Narrative Passages in CUET English

The bus to the exam centre was supposed to leave at seven. Ravi reached the stop at five to seven, just in time to see it turning the corner at the far end of the road. The conductor, it turned out, had decided that morning to leave early.

For a minute he simply stood there, doing the arithmetic of disaster. The centre was eleven kilometres away. The exam began at nine. His father had taken the scooter to the market before dawn.

It was Mrs Kulkarni, who ran the tailoring shop beside the stop, who solved it. She did not ask a single question. She walked to the back of her shop, wheeled out a heavy black bicycle with a basket on the front, and held it out to him. "It was my husband's," she said. "Nobody has ridden it for two years, so do not expect it to be fast."

It was not fast. The chain complained on every slope, and the seat had been set for a much taller man. But it moved, and Ravi reached the gate at twenty to nine, damp with sweat and grinning like a fool.

That evening he brought the bicycle back, cleaned, with its chain oiled and its seat lowered. Mrs Kulkarni looked at it for a long moment. Then she said that she might start riding it herself.

Every Sunday at six, Nani's phone rang, and every Sunday it rang for a long time before anyone answered. By the time she had found her glasses, found the phone and found the green button, the call had usually stopped.

"Just press it, Nani," Priya said, for perhaps the hundredth time. "Green is yes. Red is no. That's all."

Nani looked at the phone the way she might have looked at a snake. "Your uncle's face comes into it," she said. "How does his face come into it? He is in Dubai."

Priya opened her mouth to explain, and then closed it. She had been about to say something about signals and satellites, but she realised she did not really know either. She only knew which button to press.

So she tried a different way. She sat beside Nani and pressed nothing at all. When the phone rang at six, she waited. Nani's hand hovered over the screen, pulled back, came forward again, and pressed green. Her son's face filled the screen, laughing.

"You answered it yourself!" he said.

Nani did not look at him. She looked at Priya, and for the first time Priya saw that her grandmother had not been slow. She had been afraid.

The ball went higher than any of them had ever hit it, over the neem tree, over Sharma-ji's wall, and through his kitchen window with a crash that stopped the game at once.

For a second nobody moved. Then eight boys discovered that they all had somewhere urgent to be. Within a minute the lane was empty except for Kabir, who had hit the ball, and his little sister Tara, who had been watching from the steps.

"Run," she whispered. "Nobody saw."

"You saw," said Kabir.

He walked to Sharma-ji's gate and rang the bell. His heart was beating so hard he was sure the old man could hear it. Sharma-ji came out holding the ball in one hand and a piece of glass in the other, and looked at him for a long time.

"I hit it," Kabir said. "I'll pay for the glass. It might take a few months."

Sharma-ji turned the ball over in his fingers. "Thirty years I have lived in this lane," he said at last, "and every summer at least one window. You are the first to ring the bell." He handed back the ball. "Pay for half. The other half is for ringing."

Mr Kapoor had run the stationery shop outside the bus stand for twenty-two years, and he could count change faster than any machine. So when the girl in the blue uniform came back ten minutes after buying her notebooks, he assumed she wanted to return something.

"You gave me too much," she said, and put a fifty-rupee note on the counter. "I gave you two hundred. You gave me change for five hundred."

Mr Kapoor looked at the note. He looked at his till. It was true. Twenty-two years, and he had made a mistake, and this child, whose shoes were mended at the toe, had walked all the way back to give him money he would never have missed.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Lakshmi."

He pushed the note back across the counter. She pushed it back to him. They did this twice more, and then Mr Kapoor laughed, took the note and put it in his till.

The next Monday, when Lakshmi came in for a new pen, she found that it had already been paid for. A card was taped to the counter beside the pens. In Mr Kapoor's careful handwriting, it said: Lakshmi, one pen a month, for as long as this shop stands.

The science fair was at ten, and at a quarter to ten Irfan's volcano was a very ordinary cone of clay that did absolutely nothing.

He had tested it twice at home. Both times, when he poured vinegar into the baking soda, red foam had come rushing out of the top and down the sides, and his little brother had screamed with delight. Now, with the judges two tables away, he poured, and waited, and the volcano gave a small, sad bubble and stopped.

His friend Neha leaned over. "Did you use the same baking soda?"

He had not. At home, his mother had given him a fresh packet. This morning, in a hurry, he had taken the old tin from the back of the cupboard.

There was no time to buy more. So when the judges arrived, Irfan did not show them an eruption. He showed them the sad bubble, and then he told them why it was sad: that the old baking soda had lost most of its power, that the reaction needed fresh powder to make enough gas, and that he had learnt more about it in the last fifteen minutes than in the whole of the week before.

He did not win. But one of the judges wrote something on her sheet, and at the end of the day she came back to shake his hand.

The dog turned up at the tea stall on a Tuesday, a brown dog with one white ear and a red collar that said Bruno. It was plainly somebody's dog. It sat politely, refused biscuits from strangers, and looked up the road every time a scooter went past.

Gopal, who ran the stall, tied a string to the collar and asked everyone who stopped for tea whether they knew a Bruno. Nobody did. On Wednesday he wrote BRUNO FOUND on a piece of cardboard in large letters and hung it on the stall. On Thursday he asked his nephew to put a photo of the dog on his phone and send it round.

On Friday evening a scooter stopped so suddenly that the rider nearly fell off. A girl of about twelve jumped from the back seat, and the dog made a noise Gopal had never heard a dog make, half bark and half cry.

The girl's father tried to give Gopal five hundred rupees. Gopal would not take it. "He drank my milk for four days," he said. "That was only fair. He was good company."

"Then at least let us buy tea," said the father.

That, Gopal agreed, was a different thing altogether. They had eight cups between them, and the father paid for every one, and Bruno had his milk from a saucer at their feet.

The lights went out at eight, in the middle of the news, and the fan slowed to a stop like a tired dancer.

For the first few minutes everyone in the Joshi family did the same thing: they picked up their phones. Then, one by one, they noticed the batteries. Papa's was at twelve per cent. Maya's was at five. Grandmother's phone, which she used only to call the vegetable seller, had been dead since Sunday.

So Grandmother lit a candle. And because there was nothing else to do, she began to tell a story about the year the river flooded and her father rowed the whole family to the temple on the hill in a boat made from the doors of their house.

Maya had never heard the story. Neither, it turned out, had Papa.

"You never told me that," he said.

"You never asked," said Grandmother. "You were always doing your homework. Then you were always doing your work."

The candle burned down. Grandmother told three more stories, and one of them was about Papa as a small boy, which made him put his face in his hands while Maya laughed until she could not breathe.

The lights came back at half past ten. Nobody moved to switch on the television.

It began to rain just as the school bell rang, and within a minute the gate was full of children waiting for the rain to stop.

Nikhil had an umbrella. It was large and black and had been his father's, and it had one broken spoke that made it lean to one side like a tired bird. He was about to open it when he saw the small boy from the first standard standing at the edge of the crowd, holding his school bag over his head.

"Where do you live?" Nikhil asked.

The boy pointed down the road, towards the market, which was the opposite way from Nikhil's house.

Nikhil thought about his mother, who would be waiting, and about the long walk back. Then he opened the umbrella.

They walked together to the market, the small boy talking the whole way about a frog he had once found in his shoe. The umbrella leaned. The rain came in on Nikhil's side. By the time he had delivered the boy to a relieved mother at a sweet shop, his left shoulder was soaked through.

The mother pressed a paper bag into his hand. Inside were two warm jalebis.

He walked home in the rain, eating them, and decided that it had been an excellent bargain.

Varun had practised four hundred words for the district spelling bee. He could spell "rhythm" without thinking, "necessary" in his sleep, and "onomatopoeia" faster than his teacher could say it.

On the day, he stood at the microphone, and the judge smiled at him. "Before we begin," she said, "please spell your name for the record."

Varun opened his mouth. Nothing came out. For one terrible moment, the only thing in his head was the sound of four hundred words all shouting at once.

"V," he said at last. "A. R." He stopped. Somewhere in the hall, someone giggled. "U," he said. "N." He paused again, as if waiting for more letters to arrive, and then added, very quietly, "I think."

The whole hall laughed, the judges too, and something strange happened: Varun laughed as well. The laughing loosened something in his chest. By the time the judge gave him his first real word, "chrysanthemum", his hands had stopped shaking.

He spelt it perfectly. He spelt the next eleven words perfectly too, and came second in the whole district.

For years afterwards, his family introduced him at weddings as "Varun, V-A-R-U-N, I think."

In the school's production of The Forest, Aarav had been given the part of Tree Number Three. Tree Number Three had no lines. He stood at the back of the stage in a brown costume with cardboard branches, and his only job was not to move.

Aarav was very good at not moving. He had practised in front of the mirror, arms out, until his shoulders ached.

On the night, halfway through the second act, the boy playing the Woodcutter forgot his lines. He stood in the middle of the stage with his wooden axe, staring at the audience, and the silence grew longer and longer.

Aarav knew every line in the play. He had heard them all at rehearsal, night after night, with nothing to do but listen.

So Tree Number Three leaned forward, very slightly, and whispered: "I have walked for three days and found no water."

The Woodcutter blinked, repeated the line, and the play went on.

Nobody in the audience noticed. But at the end, when the actors took their bows, the Woodcutter took Aarav by his cardboard branch and pulled him to the front of the stage. And the teacher, who had noticed everything, clapped loudest of all.

Kiran had imagined that birdwatching would be exciting. Instead, on the first morning at the lake, Dr Rao handed her a notebook, a pair of binoculars and a folding stool, and told her to sit still.

"For how long?" asked Kiran.

"Until the birds forget you are here," said Dr Rao.

Kiran sat. The mist lay on the water. Nothing happened. A dragonfly landed on her knee and left again. Her legs went to sleep. She counted her own breaths, then the reeds, then the clouds.

After an hour, a grey heron stepped out of the reeds not ten metres away. It stood on one leg, looking at the water with enormous patience, and then struck so fast that Kiran almost missed it. When it lifted its head, there was a fish in its beak.

After that, the lake seemed to wake up. There were egrets, a kingfisher like a blue spark, a family of ducks paddling in a line. Kiran forgot her legs. She forgot to count her breaths. She filled three pages of the notebook without looking at the time.

When Dr Rao came back to fetch her, she was surprised to find that it was nearly noon.

"How was it?" asked Dr Rao.

Kiran thought about the heron standing so still for so long, waiting for exactly the right moment.

"I think," she said, "I was learning to be a heron."

On the first day of the holidays, Meena's aunt gave her a packet of sunflower seeds. "Plant them by the wall," she said, "and water them every evening."

Meena planted all twelve seeds in a neat row. The next morning she ran outside before breakfast. Nothing. She watered them again, though it was not evening. At lunch she checked. Still nothing. By the third day she was sure the seeds were dead, and she dug one up to see.

It had split open, and a tiny white root was pushing down into the soil. Meena stared at it, ashamed. She pressed it gently back into the ground and patted the earth over it.

After that she made herself a rule: look only once a day, in the evening, with the watering can. On the eighth evening, a row of small green loops appeared, bent over like people bowing. By the end of the holidays the sunflowers were taller than the wall, and taller than Meena too.

Only one plant was shorter than the rest. It was the one she had dug up. It had lived, but it was always a little behind. Meena did not mind. Whenever she looked at it, it reminded her that some things grow best when you leave them alone.

When Dadi got her first smartphone, she held it the way you would hold a hot plate: with two fingers, at arm's length.

"You just touch the picture," said Kabir, who was twelve and had been touching pictures all his life.

"Which picture?"

"The green one. No, not that green. The other green."

By the end of the first week, Dadi could answer a call, but only if Kabir was in the room to tell her which way to swipe. By the end of the second, she could send a voice message, although most of them began with ten seconds of her asking, "Is it recording?"

Kabir grew impatient. He had explained the same things again and again. One evening he said, more sharply than he meant to, "Dadi, it's easy. Why don't you remember?"

Dadi looked at him for a moment. "When you were four," she said, "I taught you to tie your shoes. It took three months. Every morning I showed you again."

Kabir said nothing. The next morning he wrote the steps on a card in large letters: GREEN BUTTON. SWIPE UP. SPEAK. Then he taped the card to the back of her phone.

By the end of the month, Dadi was sending him photographs of her garden. Most of them were of her thumb.

For thirty-one years, Ramu Kaka rang the bell at the government school in our village. He rang it at nine for assembly, every forty minutes for the next lesson, and at four for home. He rang it through rain and heat, and once, the story goes, with a fever so high that the headmaster sent him home straight after.

He never needed a clock. The children said he could feel the time in his arms.

On his last day, the headmaster announced that a new electric bell would be fitted. It would ring on its own, at exactly the right moments, forever.

At four o'clock, everyone waited for the new bell. It rang, loud and perfect. Nobody moved.

Then, from the end of the corridor, came the old sound: the brass bell in Ramu Kaka's hand, slightly late, as it always was on Fridays, because he liked to give the smallest children time to finish their drawings.

The whole school came out to the yard to clap for him. He went pink, rang the bell once more, and then handed it to the headmaster.

The electric bell still rings at our school. But on Fridays, the teachers say, it always seems to ring a minute too early.

Mr Iyer wrote the sum on the board, worked it out, and drew a box around the answer: 48.

Priya looked at her notebook. She had got 42. She worked it again. Still 42. She looked at the board and followed each line, and there it was: in the third line, Mr Iyer had written 7 × 6 as 48.

Her hand went halfway up and stopped. Mr Iyer had taught for twenty years. Nobody corrected Mr Iyer.

She put her hand down. Then she thought of Rahul in the back row, who copied everything from the board and never checked, and who would learn the wrong answer. Her hand went up again, all the way this time.

"Sir," she said, "I think in the third line, seven sixes might be forty-two."

The class went silent. Mr Iyer turned to the board and looked at it for a long moment. Then he picked up the duster and rubbed out the 48.

"Forty-two," he said. He wrote it in. "Thank you, Priya." And then, to the class, "Checking is not rude. Not checking is."

After that, whenever he finished a sum on the board, he would turn around and ask, "Well? Who is going to check me?"

Halfway through her first board exam, Meera looked at her watch and froze. It said 10:15, exactly what it had said the last time she looked. The battery had died.

There was no clock on the wall of the exam hall, and the invigilator was busy at the far end of the room. Meera felt her heart race. How much time was left? An hour? Twenty minutes? She began to write faster and faster, until her handwriting was hard to read even for herself.

Then she stopped and took a breath. Panicking, she realised, was wasting more time than the broken watch. She had practised this paper at home many times, and she knew that each long answer took her about fifteen minutes. So she would use the answers themselves as a clock. Three long answers were left: about forty-five minutes of work.

She wrote steadily, one answer at a time, without looking at her wrist again. She had just finished the last line of the last answer when the bell rang.

Outside, her friends were complaining that the paper had been too long. Meera only smiled and slipped the dead watch into her pocket. That evening she bought a new battery, but she never forgot the lesson. A watch could stop; what she had practised could not.

Rohan had booked the window seat on the train to Jaipur three weeks earlier. It was his first journey alone, and he had planned it carefully: the window, his headphones, a packet of chips and six hours of fields rushing past.

When he reached his seat, an old woman was sitting in it. She had a cloth bag on her lap and a nervous look, as if she expected to be told off.

"Excuse me," Rohan began, holding out his ticket. "I think this is—"

"I know, beta," she said. "My seat is the middle one. But I feel sick if I cannot see outside. I will move if you want."

Rohan looked at the middle seat, squeezed between a large man reading a newspaper and a family eating parathas. He thought of his three weeks of planning. Then he looked at the old woman's hands, which were holding the bag very tightly.

"It's all right," he said. "Keep it."

The journey was not the one he had planned. The large man's newspaper kept hitting his ear, and the parathas smelled so good it was almost painful. But somewhere after Ajmer, the old woman unwrapped a cloth and offered him two laddoos she had made herself, and told him about her grandson, who was also going to Jaipur, to study, just like Rohan.

By the time the train stopped, Rohan had not seen many fields. He did not mind as much as he had expected.

Every morning at six, Babu opened his father's tea stall at the corner of the bus stand. By the time the first bus came in, the water was boiling, the glasses were washed, and the newspapers that the stall kept for customers were neatly folded on the bench.

Babu was fourteen and had left school two years earlier, when his father's knee went bad. But he had made a rule for himself. Between customers, he read the newspapers before anyone else did: one Hindi and one English. The English paper was slow work. He kept a small notebook in his pocket and wrote down every word he did not know, to ask about later.

Most customers paid no attention. But one, a schoolteacher who caught the 7:20 bus, began to notice the notebook. One day she asked to see it. She turned the pages for a long time.

"Who explains these words to you?" she asked.

"Nobody," said Babu. "I guess them. Sometimes I am wrong."

The next morning she came with an old dictionary and a form for the open school, where students could study at home and sit the exams later. "You will have to read even more," she warned.

Babu looked at the dictionary, then at the stove. "Tea first," he said, and poured her a glass. "Then reading."

She laughed, and from that day she paid for her tea and stayed until the 7:40.