Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
The power went at four, and by six the monsoon rain had settled into the slow, sullen kind that would not stop before morning. Unni carried his father’s radio to the table beside the emergency lamp.
It was a heavy set in a wooden case, its cloth front faded to the colour of weak coffee. Nobody had switched it on in the eleven months since the funeral.
“It was always temperamental,” his mother said from her low stool, scraping coconut. “Your Achan had to slap it and call it names before it would play.”
Unni unscrewed the back panel. Dust lay thick over a nest of wires. He propped his phone against a steel tumbler and played a repair video, pausing it every few seconds, until the battery fell to nine per cent and he had to choose. He switched the phone off.
After that he worked by the lamp and by guesswork. He found a loose wire and pressed it back with a screwdriver heated on the gas stove. The room smelt of burning. His mother did not ask him what time he meant to sleep.
Near ten he turned the knob. There was a hiss, a whistle, then, faint and far off, a woman’s voice reading the warning for fishermen: strong winds, rough sea, boats must not venture out. Unni sat back. He did not know what he had expected. Not this, a stranger reading wind speeds to boats that were not his.
His mother had stopped scraping. “He listened to this every night,” she said. “He never went near the sea in his life.”
Unni turned the volume up a little. Outside, the rain kept on. Neither of them reached across to turn the radio off.
The mother’s remark that her husband “never went near the sea in his life” suggests that
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → the nightly bulletin mattered to him as a habit, not for what it said
The father had no use for a warning to fishermen, yet he heard it every night.
- A bulletin is a short piece of news read out on radio or TV.
- The mother says, “He listened to this every night.” Then she adds that he “never went near the sea”.
- So the news about wind and boats did not touch his life. What mattered to him was the habit and the voice itself.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: he had always secretly wished to become a fisherman — Incorrect. Not mentioned: Nothing in the passage speaks of such a wish. The remark only shows that the warning was of no practical use to him.
Option 2: the warning for fishermen was the only programme the set could catch — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage never says the set could catch only one station. The remark is about him, not about the radio.
Option 4: she had always found his habit of listening to it rather foolish — Incorrect. Misread: She stops her work to say this, and she lets the radio play on. Her words are full of feeling, not scorn.