Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
By ten o’clock the terrace floor was too hot for bare feet, so Aarav stood on an old cotton sari while Dadi sat cross-legged in the one strip of shade. Between them, on a steel tray, lay the raw mangoes she had cut at dawn, each piece still holding a sliver of hard white stone.
“Write it down properly this year,” his mother had said. So Aarav had his phone out and a fresh note open.
“How much salt, Dadi?”
“Enough.”
“Enough is not a quantity.”
She laughed and pushed the bowl towards him. “Then taste and find out.”
The note did not get much longer. The fenugreek was roasted until the smell told her to stop, and the chilli went in until the colour looked right. Dadi’s measures lived in her fingertips. Aarav was moved to crow duty with a broom and spent twenty minutes losing an argument with one crow on the water tank.
The oil came last. Dadi had carried the heavy jar up two flights of stairs herself and waved away his help. Now she held it out to him. He tipped it too fast, and oil splashed onto the tray. She did not take the jar back. She only rested two fingers on his wrist, and the stream thinned to a slow gold thread.
They tied muslin over the jar and set it in the corner that got the most sun. It would cure there for a week. Aarav looked at the three lines on his screen and put the phone in his pocket. Then he pressed a finger into the spice left on the tray and tasted it, frowning, the way she did.
The line “Dadi’s measures lived in her fingertips” suggests that
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → she judges the right amounts by feel and long practice, not by fixed figures
The line does not mean that Dadi really measures with her fingers. It means that she knows the amounts from years of practice.
- She roasts the fenugreek “until the smell told her to stop”. She adds chilli until “the colour looked right”.
- She uses no spoons or numbers. For salt she says only “Enough”. Her senses and her hands know when the amount is right.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: she counts out each spice carefully with her fingers before adding it — Incorrect. Misread: This takes the line word for word. Dadi does not count anything. She goes by smell, colour and taste.
Option 3: she does not like anyone else to touch the spices while she works — Incorrect. Contradicted: She pushes the salt bowl towards Aarav and tells him to taste it.
Option 4: her hands have grown too stiff for the fine work of measuring — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage says nothing about stiff hands. She cut all the mangoes herself at dawn.