Question

What does Valli mean when she says, “I was just agreeing with what you said about things happening without our knowledge”.

Answer 1

Hint: The context of the above question is given in the story ‘Madam rides the bus ‘ written by Vallikkannan. It is translated from Tamil by K.S. Sundaram and illustrated by R. K. Narayan. The story is about the bus ride of a little girl and her experience.

Complete answer:
Valli in the story is an 8-year-old curious girl. She said the given statement while her mother was conversing with one of her aunts. When her mother said “Yes, you’re right, So many things in our midst and in the world outside. How can we possibly know about everything? And even when we do know about something, we often can’t understand it completely, can we?” to her aunt, then, Valli exclaimed “Oh, yes!”.

On being asked by her mother what did she mean, she replied “I was just agreeing with what you said about things happening without our knowledge”. It was her bus ride to the town and her experience on the bus that made her agree with her mother.

Valli had visited the town for the first time and before that, she had no idea of the new things she explored on her way. This justifies her confirmation of the statement “How can we possibly know about everything?”. The world existed beyond that village, as well as the town and she could have known more if she would have travelled farther. There are experiences in life that occur to us and we often don’t know ‘why’ they happened. Thus, we cannot possibly know about everything.

Similarly, Valli had seen a lot of different happy and sad scenes outside the window during her journey. She knew about those things but couldn’t fully understand or reason things out such as why the cow died? This justifies her confirmation to the statement “And even when we do know about something, we often can’t understand it completely, can we?” Also, when she says “ things happening without our knowledge” she means that she had ventured out without her mother’s knowledge of it.

Note: ‘Madam rides the bus’ is a sensitive story that revolves around the theme that curiosity may make us aware of things but, our understanding of those things might still stay scant. What existed a moment ago might not exist the next moment and no one might know ‘why?’.