Question

The summer he turned 82, my father lost his stories. He was still vibrant, garrulous and energetic, and initially, none of us noticed that his anecdotes were getting repetitive, that he was forgetting names and places, that he was confusing times and references. A man of many narratives, we listened to his oft-repeated tales, sometimes with feigned patience and sometimes with visible impatience.

Till the day the stories stopped. The words dried out. The memories disappeared. The change happened so gradually that its final suddenness took us, his immediate family by complete surprise. And when the stories dried up, the energy seemed to drain away from his soul. This loss of energy was immediately and visibly apparent as this was one trait, above all others that characterized my father.

A child of Partition, Baba had left his native Barisal in present-day Bangladesh, on the eve of this momentous event in 1947, at the age of 14. My grandmother, widowed since the birth of my father, her youngest son, decided to leave their sprawling homestead with extensive farming lands and immigrate to the yet-to-be formed republic of India, along with her four other sons. Thus, family lore tells us, she liquidated some of her assets, packed her immediate family and necessary belongings onto a steamer and sailed into the teeming, seething city of Calcutta to set up a new life.

A seminal rupture in the subcontinent, Partition had wreaked havoc among countless families, uprooted and flung far and wide without any recourse. Baba often became that recourse – his contribution making a significant difference to families struggling to survive with some degree of dignity. It seemed his experience of early loss and deprivation had in a strangely converse way, endowed him with a generosity of soul that I have yet to encounter in another person.

It was thus shocking to see this extraordinary man with the mind, heart and soul of a Colossus shorn of his spirit.

In an effort to revive his flagging interest, I urged him to start writing down stories from his life. I bought him a notebook and with great flourish announced his assignment.

Stories were my particular stock in trade. I’d nurtured an early passion for storytelling and story writing into a teaching career focussed on literacy. I used specific strategies to build a writing habit in my students, centred on the belief that we all have stories to tell. As the children became confident and joyful storytellers, their acquisition of benchmarked literacy skills outstripped that of their peers.

Could I use these same strategies to draw the forgotten stories from Baba? Would these forgotten stories, in turn, help him reconstruct a sense of self?

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from: “Her father’s memories were slipping away. She made him tell stories so that he could hold on to them”, by Ranu Bhattacharyya, Scroll, 2019.]

Which of the following most accurately expresses the author’s main idea in the passage? 

विकल्प

• As people get older, they tend to lose their memories.

• Asking an old person who is losing their memory to write down stories from their life may help them reconstruct their sense of identity.

• Partition was a very disruptive event in our subcontinent’s history, and we should ensure our grandchildren know about it.

• It can sometimes be tiresome and boring to listen to old people telling the same stories over and over again.

Answer 1

Asking an old person who is losing their memory to write down stories from their life may help them reconstruct their sense of identity.

Explanation:

The correct answer is - asking an old person who is losing their memory to write down stories from their life may help them reconstruct their sense of identity.
This is apparent from the way in which the author describes how their father was losing his memory, how the author asks him to write down stories from his life, and finally, in the last paragraph of the passage, where the author describes how they wondered if asking their father to write down such stories would help them ‘reconstruct a sense of self’. While the other points may have been discussed in the passage, none of these is the author’s main point, as the idea in the answer is the one that is discussed at most length and in-depth.