Grounded in the opening sentence of ‘A Baker from Goa’.
They are nostalgic about the Portuguese days and the famous loaves of bread made by traditional village bakers.
The narrator explicitly says the profession survives.
Yes. The mixers, moulders, furnaces and baker families still exist, and the sound of the baker’s bamboo can still be heard in some places.
The local term is stated directly.
The baker is called a pader in Goa.
Grounded in the baker’s daily routine and the children’s anticipation.
He came at least twice a day—once while selling in the morning and again after completing his round. Children ran to meet him because they longed for the bread-bangles and sweet bread he carried.
Grounded in the clothing description.
In Portuguese days they wore the kabai, a single-piece frock reaching the knees. In the author’s childhood they wore a shirt and trousers shorter than full-length trousers but longer than half-pants.
Grounded in the narrator’s explanation of the expression.
Anyone wearing trousers that end below the knees is jokingly said to be dressed like a pader because that resembles the traditional baker’s distinctive clothing.
The detail appears in the description of the baker’s business.
They were recorded on a wall in pencil.
Grounded in the closing image of the baker.
It means a pleasantly plump or well-fed physique. The baker’s rounded body was public evidence that baking was a profitable profession.
Both parts are answered from the three absences in the opening stanza.
(i) In a treeless forest no bird can sit on branches, no insect can hide, and the sun cannot bury its feet in tree-shadow. (ii) The image personifies sunlight as a body reaching the ground: its ‘feet’ are the rays falling low among the trees. A leafy canopy buries or covers those rays in shade. In the empty forest, full sunlight reaches the ground because no trees interrupt it.
The response follows the second stanza’s personification and simile.
(i) The trees are unnaturally confined inside a house. Their roots work to free themselves from cracks in the veranda floor, leaves strain toward the glass, and small twigs grow stiff with exertion as they press outward. (ii) The long-cramped branches are compared to newly discharged patients, half-dazed and shuffling toward the clinic doors after confinement.
The answer traces the visual transformation and interprets the speaker’s conspicuous silence.
(i) At first the whole moon shines in an open sky. At the end it appears ‘broken like a mirror’, its pieces flashing in the crown of the tallest oak; the moving branches divide the visible moonlight. (ii) The house loses the plants that formed its artificial forest. The glass breaks, whispers cease, and the smell of leaves and lichen lingers briefly as the natural world moves outside. (iii) The speaker may scarcely mention the departure because it is extraordinary, difficult to explain and perhaps exposes the troubling fact that the trees were confined indoors. Silence can accompany events whose importance or strangeness has not yet been processed.
The response develops both interpretations requested and links the comparison poem.
(i) The poem can represent human domination of nature: trees kept as decoration inside a house struggle back toward a forest emptied by human action. Like the caged tiger, they retain strength but suffer confinement and instinctively seek their proper habitat. (ii) As a human metaphor, the roots, branches and leaves become people breaking restrictive social structures. The ‘long-cramped boughs’ resemble patients emerging after enforced dependence, and the collective forest suggests that isolated individuals gain freedom and community by moving together. The poem can therefore address ecological captivity and human liberation at once.
The comparison addresses subject, root imagery, direction of action and tone in both NCERT poems.
Both poems personify trees as living beings with powerful roots and expose the violence of separating them from natural growth. ‘On Killing a Tree’ describes how superficial cutting cannot destroy a tree; killing requires pulling out and scorching its root, making human violence explicit. ‘The Trees’ reverses the movement: confined trees actively free their roots and branches and return to the forest. Patel’s tone is grim and ironic as it instructs destruction, while Rich’s night escape is tense but ultimately liberating.