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 tone of the narrator in the passage can best be described as
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Tender: she watches her father’s quiet grief with loving understanding
A tender tone is gentle, soft and full of love. The narrator watches her father in this way.
- She does not blame him, even though he undoes her afternoon’s work.
- She sees the grief behind his fussing. She knows “he was not really packing a trunk at all”.
- She feels “a strange tightening” in her throat. This shows her own love and sadness. Example: Dadi spoke in a tender voice to the sleeping baby.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Nostalgic: she longs for the childhood she is about to leave behind — Incorrect. Wrong focus: Nostalgic means feeling a sad longing for the past. The narrator is watching her father on this one night. She does not look back at her childhood. Example: Old school photos always make my mother nostalgic.
Option 2: Ironic: she gently mocks her father’s needless fuss over a packed trunk — Incorrect. Misread: Ironic means saying the opposite of what one means, often to make fun of something. The short line “It had not” may sound dry. But the narrator does not make fun of her father. She understands him. Example: Ravi gave an ironic smile when the “short” meeting went on for three hours.
Option 4: Detached: she records the events of the night without any feeling of her own — Incorrect. Contradicted: Detached means not showing any personal feeling. The narrator speaks of “a strange tightening in my throat”, so she is deeply moved. Example: The reporter gave a detached account of the accident.