Class 6 English Chapter 7: Neem Baba

A girl and a tree

Amber comes home from school and sits down in the shade of the neem in her courtyard. She feels that the tree is whispering to her. So she looks up and speaks to it, and it answers her.

Laid out as a script

What follows is set out as a conversation. A name, a colon, and then the words that person says. There is no narrator explaining anything at any point. Everything you learn arrives because Amber asked a question. If she had not been curious, the page would be blank.

They already know each other

The tree calls her dear Amber. It reminds her that she played in its shade when she was small, so this is not a first meeting. She calls it Neem Baba, which is the name it offers her.

Very old, and from here

The neem is ancient. It began somewhere in North India or in Myanmar, millions of years ago. Its family later spread well beyond those places, and it is clearly proud of how far they went.

A large family

Today neem grows across many Asian and African countries, and in parts of America too. A tree that began in one region now has relatives on three continents. Not many plants can say that.

A collection of names

Its Sanskrit names include Arishta, which means the one who cures diseases. There is Nimba as well, and Nimbaca. The word Neem itself was given by the Iranians, and Hindi calls it Nimb.

Seven more

Across the Indian languages there are several others: Nim, Leemba, Nimori, Nimbamond, Nimbe and Nimo. Each language has taken the tree and named it for itself, which is worth stopping to notice.

Why so many names

Neem Baba gives the reason without being asked. Trees become well known for what they do. People find them useful, and that is why they are remembered. Nothing in his answer is about beauty or height.

What scientists call it

They have added their own titles, which are generous ones. Nature's gift to man. The magic tree. The tree of the twentieth century. Every one of those is again about usefulness.

In the house

The everyday uses come next, and they are very ordinary ones. Twigs for cleaning teeth. Leaves tucked among clothes to protect them. Neem oil turned into soap and into toothpaste.

In a sickroom

When Amber's brother had measles, the doctor had neem leaves spread on his bed. Measles itches badly. The leaves soothe the skin, and they also stop germs from breeding on it. Two reasons, not one.

Her own family

Amber adds two more from her own house. Her grandmother once cured her cough with a medicine made from bark. She also treated her father's itching eyes with a kajal made from neem flowers.

The warning

And here Neem Baba stops her. Remedies like these belong to people who are properly trained and have real experience. Knowing a use is not the same as being able to apply it safely.

Out in the fields

For farmers the seeds matter most. Ground into powder and mixed with water, they keep locusts off crops. The same powder protects roots from termites, and keeps insects out of stored grain.

Standing water

In flooded rice fields that powder stops mosquitoes breeding and lifts the yield. Amber immediately sees further. Put it in the puddles around houses, she says, and mosquitoes will not breed there either.

A question back

Neem Baba ends by telling her that many of the tree's qualities are still undiscovered. Then he asks whether she will find them when she grows up. She says she will, and the chapter closes.

Scenario:

Aarti reads the chapter and is impressed. That evening her younger brother has a rash, so she boils a handful of neem leaves and tells him to wash with the water. She has not asked anybody. When her mother finds out she is not pleased, and Aarti is puzzled, because the chapter says neem leaves are used exactly that way. Her mother agrees that they are. She then asks Aarti three things. How much did you use, how hot was it, and do you know what the rash actually is. Aarti cannot answer any of them.

Analysis:

Everything Aarti did came out of the chapter, and she had still skipped the sentence that mattered most.

Activity:

Find the warning sentence in the chapter and copy it out above your notes on the uses.

Title:

Name your own tree

What You Notice:

Trees with many uses usually collect many names, and trees nobody uses often have only one. That is exactly what Neem Baba told Amber, and you will have tested it on a tree he never mentioned. If your tree has several names and no uses that anybody remembers, that is worth noticing too, and worth asking about.

When Persian visitors found the tree growing freely in India they called it Azad Darakhte Hindi, and its Latin scientific name Azadirachta indica comes from that.

Scientists have given the neem some remarkable titles, including nature's gift to man and the tree of the twentieth century.

Neem wood is not eaten by termites, which is why furniture made from it lasts so much longer than furniture made from softer woods.

Where the neem is used — HOME - FARM - STORE — At home for teeth, clothes and illness. On the farm against insects and mosquitoes. In the store to keep grain safe. Three places, one tree.

Why the tree is famous — Known for what you do — Neem Baba says it himself. Nobody named the tree for being tall or old. Every name it carries came from somebody it helped.

Words that team up

This chapter is full of words working in pairs. Neem oil. Seed powder. Rice fields. Each pair means one thing, not two. You cannot take one word away and keep the meaning.

What a compound is

A compound word is a single meaning built from words that already existed separately. Seed means one thing, powder means another, and seed powder means a third. That third meaning is the whole test.

Keeping the space

The pairs above are still written as two words with a space between them. That does not make them any less joined. Their meaning has fused even though their spelling has not. A space is a habit of writing, not a fact about meaning.

Joined right up

Other compounds have finished the job. Something, grandmother, childhood, sometimes. Nobody writes some thing or grand mother any more, though people once did. The join finished long ago and nobody noticed it happening.

The middle case

And some sit between the two, held together by a hyphen. Thought-provoking. Cost-effective. Cleanliness-parting, which somebody invented for this tree. A hyphen is often where a very new compound starts out.

Why three kinds

There is no tidy rule that tells you which spelling a compound will take. It depends on how long the pair has been together and how used to it people are. Dictionaries follow that habit rather than setting it.

Moving to the past

Now a different piece of work. Every verb in the chapter can be put into the past, and what happens next divides them into two groups.

The easy group

Discover becomes discovered. Cure becomes cured. Spray becomes sprayed. The word keeps its shape and takes an ending, and you can see the original inside it. That is why a rule works here. You can use it on a word you have never met.

The awkward group

Become becomes became. Find becomes found. Make becomes made. Tell becomes told. Give becomes gave. These do not take an ending. They change shape. Sometimes one letter moves, and sometimes almost all of them do.

No rule to learn

Nothing about find tells you the past will be found. You cannot work it out, so these verbs have to be collected one at a time. Every speaker of English has done that collecting, usually without noticing.

The oldest words

It is worth noticing which verbs behave this way. They are the short, common, everyday ones, and they are the oldest words in the language. Words used constantly resist being tidied up.

Giving things a voice

The third piece of work is the one holding the chapter up. Personification means writing about something that is not a person as though it were one.

Two small examples

One line of it runs: the leaves whispered in the wind. Another has it that the flowers danced merrily in the breeze. Leaves cannot whisper and flowers cannot dance, but you know exactly what both lines mean. Neither line asks you to believe anything.

Why it works

It borrows something you already understand. You know what whispering sounds like, so you know at once what the leaves were doing. The writer is spared a whole sentence of explaining.

The whole chapter

Now look at Neem Baba himself. He remembers a small child playing in his shade, he offers a warning, and he ends by asking Amber a question. He is also proud of his family and rather pleased with his names.

The largest example in the book

A tree cannot do any of those things, and the entire chapter depends on pretending that this one can. It is the largest example you will meet this year. Without personification there would be nothing on the page at all.

Scenario:

A teacher writes three sentences from her class on the board without saying what is wrong with any of them. The first says: Amber finded the answer herself. The second says: my grand mother cured my cough with neem bark. The third says: the branches reached down and patted her on the head. She asks the class which of the three are mistakes and which are choices. One boy says all three are wrong, because none of them could really happen. A girl disagrees and says only two of them break a rule. The teacher tells the class that the girl is right, and asks them to explain why.

Analysis:

Two of the sentences break a rule of the language. The third breaks a rule about the world, and it does so on purpose.

Activity:

Write three sentences of your own, two with a mistake in them and one with deliberate personification, and see whether your partner can tell which is which.

Title:

A compound hunt in your own room

What You Notice:

Your joined column will probably fill up fastest, because the compounds you know best are the ones that have closed up. The disagreements are the interesting ones. A word you wrote with a space and the dictionary joined is a compound caught halfway through closing, and in twenty years the dictionary may agree with you.

Many closed compounds began life with a space. Today nobody writes to day or to night, but both were once written as two separate words.

The irregular verbs are mostly the oldest and commonest words in English. That is exactly why they resisted the tidy ending that everything else took.

The three kinds of compound — SPACE - HYPHEN - JOINED — neem oil has a space. Cost-effective has a hyphen. Grandmother has joined. Three spellings, one idea.

Regular or irregular — Does it keep its shape? — Discovered still looks like discover. Found does not look much like find. That question sorts almost every verb.

Two jobs, not one

This part of the chapter asks you to do two different things. One is spoken and one is written. They sound similar, which is exactly why people muddle them, so it is worth separating them first.

The first job

You make a leaf card, and then you tell the class how you made it. The card itself is small. The telling is the part that is actually being marked.

Making the card

Draw the outline of a leaf. Write on it the name of the tree it came from. Add one thing that tree is used for. Three small steps, and no more than that.

Then explain it

Now say how you did that, in the order you did it. Not what the card shows, but how the card came to exist. Those are two quite different answers. One of them can be checked by looking at the card. The other cannot, because the steps are over and nothing on the card records them.

Why order matters

This is called explaining a process, and the order is not decoration. Tell somebody to write the name before drawing the leaf and they will run out of room. The steps depend on each other.

The joining words

First. Next. Then. After that. Finally. These small words tell a listener exactly where they are in your sequence. Without them a set of instructions is only a pile of sentences.

Why speaking needs them more

A reader can go back and check the line above. A listener cannot do that at all. Your joining words are the only thing keeping them in step with you.

The worst mistake

A step described badly can still be guessed at. A step left out cannot. Missing one is the single thing that breaks a process, and it is easier to do than you would think.

How to catch it

Read your steps to somebody who has not seen your card. Watch their face while you do it. The place they frown is the step you skipped over without noticing.

The second job

Now the written one. Choose a tree near your home and write a paragraph about it. There are three things that paragraph has to contain, and each of them does a different job.

Where it is

Be exact. Beside the second gate of the school, not somewhere near the school. Somebody should be able to take your sentence and walk to the tree without asking you anything.

How it looks

Height, the shape of the leaves, the colour of the bark, whether it flowers. Anything that would help a stranger pick it out from the trees around it. A stranger cannot use many green leaves to find anything.

Why you like it

This is the part that is yours. Not because trees are beautiful, which is true of every tree there is. Something that happened under this one, and under no other.

The test of the third part

Read your reason and ask whether it would fit any other tree in your street. If it would, you have not finished writing it yet. Keep going until it fits one tree only.

The title

Leave it until the end. Once the paragraph is written you can read it back, see what it turned out to be about, and name it from that. A title chosen first rarely fits.

Before you hand it in

Three questions. Could a stranger find the tree. Could they tell it from its neighbours. Could anybody else have written your last sentence. If the answer to the third is yes, rewrite it.

Scenario:

Two pupils in the same class write about the same peepal tree in their school yard. Ravi writes that it is a big beautiful tree near his school. He says it has many green leaves. He likes it because trees are useful to everybody. Meena writes that it stands in the far corner of the yard, beyond the water tap. She says its leaves have long thin tips. They rattle loudly even when there is hardly any wind. She likes it because she hid behind it on her first day. A girl called Sunita found her there, and is now her closest friend. Both paragraphs are almost exactly the same length.

Analysis:

The class picked Meena's paragraph without hesitating, and could say why. Ravi wrote about trees. Meena wrote about one tree.

Activity:

Write your own three parts about a tree you pass every day, then read the last sentence to a partner and ask whether it could belong to any other tree.

Title:

The hidden step

What You Notice:

The step is usually easy to name when it is somebody else's instructions and nearly impossible in your own. That is because you can see your own finished object in your head while you read, and it quietly fills the gap for you. Your partner has nothing to fill it with, which is exactly why reading your work to somebody else finds mistakes you cannot.

The Persians who found the neem growing freely in India called it Azad Darakhte Hindi, and its scientific name Azadirachta indica was built from that.

A leaf is often the quickest way to tell two trees apart, which is why leaf shapes are what scientists reach for first.

Holding a process together — FIRST - NEXT - THEN - FINALLY — Four words that keep a listener in step with you. Without them a set of instructions is just a pile of sentences.

The three parts of a tree description — WHERE - LOOKS - WHY — Where it stands, what it looks like, and why it matters to you. Miss the third and it could be anybody's paragraph.