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Along Kathmandu’s narrowest and busiest streets, there are small shrines and flower-adorned deities. Apart from these, there are fruit sellers, flute sellers, hawkers of postcards, shops selling Western cosmetics, film rolls, chocolate, those selling copper utensils and Nepalese antiques. The author hears film songs that were blaring out from the radios, sounds of car horns and bicycle bells, vendors shouting out their wares. He says that stray cows roam about on the roads. He also draws a vivid picture of a flute seller with many bansuris protruding from his pole. He describes how the serene music produced by the flute seller is heard clearly above all the other noise.

The two temples the author visited in Kathmandu were the Pashupatinath temple and the Baudhnath stupa.

Marzipan is a sweet made with grated almond.

The writer did not want to tear himself away from the square because he liked flute music too much and he did not want to leave the place when it was being played there.

The holy Bagmati flows below the temple of Pashupatinath. A corpse was being cremated on its banks. Washerwomen were busy washing clothes and children were bathing. From a balcony a basket of flowers and leaves was being dropped into the river. Withered old offerings was also being dropped into the river. There is a small shrine half protruding from the stone platform on the river bank.

Vikram Seth compares the fifty or sixty bansuris protruding in all directions from the pole of a flute seller to the quills of a porcupine.

1. D. Both ‘A’ and ‘B’

2. D. Both ‘A’ and ‘B’

3. A. ‘extemporaneously’.

4. B. ‘stops abruptly’.

1. C. a shrine.

2. B. Tibetan immigrants.

3. D. Both ‘A’ and ‘B’

4. A. ‘sound loudly and stridently’.

The Westerners could not convince the policeman that they were ‘Hindus’. Since the entry to the temple is restricted to ‘Hindus’, they were not allowed to enter the temple.

The signboard outside Pashupatinath indicates that the entry to the temple is restricted to Hindus only.

At Pashupatinath, there is a small shrine that protrudes from the stone platform on the river bank of Bagmati. It is believed that when the shrine will emerge fully, the goddess inside it will escape. The evil period of Kaliyug on earth will then end.

Vikram Seth is greatly fond of flute music. He says that it is at once the most universal and most particular of sounds. There is no culture that does not have its flute. The different kinds of flutes are: the reed neh, the recorder, the Japanese shakuhachi, the deep bansuri of Hindustani classical music, the clear or breathy flutes of South America and the high-pitched Chinese flutes. Each of these has its specific fingering and compass. It weaves its own associations. For him, to hear any flute is to be drawn into the commonality of all mankind, to be moved by music closest in its phrases and sentences to the human voice. Its motive force is living breath: it needs to pause and breathe before it can go on.

(1) invention

(2) direction

(3) temptation

(4) dedication

(5) exhaustion

(1) Pashupatinath is more sacred than any other temple for Hindus. OR No other temple for Hindus is so sacred as Pashupatinath.

(2) They are cremating a corpse on the banks of the Bagmati river.

(3) 1 am so exhausted that I cannot go further.

(4) The sound rises clearly not only above the noise of traffic but also above the hawkers’ cries.

(5) He sells his wares silently / without shouting.

(6) 1 do not find it easy to tear myself away from the square.

(7) Every culture has its flute.