Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
The night before I left for the hostel, my father decided that my trunk had been packed wrongly. It had not. My mother and I had spent the whole afternoon on it, rolling the dupattas tight and tucking the pickle jar between two towels. But after dinner he knelt on the floor of the front room, lifted everything out and began again.
I sat on the divan and watched. He worked slowly, with the care he had once given to the railway ledgers he kept for thirty-one years, smoothing each fold with his palm. Now and then he held something up to the tube light, a sweater, a steel tumbler, my old geometry box, as if checking it for some fault only he could see. The geometry box he put back in twice.
My mother brought him tea and left it on the window sill. It went cold. Neither of them mentioned it.
Around eleven he started on the lock. It was a heavy brass one from the bazaar, and it worked perfectly. He oiled it anyway. He turned the key one way and then the other, listening, his head bent so low I could not see his face. I wanted to tell him to go to sleep, and that I would write every Sunday. I said neither, because I understood, with a strange tightening in my throat, that he was not really packing a trunk at all.
When he finally stood up, his knees cracked. He told me the woollens were at the bottom and that I must not open the trunk on the train. Then he went to bed without looking at me, and the light in his room stayed on till late.
The lines “It went cold. Neither of them mentioned it.” mainly serve to
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → show, through a small unspoken detail, how much feeling the family keeps to itself
These short lines show feelings that nobody puts into words.
- The mother brings tea, a small act of care. The father is so lost in his task that he lets it go cold.
- Neither of them speaks about it. Both are sad that their daughter is leaving, and both keep it to themselves.
- The very short sentences make the silence in the room easy to feel.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: bring out the mother’s annoyance that her husband has ignored her care — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The mother leaves the tea and says nothing. There is no sign that she is annoyed.
Option 3: suggest that the father is too stubborn to accept help from anyone — Incorrect. Misread: The father does not refuse the tea. He only forgets it because his mind is on his daughter.
Option 4: mark how late the night has grown since the packing began after dinner — Incorrect. Wrong focus: Cold tea does show that some time has passed. But the main point of “Neither of them mentioned it” is the silence between them, not the time.