NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 1 Rama to the Rescue — Let us think and reflect

The man says it because of what he sees his wife doing. It is late at night and both of them have lain down to sleep, but instead of sleeping his wife has sat up and is staring hard towards the door with a frightened face.

Her strange behaviour surprises him, so he asks two quick questions at once — “What's the matter? What are you looking at?” He has not yet heard the digging himself; it is her expression that alerts him.

Answer: D. be silent

‘Ssssh’ is not really a word — it is a sound we make, usually with a finger on the lips, to tell somebody to stop talking and keep quiet. In the picture the wife is doing exactly that. She wants absolute silence in the room so that both of them can hear the noise coming from the wall.

Three things in these few lines show it.

• She hushes her husband — “Ssssh! Listen!” — because even a whisper would spoil her listening.
• She heard the sound before he did. He is still asking what the matter is when she has already worked out that somebody is at the wall.
• She notices something very fine indeed — not a noise, but the absence of one: “I … I think he has got in … the noise has stopped.” Only somebody listening with full attention would realise that the digging had stopped, and understand what that silence meant.

kotwal

The villagers caught the thief and took him to the kotwal.

The kotwal is the village policeman, so he is exactly the person to whom a caught thief would be handed over. In some parts of India he is also called the thaanedar or the daroga.

Answer: A. surprise

Rama has come running only because he heard his own name being shouted. He was not expecting a crime. When he reaches the house and suddenly notices a great hole freshly dug through the wall with bricks and earth scattered around it, he is taken aback — and “Oh, oh!” is the sound of that shock.

It cannot be anger or pain, because nothing has been done to him, and certainly not happiness, because what he has found is a robbery.

Everything Rama does that night shows a good policeman:

• He was on duty in the middle of the night, patrolling the village streets with his stick — that is why he was near enough to hear at all.
• He responded at once. “Rama, the village kotwal, ran to the house from which he heard his name being called.” He did not ignore the call or wait till morning.
• He was observant and quick to understand. One look at the hole and he knew what had happened: “Some thief has dug his way into this house.”
• He was brave. He crawled through the narrow hole alone, into a dark house where a thief was hiding.
• He finished the job — he caught the man and told him plainly, “You're under arrest.”

Because they had heard somebody digging into their house and knew that a thief was inside with them.

The wife heard the scraping noise first and made her husband listen. He said, “Somebody is trying to get in,” and a moment later she realised, “I … I think he has got in … the noise has stopped.” After that, fear kept them wide awake — they lay under the blanket whispering about what to do, while the thief waited behind the door for them to sleep.

What he wished: The thief wished that the couple would stop talking and either fall asleep, so that he could search the house safely, or else let slip where the money was hidden. His own words say both: “I wonder where they keep their money”, “Voices! They're awake. I'll have to wait till they fall asleep”, and “I wish they would stop this silly game and talk about their money instead… or fall asleep at least!”

Did it happen? No — not in the way he wanted. The couple never said a word about their money, and they never fell asleep. The chatter did stop at last, and he thought his luck had turned — “Ah, at last they've stopped their chatter!” — but by then the wife's shout had already brought Rama the kotwal to the house. Instead of finding the money, the thief found a policeman crawling through his own hole, and heard the words “You're under arrest.”

They got help by a clever trick — they made the kotwal come to them without the thief ever suspecting it.

The husband whispered his plan to his wife, and then the two of them held a loud, ordinary-sounding family conversation:

• The wife asked, “What should we name our child?” and the husband answered, “If he is a boy we'll call him Rama” — which happened to be the name of the village kotwal.
• Then they said what they would do to call the boy: “When he's in the house, I'll call out softly to him. Rama! Rama!” … “But what if he's in the yard?” … “Then I'll call out a little louder, Rama, Rama!” … “But what if the boy is not in the house or in the yard, but in the street?” … “Oh, then I'll call out very loudly…”
• And the wife shouted at the top of her voice, “RAMA! RAMA!”

Rama the kotwal, out on his night round in the street, heard his name and came running. He saw the freshly dug hole, crawled in and arrested the thief. To the thief it had sounded like nothing more than a husband and wife chattering about a baby's name.

Yes — cleverness is often more useful than strength, especially when we are helpless in every other way.

The couple in this story could not fight the thief, could not run out of the house, and could not shout “Help! Thief!” without being attacked. They had only one weapon left — their brains. By turning a shout for help into an ordinary conversation about a baby's name, they brought a policeman into the house while the thief sat listening happily to the whole plan.

The other two texts of this unit show the same thing. Sage Mahipati could not argue Rama Natha out of his belief, so he cleverly turned the search for a potion into six years of farming. Reynard the Fox could not climb a tree, so he used flattery to make the food fall to him.

But cleverness alone is not enough. It has to go with calmness — the couple did not panic — and it must be used honestly. Reynard's cleverness was used to cheat, and that made him a thief of another kind.