) — Critical Reflection

Completed sentence: One crop of bajra makes a little difference for people like Khetaram because that single crop comes only in a good year and “cannot feed my family of five”, so the household still needs the assured income of his job to survive.

Because in his part of the Thar famine is not an emergency that comes and goes — it is the normal condition around which life is organised.

The phrase “a way of life” is usually kept for customs — food, dress, festivals. Khetaram uses it for hunger, and that is what makes the sentence land. Notice what follows it: a good year is defined not as a year of plenty but as a year with one crop of bajra. When the best year is measured in a single crop, scarcity is the baseline. The families around him have already built their lives to fit it — “for each family which resides in this arid land, survival is partly dependent on money orders remitted by a relative.” Sending a man away to earn, and waiting for his money order, is not an emergency measure there; it is the household’s ordinary arrangement.

Because his land cannot feed his family: even in a good year it yields only one crop of bajra, and “That cannot feed my family of five.”

The job supplies what the field cannot — a salary that arrives whether or not the rains do. Khetaram states the consequence of not having it in the plainest words in the extract: “We would starve without this job.” In a land where akaal is “a way of life”, an assured monthly income is not extra earning; it is the difference between eating and not eating.

Other families : Money orders :: Khetaram : job (his job as a Gramin Dak Sewak — the words the extract gives you are “this job”).

A year in which the rains come — enough of them, and at the right time — so that one crop of bajra actually comes up. That is all: “In a good year, I get one crop of bajra.”

Two things follow from that definition, and a full answer should say both:

• It is defined by rain, not by profit. In the Thar the harvest depends entirely on the monsoon; there is no canal and no second season. So ‘good’ means ‘not akaal’.
• The bar is startlingly low. Elsewhere a good year might mean two or three harvests and a surplus to sell. Here it means one crop of the hardiest millet — and even that “cannot feed my family of five.”

Answer: B. Sender of the letter.

Completed sentence: The most likely reason for Khetaram reading the letter twice is because the family cannot read it themselves and he is about to tear it up — so a second reading is their only chance to take in news this shocking and be sure of every word before the letter is destroyed.

His philosophy is that inauspicious news must not be allowed to settle — it should be delivered outside the home and then destroyed. He states it twice, in two languages of thought: “Ashubh Samachar cannot be carried into the house,” and “Bad news must be destroyed.”

He acts on it exactly, in three deliberate steps:

1. He stops outside. He does not cross the threshold, though he is a man who “can dwell on any threshold” and is welcome everywhere. For this one delivery he keeps the grief at the door.
2. He reads the letter out twice, so the family hears it whole and does not have to touch the paper.
3. He tears it to bits, so nothing carrying the ill omen remains in the household.

False.

His action and his belief match exactly. He believes “Bad news must be destroyed” — and he destroys it: he “tears it to bits”. He believes “Ashubh Samachar cannot be carried into the house” — and he does not carry it in: he “stands outside”. Every step of what he does is the belief put into practice.

He is deeply considerate — sensitive to what other people believe and to what they can bear.

The evidence is in what he chooses to do when nothing compels him. No postal regulation tells him to stop at the door, to read a letter twice, or to tear it up afterwards; he is not even a member of the family. He does it because he has understood that in these homes death-news must not be carried inside, and he shapes his own conduct around somebody else’s grief. That is consideration, not duty.

The word is justified because the GDS delivers where no other arm of the state arrives at all — “they deliver in interior areas that are often inaccessible by any means besides foot.” Something is invaluable when there is no substitute for it, and the chapter proves there is none.

• Reach. Khetaram works 120 km beyond the last railhead, 50 km beyond the last phone and 10 km beyond where the road “crumbles into sand so soft that even bicycles can’t ply”. The chapter widens this from one man to a map: “The frozen desert of Ladakh, the isles of Lakshadweep, and the riverine communities of the northeast are all GDS territories.”
• Reliability. Despite that terrain, mail from Jodhpur, 330 km away, is delivered at the border “within 24 hours of dispatch”. It is “his bodily effort that ensures” it.
• What is being delivered. Not conveniences — money orders on which “survival is partly dependent”, and the savings of rural depositors “who entrust their monthly savings to the post office”.
• Scale. “India’s three lakh plus delivery agents” became GDS, and they “constitute more than 50 per cent of the total workforce.” Half the postal service is these men and women.
• Services no machine performs. He reads letters out and drafts replies; he knows how to hand over a death.

The British system existed to serve the administration; India Post was created to serve the population. The chapter states the contrast in a single sentence: “Unlike the British postal system set up in India to relay company dak between administrative centres, after independence, the mandate of India Post was to bring the entire population within the mailing ambit.”

Two instances, each with the line that proves it:

1. They trust the GDS with their money. Through the GDS, “India Post has also been able to reach rural depositors, who entrust their monthly savings to the post office in their area. Every post office in the country has many operational accounts of the people which reflects their trust in the postal system.” People who have very little hand over what they have saved — and they hand it to the man who walks to their door.
2. They refused to let anyone else do the job. “A few years ago, a scheme to scrap the GDS and transfer the job to patwaris (village record keepers) was proposed and summarily rejected. ‘We knew they would not be able to do the job,’ says Budh Singh, a village elder.” The villagers preferred the postman they knew to an official with a bigger designation.

Most likely because the job is still the only thing standing between his family and hunger — and because, unlike a farmer’s field or an ordinary government post, it does not stop at sixty. He says it himself: “I am grateful that as a Gramin Dak Sewak, I can serve the people even after 60.”

The inference has three supports in the text:

• The need has not changed. His land still gives one crop of bajra in a good year, and “We would starve without this job” was never a temporary condition. At 60 he has no pension from the fields.
• The rule was written for exactly this. GDS “are also allowed to serve after the age of 60, till the age of 65… so that they can be paid a salary to enable them to have an assured income.” Khetaram is grateful for a rule that keeps that income coming.
• He can still do it, and he wants to. “Khetaram says his spine is strong” — the sentence is placed immediately before his statement of gratitude. And notice his verb: he is grateful that he can “serve the people”, not that he can earn. After sixteen years of being “a warmly received man”, the work is also his standing in the world.

Because they hold together the part of the country that every other service has given up on — and they do it on foot, for an ordinary wage, without being noticed. The tribute is stated outright at the end: “People like Khetaram are a part and parcel of our social fabric, and are a great support! Our salute to all the people like Khetaram!”

Four reasons the chapter has already earned by the time it says this:

• They are the state where the state ends. Khetaram is “the lone face of the state who reaches the far-flung hamlets, or dhaanis” — beyond the railhead, the road and the telephone.
• The cost is physical and permanent. A shoulder “slumped from years of carrying a mailbag”; 20 km for a single delivery; a 28-kilo load; sands that “sizzle” under his mojri-clad feet; sandstorms that “turn him into a walking sandman”; and delivery on days recorded as 49.9°C.
• What they carry is survival, not convenience. Money orders, savings, and — in a place where many cannot read — the words themselves, read out and answered in his own hand.
• They are the reason the system is trusted at all. Half the postal workforce is GDS; villagers refused to trade them for patwaris; depositors hand them their savings.