Class 6 English Chapter 1: A Bottle of Dew

A field left to itself

Rama Natha was the son of a wealthy landlord. When his father died, wide fields passed to him. He never walked them and never sowed them. One idea filled his head, and it left room for nothing else.

The idea that ate his days

He believed a liquid existed that could turn any object into gold. Finding it was his only work. Strangers took his money and promised him the secret. None of them delivered. He still would not stop.

Madhumati does the arithmetic

His wife, Madhumati, watched the money leave the house. She was tired of the search and frightened by the sums. At the rate her husband spent, she could see where this ended.

A sage comes to town

Then a sage named Mahipati arrived. Rama Natha became his follower at once and asked the question he asked everybody. This time the answer was yes.

The condition

Plant banana plants, the sage said. Water them with your own hands. On winter mornings dew sits on the leaves. Collect it. Bring five litres and he would chant the words over it. One drop would then turn anything to gold.

Five litres is a great deal of dew

Rama Natha objected. Winter is short, so this would take years. The sage agreed, and added the part that mattered. Plant as many as you wish, but look after them yourself, and gather the dew with your own hands.

The fields wake up

He cleared land that had lain empty for years. He planted row after row of banana shoots and tended them. Each winter he gathered dew off the leaves, a few drops at a time.

Madhumati goes to market

Madhumati did not sit and watch. She harvested the bananas, carried them to market and was paid well. More plants went in every year, so every year there was more fruit.

Six years

The plantation spread until it was large. Each season the rows reached a little further across ground that had grown nothing for years. At the end of six years the bottle finally held five litres. Nobody in the house had noticed the other thing that had been filling up.

Nothing happens

He carried it to the sage, who muttered over the water and handed it back. Rama Natha shook a few drops onto a copper vessel and waited. The copper stayed copper.

Six wasted years

He accused the sage of cheating him and said six precious years were gone. The sage said nothing to any of that. He simply beckoned his wife forward.

The box

She came carrying a big box. When she opened it, stacks of gold coins shone inside. The gold was real, and there was a great deal of it. Rama Natha had been looking for exactly this, and here it sat, brought in by his wife. It had simply arrived by a different road from the one he had been watching.

The trick explained

There had never been a potion, the sage said. Rama Natha had worked his land and Madhumati had sold its fruit. Between them they had built this money. Told the same thing six years earlier, he would not have listened, so the sage set him a task instead.

What he did next

Rama Natha understood what lay behind the words. From that day he worked his plantation harder than before. That last line is what makes it a fable and not a joke played on a foolish man.

Who tells it

The version in your book is retold by Sudha Murty, who has put many old Indian stories into plain English for young readers.

Scenario:

After reading the story, Vikram tells his group that the sage cheated Rama Natha. He points out three things. Mahipati promised a potion. He took six years of labour. He then produced nothing. Anjali disagrees. She says the sage never promised the dew would work. He said only that a potion was possible. Everything he asked for was real work with a real result. Vikram answers that a person who hides the truth is lying whether he says a false word or not. Their teacher asks them both to find the sage's own explanation at the end of the story and read it aloud before arguing any further.

Analysis:

Two pupils, one story, and a disagreement about what counts as a lie.

Activity:

Write the conversation the sage and Rama Natha would have had on day one if the sage had spoken plainly.

Title:

Catch your own dew

What You Notice:

Tiny drops gather on the outside of the cold tumbler, and your finger comes away wet. Nothing leaked. The air touching the cold glass could not hold all its water vapour, so it left some behind as drops. That is dew, made on your table. Now imagine gathering five litres of it.

Dew is not rain that fell quietly. It forms in place, when air touching a cool leaf can no longer hold all its water vapour.

A banana plant is not a tree. It has no wood, and what looks like a trunk is a tight bundle of leaf bases.

Copper was a good choice for the test in the story. It is the metal an Indian kitchen of the time would have had lying about.

The order of the sage's instructions — PLANT - POUR - WAIT - GATHER — Plant the banana shoots. Pour water by your own hand. Let a winter night pass. Gather the dew off the leaves. Four steps, and not one of them is magic.

Who did what — He grew, she sold — Three words hold the whole household. Rama Natha in the field, Madhumati at the market, one box of coins between them.

Two words, one sound

Say the word dew out loud. Now say due. Your mouth did the same thing twice. Yet one is water on a leaf and the other means something is expected soon. Words like these are called homophones.

Why they cause trouble

Listening cannot separate them. If a friend says the word aloud, you have no way of knowing which spelling she means. Only the rest of the sentence can tell you, so a homophone is really a question about meaning wearing the costume of a spelling.

Six pairs from this story

The word list beside our story gives six: I and eye, dew and due, son and sun, one and won, ate and eight, see and sea. Read each pair aloud and notice how little your mouth changes.

Putting them to work

The son helped his father. The sun rose behind the banana rows. Both sentences are correct. Swap the two spellings and both turn into nonsense, though neither would be misspelled.

A checker will not save you

This is why a spell-checker is no help here. It looks for words that do not exist. Son exists, sun exists, and the machine has no opinion about which one belongs in your sentence.

Joining two ideas

Now a different job. Two short ideas often belong together, and a joining word says how. He planted the shoots. The sage told him to. Put because between them and the pair becomes one sentence with a reason inside it.

Because and as

Both of these give a reason. He kept collecting because he believed the sage. He kept collecting as he believed the sage. The meaning holds, and only the sound of the sentence shifts.

Before and as soon as

These two give a time instead. He cleared the land before he planted anything. That tells you the order. As soon as winter arrived, he was out among the leaves. That tells you there was almost no gap.

Choosing the wrong one

A joining word is not decoration and cannot be swapped freely. He sold the fruit before he grew it is a sentence with perfect grammar and an impossible meaning.

One letter, two voices

Now listen to the letter s. In sage and promising it hisses. In wisdom and trees it buzzes. Same letter, two different sounds, and nothing in the spelling warns you which is coming.

Hiss or buzz

There is a test you can feel. Rest a finger lightly on your throat and say sand, then say nose. Sand leaves the throat still. Nose makes it shake. That shake is the /z/.

A word that does both

The word surprise contains both. Its first s hisses and its second one buzzes, in the space of a single short word. English rarely bothers to be tidy about this, and there is no rule you can learn that would have predicted it. You simply meet the word and listen to what your mouth already does with it.

Sounds that repeat on purpose

One last game with sounds. When several nearby words begin with the same one, we call it alliteration. Big bunch of bananas. Your ear notices immediately, which is why poems and advertisements use it.

Why a tongue twister trips you

A twister crowds those near-identical shapes together and asks you to hurry. Your mouth cannot plan quickly enough, so the sounds come out swapped. That failure is the whole point of the game.

What to carry away

Three separate tools, all about listening. Homophones warn you that your ear cannot spell. Joining words say how two ideas connect. And the letter s reminds you that a written letter and a spoken sound are not the same thing.

Scenario:

Nisha types her essay and runs the spell-checker. Not one word is underlined, so she hands it in confident. It comes back with four corrections. She had written that the sun of the farmer worked hard. That the reward was do to him. That he one the prize. That he ate eight bananas by the see. Every one of those words is spelled correctly. Nisha protests that the computer checked it. Her teacher asks her to read the first sentence aloud and say who exactly worked hard, the farmer's boy or the star in the sky.

Analysis:

Four errors, zero underlines. The tool did its job and still missed everything.

Activity:

Swap essays with a partner and hunt only for homophones, reading every sentence aloud.

Title:

The throat test

What You Notice:

Sand, sage and promising leave the throat still, so their s is a hiss. Nose, keys and was make it shake, so theirs is a buzz. Nothing in the spelling told you which list a word belonged in. You had to listen, and your throat turned out to be a better guide than the page.

A spell-checker will happily let you write that the son came up at six o'clock, because son is a real word, correctly spelled and in the wrong place.

English has trios as well as pairs. To, too and two all sound the same and do three completely different jobs in a sentence.

The /z/ buzz in words like trees and keys is your voice box switching on. The hiss in sand is the same mouth shape with the voice off.

Which homophone to write — The ear cannot spell — Saying the word aloud will never tell you whether to write sun or son. Only the meaning of the sentence can decide it, so read the whole line before choosing.

Telling /s/ from /z/ — Hiss or buzz — A snake hisses, a bee buzzes. Hold your throat as you say the word. Nose buzzes, so it ends in /z/. Sand hisses, so it starts with /s/.

Speaking is not writing out loud

A reader can go back. If a paragraph loses them, their eye simply returns to the top of it. A listener has no such option. Whatever you said has gone, and they are still holding what they managed to catch.

Signposts for the ear

That is why spoken points need signposts. Firstly tells a listener that a list has begun. Secondly tells them the first point has finished. Lastly warns them you are about to stop. None of this adds information, and all of it helps.

Joining a reason to its point

A bare list is still weak. Compare two versions. Hard work matters. You learn skills. Now join them: hard work matters, because you pick up skills while you do it. The second sounds like an argument rather than a heap.

Listening for an order

Now the other side of the same skill. When somebody describes a set of events, you have to catch both what happened and when. Trying to do both at once is where listeners come unstuck.

Catch first, sort later

So split the job. Note each event roughly as it arrives, in any form you can write quickly. When the speaker stops, look at your notes and number them. Sorting is easy on paper and almost impossible in your head.

Describing so a reader can taste it

Writing next. Suppose you have to describe a banana. The weak version says it is nice and yellow, which puts almost nothing in the reader's mind.

Look, smell, touch, taste

Walk the senses instead. The skin is yellow with small brown flecks. It smells faintly sweet. The outside feels smooth and slightly waxy. Inside, the flesh is soft and gives way without effort. Four sentences, and the reader is holding one.

Why the extra senses matter

Sight alone is the habit everyone falls into, and it is the sense that carries the least here. Smell and touch are what make a description feel like the thing rather than a picture of it.

A story becomes a script

Last, a different kind of writing. A story tells you what happened. A script shows it, using only what an audience can see and hear.

What a script keeps

Each line carries a name, then the exact words spoken. Narration disappears. Where a story says he was worried, a script has to find a line that a worried man would actually say.

Short notes in brackets

A script may add a brief instruction: how a line is said, or what the speaker is doing. These are kept short, because an actor needs to find their words quickly on the page.

Turning narration into speech

This is the real work of adapting a story. Somebody has to say the information out loud, and it must sound like a person talking rather than a paragraph read aloud.

One piece of the story

A good scene to try is the moment the dew fails. Three people are present, each wanting something different, and everything they feel has to arrive through what they say.

Practising out loud

A script is not finished until it has been spoken. Read your lines aloud and you will hear at once which ones no human being would ever say.

What ties these together

Speaking, listening and writing look like three separate skills. They share one idea. In each of them you are managing what somebody else can follow. Ordering words do it for a listener. Rough notes do it for yourself. The senses do it for a reader, and dialogue does it for an audience. Four tools, one job.

Scenario:

The Class 6 children at a school near Navsari turned unused ground behind the kitchen into a banana patch. Meera's group kept the record book. Every Monday they measured the tallest plant and counted its new leaves. They also wrote three sentences on what the patch smelled and felt like after rain. When the first bunches were cut, the school sold them at the gate. Meera worked out that eleven bunches had brought in more than the saplings cost. At the annual day her group read their record aloud. Then they performed a short scene of their own, about a farmer who waited for rain instead of digging a channel.

Analysis:

One patch of ground fed three subjects at once: careful measurement, written description and a performed script.

Activity:

Keep a record of one plant near your home for two weeks, with a measurement and one sentence of description each time.

Title:

Describe a fruit without naming it

Safety:

Wash any fruit before tasting it, and ask an adult first.

What You Notice:

The line people guess from is almost never the one about looks. Colour and shape fit a dozen fruits at once, while the smell and the feel usually fit one. That is the whole reason a description reaches past sight. A reader who is told a skin is smooth and a flesh is soft and sweet is holding something, and a reader who is told a fruit is yellow is holding a colour.

India grows more bananas than any other country in the world, and most of them are eaten here rather than sent abroad.

A script for the stage is laid out differently from a story on purpose, so an actor can find their own lines at a glance.

Listeners remember the first and last thing you say far better than the middle, which is one reason lastly is such a useful signpost.

Giving reasons out loud — FIRST - NEXT - LAST — Three signposts a listener can follow. Firstly opens, next carries on, and lastly warns that you are about to stop, which stops people wondering how long you will go on.

Describing an object — LOOK - SMELL - TOUCH - TASTE — Walk down the list and you will always have four sentences. Most weak descriptions stop after looking, which is why they feel thin.