NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 1 A Bottle of Dew, Part II — Let us discuss
Book page 5 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
Why was Rama Natha angry?
Answer
Rama Natha was angry because the “magic potion” did not work. He carried the bottle of dew carefully to the sage, the sage muttered something over the water and told him to try it out — but when he “sprinkled a few drops on a copper vessel and waited for it to turn to gold”, nothing happened.
He felt he had been fooled after all his labour, and burst out, “This is cheating. I have wasted six precious years of my life.” Six years of watering plants and collecting dew at dawn seemed, at that moment, to have been thrown away.
Q2.
How did Rama Natha and Madhumati create wealth?
Answer
They created it by working together on their own land — the husband growing the crop and the wife selling it.
Rama Natha: cleaned his large fields, which had been lying empty for years, planted “rows and rows of banana plants”, tended them carefully and collected the dew every winter morning. Each year he planted more and more plants, until they had a huge banana plantation.
Madhumati: “gathered the banana crop, took it to the market and got a good price for it”, year after year, and quietly saved the money.
After six years the savings had grown into a big box filled with “stacks of gold coins”. As the sage told him, “It was your hard work that created this wealth, not magic.”
Why the plan worked so well: Nothing was wasted. The dew was the excuse for planting the trees; the trees gave fruit; the fruit gave money. Rama Natha thought he was chasing gold, and he was — only through bananas instead of magic.