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.
Which of the following statements reflect the theme of the passage?
(A) Trying to reach a lost person through what he left behind can lead to a meaning one did not expect.
(B) A small habit of the dead, taken up again, can quietly keep him present in a family.
(C) Old things, once mended, lose the meaning they held for the one who has died.
(D) Grief is best handled by putting away the things the dead have left behind.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → (A) and (B) only
Each statement is checked against the passage.
(A) Trying to reach a lost person through what he left behind can lead to a meaning one did not expect. — Correct.
- Unni mends his father’s radio but “did not know what he had expected”.
- A stranger’s weather warning turns out to be the very thing his father heard every night.
(B) A small habit of the dead, taken up again, can quietly keep him present in a family. — Correct.
- Unni turns the volume up, and “neither of them” turns the radio off.
- The father’s nightly habit goes on in the room.
(C) Old things, once mended, lose the meaning they held for the one who has died. — Incorrect.
- The mended radio plays the same bulletin the father loved.
- It brings his habit back instead of losing it.
(D) Grief is best handled by putting away the things the dead have left behind. — Incorrect.
- The radio was put away for eleven months.
- The passage ends with mother and son keeping it on, not putting it away.