NCERT Book Class 7 English (Honeycomb) Chapter 2 A Gift of Chappal; The Rebel

2
Before you read

Mridu is a young girl growing up in Madras (now called
Chennai) with Tapi, her grandmother, and Thatha, her
grandfather. One afternoon Tapi takes her to her aunt
Rukku Manni’s house to meet her cousins Lalli, Ravi
and Meena.

A Gift of Chappals
I

A smiling Rukku Manni threw open the
door. Ravi and Meena rushed out, and
Ravi pulled Mridu into the house. “Wait, let me take
off my slippers,” protested Mridu. She set them out
neatly near a pair of large black ones. Those were
grey, actually, with dust. You could see the clear
mark of every toe on the front part of each slipper.
The marks for the two big toes were long
scrawny: and scrawny.
thin Mridu didn’t have much time to wonder about
(suggesting
skinny toes)
whose slippers they were, because Ravi dragged
________________ her to the backyard, behind a thick bitter-berry
________________ bush. There, inside a torn football lined with
________________ sacking and filled with sand, lay a very small
kitten, lapping up milk from a coconut half-shell.
“We found him outside the gate this morning.
He was mewing and mewing, poor thing,” said