'Little girl,' said the moustachioed man who had made the long speech.'Panditji is a busy man. You must not bother him with such requests.'
But Pandit Ravi Shankar smiled and motioned him to be quiet. He turned to Ustad Sahib and said, 'What shall we do, Ustad Sahib?' The Ustad moved the wad of paan from one cheek to another. 'Tomorrow morning we
perform for the boy Yes?'he said.
'Yes, 'Panditji replied. 'It's settled then.' It was a very excited Smita who came home late that Anant was awake, breathing
the oxygen from the cylinder. 'Did you - did you hear him?'he whispered. 'I did,' she replied, 'and I spoke to him and
he'll come tomorrow morning with the tabla Ustad and they'll play for you.
And the following morning Aunt Sushila's neighbours saw two men get out of a taxi
which pulled up outside their block... they could not believe their eyes. 'Is it... It's not
possible?' they said.
Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Allah Rakha went up the wooden staircase and knocked softly on the door of Aunt Sushila's apartment. They went in, sat down on the divan by the window and played for the boy, surrounding him with a great and beautiful happiness as life went out of him gently, very gently.
1. Find out four non- English words from the passage.
Answers
Summary in Kannada
1 One morning, in a small apartment in Bombay, a girl of about sixteen looked up from the newspaper and said excitedly, ‘Pandit Ravi Shankar’s playing tomorrow at the Shanmukhananda Auditorium.’ ‘Sh-sh,’ said her mother pointing to the figure sleeping on the bed. ‘You’ll wake him up. You know he needs all the sleep and rest he can get.’ 2 But the boy on the bed was not asleep. ‘Pandit Ravi Shankar!’ he said. ‘Pandit Ravi Shankar, the sitar maestro?’ He raised himself up on his elbows for one second, then fell back. But his eyes were shining. ‘We mustn’t miss the chance,’ he said. ‘I’ve –I’ve –always wanted to hear him and see him…..’
3 ‘Lie down son, lie down.’ His mother sprang to his side. ‘He actually raised himself up without help,’ she murmured with a catch in her throat and her eyes turned to the idols on a corner shelf. The prayer which she uttered endlessly came unbidden to her lips.
4 ‘I must hear him and see him,’ the boy repeated. ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime.’ Then he began to cough and gasp for breath and had to be given oxygen from the cylinder that stood under the bed. But his large eyes were fixed on his sister.
5.Smita bit her lip in self-reproach. She had been so excited at seeing the announcement that she had not remembered that her brother was very ill. She had seen how the doctors had shaken their heads gravely and spoken words that neither she nor her parents could understand. But somewhere deep inside, Smita had known the frightening truth that Anant was going to die. The word cancer had hung in the air- her brother was dying of cancer even though she pretended that all would be well and they would return together, a small family of four, to their home in Gaganpur. And he was only fifteen, and the best table-tennis player in the school and the fastest runner. He was learning to play the sitar; they were both taking sitar lessons, but Anant was better than her as in many other things. He was already able to compose his own tunes to the astonishment of their guru. Then cancer had struck and they had come to Bombay, so that he could be treated at the cancer hospital in the city.