Question

Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow:

He gave her a shove. But she did not move, rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else. They edged away from her; they would not look at her. She felt them go away.

1. Who is ‘she’? On which planet is this story set?        [2]
2. Mention any two ways in which life on this planet differs from life on earth.     [2]
3. Who are ‘they’? Why did ‘they’ not come to her aid when William shoved her?       [3]
4. What do ‘they’ do to her at the end of the story? Why did they behave in this manner?      [3]

Answer 1

1. 'She' in the extract is Margot, the protagonist of the story, "All Summer in a Day." She is a nine-year-old girl who moved from Ohio to planet Venus when she was four years old. Margot longs intensely for the sun, which she remembers vividly from her time on Earth. 
   The setting of the story is the planet Venus where it keeps on raining for years together.
2. Life on Venus is different from life on this earth. Here it rains for seven years continuously. Secondly, the sun shines for one day for only an hour after every seven years.
3. 'They' are the other children. They did not come to her aid because they did not like her. They disliked her because she would not play with them. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows. And then, of course, the biggest crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the colour and heat of it and the way it really was. But Margot remembered.
4. When the sun was about to come out for the first time in seven years, the kids locked Margot in a closet. When the sun came out, the children played in the illumination like wild animals. They played until it began to rain and then in a dawning-like realization, one of them remembered that they had left Margot in the closet. They walked slowly down the hall in the sound of cold rain. They turned through the doorway to the room in the sound of the storm and thunder, lightning on their faces, blue and terrible. They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it. Behind the closet door was only silence.
   They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out
   The children behaved in such a manner at the end of the story because they realised their mistake and felt sorry for their misbehaviour.