The BLUE BEAD

--Norah Burke
EXTRACT I

(i)Sleepers are rectangular pieces of timber, stone or steel which are

specifically cut for construction of building and railway tracks. Timber
is less denser than water so it floats. British used rivers for
transportation of timber, not by boats, but by directly floating them till
they reach their destination.

(ii)Dislodge is an act of forcefully removing something from its

position. Sleepers that are lying stuck in the stones can be dislodged by
delivering sufficient force, manually or mechanically, to the sleepers
using a lever like contrivance. Also, floods can lift them and jostle them
along.

(iii)The crocodile had come from deep black water of the river where
the flowing streams produced whirlpools. He had come to glassy
shallows of the river to rest. He balanced his body on tiptoe on the
rippled sand so that only his eyes and nostrils were visible above the
water. He lay in the water motionless breathing clean sunny air.

(iv)The crocodile raised his eyes to get a clear sight of the area around
the stepping stones and raised his nostrils to breath clean sunny air
easily, this enabled him to lay motionless and concealed, in ambush, for
prolonged duration. Over the years, the crocodile had grown, from a
baby crocodile vulnerable to birds of prey and carnivorous fishes, into a
juggernaut so ferocious and formidable that nothing could pierce his
inch-thick armoured hide. Inch-thick armoured refers to the thick and
hard covering of the crocodile which even a bullet cannot pierce, it
protects him.
v) Sibia encountered the crocodile later in the story. She attacked the
crocodile by aiming at its eye with her hayfork to save the life of the
gujar woman.
EXTRACT II

(i)A mugger crocodile is a species of freshwater crocodile with a short

snout found throughout the Indian subcontinent. It is blackish brown
above and yellowy white under. They are very ferocious and powerful.
(ii) a)It means a large reptile which is very old as if it belonged to the
times before the biblical flood.
b) something which has been in existence from very old times.
(iii)The crocodile with a huge tail was twice the length of a tall man.
His colour was blackish brown on above and yellowy white on
underside. The crocodile used unimaginable and irresistible power of
his huge tail to move in water. His hide was one inch thick and nothing
could pierce it. It was waiting for food. The little flycatcher which was
trilling along made him move.

(iv)The crocodile is described as "an antediluvian saurian, a prehistoric

juggernaut, ferocious and formidable, a vast force in water, propelled
by unimaginable and irresistible power of the huge tail", suggests that
he was a strong and dangerous animal
v) The crocodile forms an important component in the development of
the plot as Sibia saved the life of a Gujar woman by attacking the
crocodile in it's eye with a hayfork. Sibia found a blue bead which was
lying next to the crocodile. She rejoiced at having discovered the
glittering bead.

Extract III
(i)The crocodile hatched from an egg, probably a hundred years ago, in
a sandbank. The crocodile was very active because as soon as he
managed to get his head out of his shell he was looking around ready to
snap at everyhing even before he was fully hatched.

(ii)It means making use of one's craft and ferocity guided purely by
natural instinct. The young crocodile could escape from predators by
instinctively using his skills and fierceness.
(iii)The young crocodile faced the dangers by becoming prey to birds
and great carnivorous fish who fed on baby crocodiles.

(iv)The young crocodile caught the food and stored it in holes in the
river bank till putrid. The big crocodile fed mostly on fish but also o
deer, monkeys, and ducks. He had also sometimes fed on pi-dog full of
parasites and a skeleton cow. Sometimes he went down to the burning
ghats and fed on half-burned bodies of Indians cast into the stream.

(v)The body of crocodile is protected with one inch thick layer of

armoured hide on the above- His eyes and the soft underarms made
him vulnerable to an attack. Nothing can pierce it, even rifle bullets
would bounce off.

Extract IV

i) The girl came from a mud house , in a shrill noisy village above the
ford. She was dressed in earth-coloured rag. She was eating a chapatti
wrapped round a smear of green chili and rancid butter.
ii) The little girl was thin starveling child dressed in an earth- coloured rag
and was barefoot. She had dark hair, great eyes and brown oily skin. She was
a happy immature child-woman about twelve years old.
iii)The girl was thin and starveling, dressed in earth-coloured rag. She divided
the chapatti in parts to make it seem more. Even on a winter morning she
was barefoot. From above evidences we can conclude that girl was from a
poor household.
iv) Sibia was a twelve-year-old child but the hard work that she had engaged
herself in to support her family deprived of her childhood .She was thus a
child-woman and born to toil.
v) The blue bead was found near the crocodile. It was a sand worn glass that
had been rooling about in the river for a long time. It was perforated right
through the middle and perhaps the neck of a bottle. A blue bead was one of
the “unattainable wonders" for Sibia that she managed to attain at the end.
Norah Burke emphasizes the dearth of wealth that surrounds Sibia and her
family. Thus, fighting and killing a crocodile to the Gurjar woman was not as
big an achievement for her as that of finding a glittering blue bead.
Extract V
i) The bazaar was in the little town at the railhead. She knew about it as she
had been there with her parents and brothers.
ii) She had seen all the milling people, and dogs and monkeys full of fleas, the
idling gossiping bargaining humanity, man spitting betel juice, heard the bell
of a sacred bull clonking as he lumped along through the dust and hubbub.
iii) She had paused, amazed , before the sweetmeat stall, to gaze at the
brilliant honey confection and they smelled wonderful. The sweets she saw
were green and magenta in colour. At home she sometimes tasted wild
honey, or crunched the syrup out of a stalk of sugarcane.
v) She saw a cloth stall stacked with great rolls of new cotton cloth stamped
at the edge with the maker’s sign of a tiger’s head. Yes, she liked the stall as
it was smelling wonderful of dressing, straight front from the mills. Smell was
so nice that she could have stood by it all day.
Extract VI
i)The wonders Sibia had seen in bazaar were the satin sewn with real silver
thread and tin trays from Birmingham.
ii) The Kashmiri merchant was selling dawn-coloured silks that poured ice
cream, a little locked chest with turquoises and opals in it.
iii) The box, when pressed resulted in a bell tinkling and a yellow woollen
chicken jumping out.
iv) Since her childhood, Sibia was engaged in hard physical labour. She had
husked corn, and gathered sticks, and put dung to dry, and cooked and
weeded, and carried , and fetched water, and cut grass from the fodder.
v) Life of Sibia shows that she was from a poor family. Her life was marked
for work and she was born to toil. She had engaged in excessive physical
labour ever since she was a toddler. Gujar were the nomadic graziers who
would move from one place to another whereas Sibia led a settled life.
Extract VII
i)The thought of being toiled whole day while an agent sat on silk cushions,
smoking hukkah did not trouble Sibia.
ii) Sibia was going to get paper grass from the cliffs above the river.
iii) Sibia was going with her mother and other women of the village. Sibia
could not skip work, when she was on her way back from the cliffs, since at
that point, her body would ache with tiredness, and there was also a great
load to carry on her back.
iv) The women wear necklaces made out of lal-lal-beeges, the shiny scarlet
seeds, black one end, that grew everywhere in the jungle. They preferred to
wear new necklaces every year instead of last year’s faded one.
v) Sibia wished to wear necklace which would make rattling swish round her
neck, as she froushed along with lots of necklace. Since each seed, hard as
stone, had to be drilled with a red-hot needle, and the family needle was
snapped, so she has to wait till they could buy another.

Extract VIII

(i) The women were going to collect paper grass from the cliffs above
the river, to sell to the agent. The danger they encountered on the way
was a huge crocodile.

(ii) Nomads who graze cattle are known as nomadic graziers. These
nomads would stay in one place until their animals had grazed all the
grass or they were unable to sell their dairy products or buffaloes for
tiger bait.

(iii) The Gujar women wore trousers, tight and wrinkled at their
ankles and large silver rings made out of melted rupees, in their ears

(iv) The men and boys were out of the camp just now with the herd or
gone to the bazaar. The Gujars were born and bred in the forests. For
centuries they had been getting their living from animals and from
trees. They stored their food together in large herds and silver
jewellery. The Gujars lived a pastoral lifestyle herding livestock
around open areas according to seasons and the changing availability
of water and pasture.

(v) The Gujars, like Sibia, are called junglis because they were born
and bred in the forest. For countless centuries, their forebears had
lived like this. They had never been to a developed city or such.
Extract IX

(i) Sibia's sharp vision and range is compared to that of a flying bird.
she looked down the cliff, the same way the bird looks down from
height when they fly.

(ii) Sibia, as a child used to hide small bowls modelled from clay in the
cave for it to dry and harden. She did this so that she could use it for
colouring.

(iii) Sibia’s mother was angry with her as she was day-dreaming
instead of working. Sibia’s mother glared at her and angrily said,
“child”. This pulled Sibia back to work, and they continued to toil on.

(iv) The women carrying the load had to go back to their homes in
their village where they had to see their animals and the evening
meal.

(v) At the end of the day feels very lucky to find the blue bead . She
expresses no happiness for killing the crocodile and saving the
women from the crocodile but only feels happy for finding the blue
bead in the river. It reveals that she was a courageous and
adventurous girl as she did all these things every day and experience
them on a regular basis therefore it was nothing new for her but to
find Blue bead was specially more important to her. It also reveals
about her poverty.

Extract X

(i) When the Gujar woman stepped on to the stepping stones, the
crocodile lunged at her and slashed at her legs.

(ii) The woman screamed, dropped both brass pots with a clatter on
the boulder. The Gujar woman recoiled from crocodile but at the same
time she fell on a bone breaking stone. She clutched one of the timber
logs to save herself.

(iii) The crocodile lunged at the Gujar woman and caught her leg
tightly in his jaws. She screamed and tried to free herself as she
slipped and fell on the bone-breaking stone, and clutched one of the
timber logs to save herself. The crocodile tried hard to pull her into
the water.
iv) Refer to ‘Wild Nature’ under Critical Appreciation, page 161. While
nature is beneficial for humans, it can also be wild and harmful as
depicted in the story, The Blue Bead. The people of the village live in
the lap of nature and enjoy it’s benefits but are also vulnerable to it’s
many dangers, like, they fall prey to various fatal diseases and are
often threatened by wild animals.

v) Sibia sprang immediately and from boulder to boulder she came

leaping like a rock goat. She heroically came on wings beside the
shrieking woman to save her.

Extract XI

(i) With all the force of her little body, Sibia drove the hay-fork at the
crocodile’s eyes. One prong went right in, while its pair scratched past
on the thorny cheek. The crocodile convulsed in pain and crashed
back with a thud and in a whirlpool of blood, he disappeared.

(ii) Sibia got her arms around the Gujar woman and dragged the
fainting woman from the water. She stopped wound with sand and
bound them with rag and helped the woman reach her encampment.

(iii) Sibia left his sickle and fork at the site, where the Gujar woman
was attacked by the crocodile. The fork was lying in the river, not
carried away by water. The strange object that Sibia saw in water was
a blue bead whose shape was wobbling in the movement of the
stream.

(iv) Sibia reached her arm down into a yard of the cold silk water to
get it. Missing it first of all, because of refraction. The object was
perfect, white- blue and even pierced ready for use, with the sunset
shuffled about inside it like gold-dust.

(v) Sibia reached home with the bead tucked safely in her skirt. She
found her mother anxiously searching for her. Instead of narrating
her heroic deed of saving the Gujar woman, Sibia excitedly showed
her mother, the blue bead. This shows that “daily heroism” is a part of
the jungle life. This also shows how desperate Sibia was to own a
necklace.

The story highlights the pathetic and dangerous living conditions in

rural areas as well as the priorities in a poor girl’s life
Refer to ‘Poverty’ under Themes on page 158.

Also refer to ‘Irony’ under style page 159.