- [Instructor] So if you're just joining us now,
in the previous video we did
a quick survey of the questions.
Just glanced through them real quick
and answered the question by looking at the blurb
what's this story about.
And we have that all in the blurb,
which is that Sandeep travels with his mother,
his aunt Mamima and his uncle Chhotomama
to visit family in Calcutta.
So now let's start marking up the passage,
and as we go through the passage,
now when we do this active reading step,
I'm going to be looking for things that tell us
about how Sandeep sees things.
I think, my prediction is that he's going to be
the point of view character
because of the questions that we're looking at.
I want to suss out relationships between characters,
evidence of social change in India,
and determining how Sandeep feels about stuff,
his point of view.
So let's get going.
Two boys were playing carrom on the steps of a small,
painted shed which had the following words on its wall
in large, black letters.
National Association of Sportsmen.
I don't know what carrom is, it's a game, I assume.
But there were no questions about it,
so I'm not gonna worry about it.
In fact, let me erase my underlining here.
I just, that word is unfamiliar to me,
it may be familiar to you, but if it's not familiar to you,
I would say just having looked at the questions,
not to sweat it.
A single table tennis table inside the shed
could be glimpsed through the window.
The boys interrupted their game
to give Chhotomama, the uncle, directions to the house
in a series of sporadic, enthusiastic gestures.
So if a word like sporadic is confusing to you,
that's okay, but enthusiastic, we can kinda get the gist.
Right, they're excited about something.
Sporadic means occasional.
Oh yes, they knew the old couple.
The old couple, who's the old couple.
And yes, their son and daughter-in-law had arrived
last night with their first child.
So we know that Sandeep and his family
are traveling to visit family and it sounds like
other elements of the family, the son and daughter-in-law,
are also getting into town.
All right, let's continue on line 10.
"Is it a girl or a boy?" Asked Mamima,
rolling down the window.
Okay, so they're in a car.
"A girl," said the boy.
Mamima rolled up her window before the mosquitoes came in.
The two boys vanished behind them.
When they reached the house, they found
that the old man was waiting on the verandah,
ooh, we had a question about waiting on the verandah.
I don't remember which question that is,
it might have been question one or two
but we'll find out, 'cause the question was
why is the old man standing on the verandah,
well let's find out.
Moths were shuddering round and round the lantern,
though the old man was oblivious to them.
He had come out because he had heard the throbbing
of the engine in the distance.
Okay, that's the, that's our answer for that question
about why was the old man standing on the verandah.
So when we do the question step,
that's gonna be why, we'll return to that text
and say aha, that's why the old man
was waiting on the verandah.
Let's continue at line 20.
The night had been silent except for
the questioning cry of an owl and the continual
orchestral sound of crickets in the bushes.
The throbbing of the engine had,
therefore, traveled through the silence
to the old man's listening ear, and to his wife's ear,
even when the car was relatively far away
and beyond their range of vision.
They had pondered over the sound and finally,
he had lit the lantern and shuffled out.
So what does this tell us?
That the sound of a car is interesting enough
to this couple that they would go and investigate it,
that means cars don't come by very often.
All right, let's continue at line, what is this, 27?
27.
"I told her," he said, referring to his wife.
"I told her that I heard the car,
"I knew it was the car, I told her you were coming."
Once they were inside, Mamima gave the pot of yogurt
and the pot of sweetmeats to the old lady.
I know that this is also, yogurt and sweetmeats
was something that was covered in the questions.
So this is gonna be important for later.
"There was no need," she said.
"Oh really," she said.
"This is too much," she insisted, with the air
of one who has just received the Kohinoor Diamond
as a birthday present.
"Come, come, come," said Chhotomama, with the air
of someone who has just given the Kohinoor Diamond
as a birthday present and refuses
to be overawed by his own generosity.
"It's nothing."
All right, that's kind of an interesting
parallel structure there, to have received
the Kohinoor Diamond and to who has just
given the Kohinoor Diamond.
Where were we?
It's nothing.
It was nothing, of course, only Ganguram's
sweets and yogurt, but they fussed and fussed
and created the illusion that it was something,
something unique and untasted and unencountered.
So here they're saying the host gifts
that Chhotomama and Mamima gave are not
super valuable gifts, it's just sweets and yogurt,
but they treat it as though it's like a diamond.
And not just any diamond, like a famous diamond.
Something unique and untasted and unencountered,
so something precious.
Let's continue at line 41.
The son and the daughter in law emerged shyly
from the anteroom, okay.
I wanna underscore words like that,
because I think that shows us how Sandeep is viewing them.
Because I think that this is being told,
even though it's in the third person,
I think this is still a little bit
from Sandeep's perspective.
They, the son and the daughter-in-law,
both stooped gently to touch Chhotomama's feet,
and Sandeep's aunt's and his mother's feet,
a traditional greeting and a mark of obeisance
towards one's elders.
Obeisance, that's a big word.
And if you're not certain what obeisance means,
think about the context of what it would mean
to like, bow and touch someone's foot,
and let's look at how they react to it.
"Oh, no no no," said Chhotomama, struggling
to keep the son's hand away from his feet.
There's no need for all this.
This was half a token gesture towards modesty,
and half towards the new, modern India.
Nehru's secular India, free of ritual and religion.
So this is setting up some of that,
that change that we're talking about.
So modern, modern India, right.
Secular, you know a non religious country.
"I have not met you for two years, Dada," said the son,
struggling to get his hands near Chhotomama's toes.
"You must not stop me."
This was half a token gesture towards modesty
and half towards the old traditional India,
Gandhi's India of ceremony and custom.
So again, we're seeing this tension
between Nehru's modern India and Gandhi's traditional India.
This chunk of the passage here is probably
going to be very important later
as we interrogate that tension between old and new India.
Because I know that's something
the questions were asking about.
Sandeep, meanwhile, and here I am at line 55.
Sandeep, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion
that the grownups were mad,
each after his or her own fashion.
Okay, so Sandeep thinks that
the grownups were mad, were crazy.
Simple situations were turned into complex, dramatic ones.
Not until then did everyone feel important and happy.
Will they never grow up, though Sandeep irately.
All right, so he's irritated
and he thinks that they're immature.
He glanced around him.
A single blue fluorescent tube was burning on the wall.
It was not a big room.
Despite its bareness, the impression it gave
was of austerity rather than poverty.
So if you don't know what austerity means,
you can compare it to poverty.
So poverty we know means poorness.
And if we don't know what austerity means,
let's continue on and see if context gives us anything.
It made one remember that poverty meant displacement
as well as lack, where austerity meant being poor
in a rooted way, within a tradition and culture
of sparseness, which transformed even the lack,
the paucity, into a kind of being.
So being austere means perhaps that you choose
not to have a lot of stuff in the room.
Maybe for reasons of tradition.
All right, so, cool.
We've read through the passage,
let's talk through what it means, what happened in it.
So Sandeep, his mother, his uncle, and his aunt
go to an old man and woman's house
to meet with their extended family.
In fact, maybe let's make a little diagram here.
So we have Sandeep, his mother, Mamima, and Chhotomama.
And they're coming in a car and they're going
to old man and the old woman's house.
I'm gonna write those down as O and W.
And the other people that have come
are the son-in-law and the daughter and their baby.
I'm gonna say S + D + B.
Now, the daughter appears to be the daughter
of Mamima and Chhotomama, and the son
is the son of the old woman and the old man.
So it's Sandeep and his mother
accompanying Mamima and Chhotomama to meet their son-in-law
and their daughter's baby for the first time.
After the daughter and the son-in-law got married
two years ago, because we remember from the passage
that the son-in-law tries to make this respectful gesture
to Mamima and Chhotomama by touching their feet
and saying I have not met you for two years.
And so everybody engages in this ritualized back and forth.
First, Mamima and Chhotomama giving host gifts
to the old woman and the old man,
and then the son in law trying to give
the respectful gesture of touching the feet
of his in-laws, and through it all,
Sandeep is witnessing it and commenting on it
through his narration, or through his perspective
that we get from the narration.
I think that generally speaking,
literature passages like this one
benefit especially from this kind of review stage.
You really want to get a handle
of who the characters are in a literature passage
and what they're doing, and have a very clear idea
of that before you head into the questions.
Remembering, too, that the blurb
at the top of the passage is a great place
to get a condensed version of that information as well.
So with all that in mind, let's take that
and start going through these questions.