NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 Feathered Friend — Let us discuss

The narrator does not claim to know Sven's motive — “Don't ask me why Sven wanted a pet, or why he chose the one he did. I'm not a psychologist.” What he does say is that the choice was “very sensible”: a canary “weighed practically nothing, her food requirements were tiny — and she was not worried, as most animals would have been, by the absence of gravity.” On a station where everything is rationed by mass, that made her the one pet that could be hidden and kept.

Sven's own stated reason was scientific curiosity. He had smuggled her up on the last ferry from Earth after his leave, “partly, he claimed, out of sheer scientific curiosity. He wanted to see just how a bird would operate when it had no weight but could still use its wings.”

She adjusted completely, and with less effort than any of the humans. When the narrator first saw her she was “hanging in the air as motionless as a hummingbird — and with much less effort, for her wings were quietly folded along her sides.” In free fall she did not need to beat her wings to stay up at all.

She had also learnt to use weightlessness: she performed “a curious kind of backward loop I'm sure no earthbound canary had ever managed, and departed with a few leisurely flicks.” The narrator concludes that “she'd already learned how to operate in the absence of gravity, and did not believe in doing unnecessary work.” Finally, she “thrived and grew fat”, which is the plainest proof of all that she had settled in.

Three things together made the mistake natural:

• Where he was: shut into “the little cubbyhole laughingly called my office”, checking lists of technical stores — a place where the only sound he ever expected was an announcement.
• Where the sound came from: “I heard the musical whistle beside my ear” — exactly where a wall speaker would be.
• What was possible: a canary on a space station is unthinkable, so his mind supplied the one explanation the setting allowed. He “assumed that it had come over the station intercom, and waited for an announcement to follow.”

Both answers can be argued. The honest reply is: yes, she was a real risk — and that risk turns out to be worth taking.

Why she could have led them into trouble: keeping her broke no written rule but was certainly unauthorised — Sven “smuggled her up on the last ferry”. She was noisy: “Claribel got rather noisy when she was upset, and we sometimes had to think fast to explain the curious peeps and whistles that came from ventilating shafts and storage bulkheads.” The crew hid her from visiting VIPs and there were “a couple of narrow escapes”. Discovery would have meant trouble for Sven and for everyone who covered for him.

Why the risk was worth it: the same bird whose peeping nearly gave them away is the one whose collapse warns them that the air is failing — “Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly dead.”