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.
In the line “as if checking it for some fault only he could see”, the ‘fault’ most likely refers to
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → an imagined flaw that gives him a reason to hold each thing a little longer
The father is not looking for a real fault. The words “only he could see” show that the fault is in his mind.
- The things he holds up are ordinary: a sweater, a steel tumbler and an old geometry box. Nothing is wrong with them.
- Checking them lets him hold each one a little longer before it goes away with his daughter. He puts the geometry box back in twice for the same reason.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: a real defect in the old things that the narrator had failed to notice — Incorrect. Contradicted: The fault is one “only he could see”. A real defect could be seen by the narrator too.
Option 2: the carelessness with which the mother had packed the trunk that afternoon — Incorrect. Wrong link: The trunk “had not” been packed wrongly. The line is about the single things he holds up to the light, not about the mother’s packing.
Option 3: the poor quality of the goods that the family had bought from the bazaar — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The bazaar is named only for the lock, and the lock “worked perfectly”. The passage never says the goods were poor.