Complete solutions to the “Before you read” prompt and every “Think it out” question of NCERT Flamingo, Poetry Chapter 1, “My Mother at Sixty-six,” with each question exactly as the book prints it, with a full model answer under each. Write your own answer first, then compare.
1 Before You Read
Before the poem, the book prints a short prompt to think about. It has no single right answer; the model answer below shows the kind of points to make, and how they lead into the poem.
Q. Ageing is a natural process; have you ever thought what our elderly parents expect from us?
Answer: As parents grow old they become physically weaker and often lonelier, and what they expect from their children is mostly not money or gifts but care and closeness:
• Time and company: regular visits, calls and conversation, so that they do not feel left alone.
• Care in health: help with doctors, medicines and daily tasks that have become difficult.
• Respect and patience: being listened to, included in family decisions and never made to feel like a burden.
• Love and reassurance: warmth shown openly, and the feeling that their children will stand by them.
The poem shows how hard this can be in practice. Driving with her mother to Cochin, the poet notices how old and pale her mother has become and feels a deep ache of fear at the thought of losing her, yet at the airport all she says is “see you soon, Amma,” and smiles. The prompt asks us to think about what our elderly parents expect from us.
2 Think It Out
Q. What is the kind of pain and ache that the poet feels?
Answer: The poet feels the pain of realising that her mother is truly as old as she looks (“realised with pain / that she was as old as she / looked”). At the airport she feels “that old familiar ache, my childhood’s fear”: a fear she has known since childhood. The poem does not spell the fear out; the usual reading is the fear of losing her mother.
Q. Why are the young trees described as ‘sprinting’?
Answer: The trees are described as “sprinting” because, seen from a moving car, they seem to rush past at speed. The word also personifies them, giving them the energetic, youthful motion of a runner, which stands in sharp contrast to the poet’s still, ageing mother sitting quietly beside her.
Q. Why has the poet brought in the image of the merry children ‘spilling out of their homes’?
Answer: The merry children represent youth, energy and the beginning of life, the exact opposite of the poet’s mother, who is at the far end of her life. Bringing in this image immediately after seeing her mother’s aged, corpse-like face sharpens the contrast between youthful vitality and old age.
Q. Why has the mother been compared to the ‘late winter’s moon’?
Answer: A late winter’s moon gives weak, pale, fading light. Comparing the mother’s wan, pale look to it suggests that her health and vitality are fading in the same quiet, gradual way, capturing old age as a slow dimming rather than a sudden change.
Q. What do the parting words of the poet and her smile signify?
Answer: Her parting words, “see you soon, Amma,” and her repeated smile are an ordinary, cheerful front that hides what she is actually feeling underneath: the deep ache and fear of losing her mother. One reading is that, at the moment closest to real emotion, the poet chooses to spare her mother (and perhaps herself) from voicing that fear, so the words and the smile say the opposite of what she truly feels.
The book itself also gives one “Notice” observation rather than a question: “the whole poem is in a single sentence, punctuated by commas.” If asked why the poem is written as a single sentence, the answer is the book’s own: it “indicates a single thread of thought interspersed with observations of the real world around”, moving between the poet’s feelings and what she observes around her without a break.