My Childhood

This chapter is not a made-up story. It is a piece of autobiography — writing in which a person looks back at his own life and sets down what he remembers. The writer is A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the aerospace scientist who later served as President of India, and the passage is taken from his autobiography Wings of Fire.

That single fact should change the way you answer questions on it. In autobiography the narrator and the writer are the same person. When the word I appears here, it is Kalam himself, remembering. Everything you learn about the other people reaches you through his memory and his affection for them. So when a question asks what the author feels about someone, you may answer straight from the text; but when a question asks what a person said, you must credit that person and not the author. Mixing those two up quietly changes the meaning of your answer.

Kalam was born in 1931 into a middle-class Tamil family in the island town of Rameswaram, then part of the erstwhile Madras State. He introduces himself with unusual honesty, calling himself "a short boy with rather undistinguished looks", born to tall and good-looking parents. There is no boasting anywhere in the extract, and no self-pity either. The family had little money. His father kept away from comforts that were not necessary, yet food, medicine and clothes were always provided, and Kalam sums up his early years as secure in both a material and an emotional sense.

Two pieces of background help. First, the years covered run through the Second World War and the last stretch of British rule, so the wider world keeps pressing into a small, quiet town that had nothing to do with the fighting. Second, the extract is built out of small domestic scenes — a meal in a teacher's house, a change of seat in a classroom, a bundle of newspapers thrown off a moving train — and not out of dramatic events. Nothing is exaggerated. The force of the writing comes from how plain each incident looks and how much each one turns out to carry.

Try to match that tone in your answers. Kalam never shouts at the people who behaved badly and never praises himself. Plain, specific writing suits this chapter far better than heavy adjectives.

Here is the movement of the extract in order, told in our words rather than the book's.

Family and home. Kalam begins with his birth and his parents. His father, Jainulabdeen, had neither much formal education nor much money, but Kalam credits him with "great innate wisdom and a true generosity of spirit". His mother, Ashiamma, is described as an ideal partner to such a man. The family lived on Mosque Street in a fairly large pucca house of limestone and brick, put up around the middle of the nineteenth century. Kalam remembers being one of many children, and remembers eating beside his mother, who served him rice, sambar, pickle and coconut chutney on a banana leaf.

The War arrives. The Second World War broke out in 1939, when Kalam was eight. Tamarind seeds suddenly found a market, and he collected and sold them at a provision shop for what he calls "the princely sum of one anna" a day. His brother-in-law Jallaluddin told him stories about the war, which the boy then tried to follow in the headlines of Dinamani. When India was drawn into the war on the side of the Allies and something like a state of emergency was declared, the train stopped halting at the local station. Newspaper bundles now had to be flung from the moving train, and his cousin Samsuddin, who distributed the papers, needed a pair of hands to catch them. Kalam came forward, and it is this work that the chapter describes as his first earning - the job the textbook question means when it asks about his first wages. Half a century later, he writes, he could still feel the pride of that first earning.

Friends and festivals. He turns next to his three close friends, all from orthodox Hindu Brahmin families, and to the way religion never came between them. His own family took part in the temple's annual Shri Sita Rama Kalyanam ceremony by arranging boats with a special platform to carry the idols to the pond near their house. At home, bedtime stories came from the Ramayana and from the life of the Prophet alike.

Two teachers. Then come the two school episodes — the new teacher who moved him to the back bench, and the science teacher who invited him home to eat.

Leaving. The extract closes after the war has ended, with freedom in sight. Kalam asks his father for permission to go and study at the district headquarters, and his father agrees, using the picture of a seagull in flight. Notice that the piece ends not with an achievement but with a door being opened.

Kalam names three close friends from his childhood: Ramanadha Sastry, Aravindan and Sivaprakasan. All three came from orthodox Hindu Brahmin families, and Kalam is careful to record that the difference in religion and upbringing was never felt as a difference by the boys themselves. Ramanadha Sastry was the son of Pakshi Lakshmana Sastry, the high priest of the Rameswaram temple — so one of a Muslim boy's close friends was the son of the town's leading Hindu priest.

The chapter also tells you what became of them. Ramanadha Sastry took over the priesthood of the temple from his father; Aravindan went into the business of arranging transport for pilgrims; and Sivaprakasan became a catering contractor for the Southern Railways. This short roll call matters more than it looks. It shows that the friendship was not a passing school attachment fondly recalled by a famous man later on. These were real people with ordinary working lives, and Kalam kept track of every one of them.

Around the friendship sits a whole shared way of living. Kalam's family arranged boats with a special platform to carry the temple idols to the pond near their house for the annual Shri Sita Rama Kalyanam ceremony — a Muslim household providing a service at the centre of a Hindu festival, and everybody treating it as normal. The children of the house were told bedtime stories drawn from the Ramayana and from the life of the Prophet. Nobody in the chapter makes a speech about tolerance; it is simply what people do.

But do not turn this into a picture of a perfect society, because the chapter itself refuses to. Kalam records that the small society he grew up in was in fact very rigid about keeping different social groups apart. The friendships and the shared festivals happen inside that rigid society, not instead of it. That is exactly why the two teacher episodes land so hard later on: prejudice does not arrive from outside the town, it is already present, and it can walk into a classroom in the shape of a new teacher.

When you write about harmony in this chapter, use that balance. Say what was shared, then admit what was still divided, then show how particular adults chose to act. An answer built in those three steps is far stronger than one that only says the people lived happily together.

The Second World War broke out in 1939, when Kalam was eight years old, and at first it did not touch his town at all; the area was isolated and life went on as before. What reached the boy first was not danger but demand. For reasons he says he never understood, tamarind seeds were suddenly wanted in the market. He collected them and sold them at a provision shop, and a day's collection brought him what he calls "the princely sum of one anna". An anna was a small coin of the old currency, one-sixteenth of a rupee, so the phrase is affectionate and a little amused. To a boy of eight, a coin earned by his own effort feels enormous.

The war reached him a second way, as news. His brother-in-law Jallaluddin told him stories about the fighting, and Kalam would then try to trace those same events in the headlines of Dinamani. That detail is why the familiar textbook question about Dinamani has an easy answer: only a newspaper carries headlines reporting current events, so Dinamani must be a newspaper.

Then the war changed the town in a practical way. India was drawn in on the side of the Allies and something like a state of emergency was declared, and the first effect Kalam noticed was small and local: the train stopped halting at the station. The newspapers still had to arrive, so the bundles were thrown out of the moving train as it passed. That created work — somebody had to be standing there to catch them — and his cousin Samsuddin, who distributed the papers, needed help. Kalam came forward, and it is this job, not the tamarind seeds, that the chapter describes as his first earning, and that the textbook question means by his first wages. He adds that half a century later he could still feel the surge of pride at having earned money of his own.

Notice the chain of cause and effect, because questions are often built on it: a war fought far away, then an emergency at home, then a train that no longer stops, then newspapers thrown from a moving train, and finally a boy's first job. Nothing in that chain is heroic. It is a child noticing that the world has shifted and quietly finding a place for himself inside the change.

Keep the two earnings straight in your head, because they are easy to swap. Tamarind seeds: about one anna for a day's collection. First wages: catching bundles of newspapers for Samsuddin.

The heart of the chapter is a pair of episodes about prejudice, and the point is that they are answered in two different ways.

The new teacher. In the fifth standard, a new teacher came to Kalam's class. Kalam wore a cap that marked him out as a Muslim; Ramanadha Sastry, sitting beside him in the front row, wore the sacred thread. The teacher could not accept the sight of the two boys together and, following the social ranking he believed in, sent Kalam to the back bench. Kalam was unhappy — and, importantly, so was his friend, who looked completely downcast as the shift took place. The teacher had not merely insulted one boy; he had broken something the two of them shared.

What follows is the part worth remembering. Both boys told their families. Lakshmana Sastry summoned the teacher and, with both boys present, told him plainly that he must not spread "the poison of social inequality and communal intolerance" in the minds of innocent children, and gave him a choice: apologise, or leave the school and the island. The teacher regretted what he had done, and Kalam records that the sheer conviction behind the priest's words reformed the young man. So the person who defends the Muslim boy is the Hindu high priest, and he does it in front of the boys, so that the children actually see justice being done.

The science teacher. Sivasubramania Iyer taught Kalam science. He was an orthodox Brahmin with a conservative wife, yet Kalam calls him something of a rebel, because he did his best to break social barriers so that people from different backgrounds could mix easily. He spent hours with the boy and wanted him to grow up equal to the best-educated people anywhere. One day he invited Kalam home for a meal. His wife was horrified at the idea of a Muslim boy eating in her ritually pure kitchen, and refused to serve him there.

Iyer neither gave up the invitation nor lost his temper with her. He served the boy with his own hands and sat down beside him to eat his own meal. She watched the two of them from behind the kitchen door — and Kalam, still a boy, wondered whether she had noticed any difference in the way they ate. Then Iyer invited him again for the next weekend, and on that visit his wife took Kalam into her kitchen and served him with her own hands.

Two methods, then. Lakshmana Sastry confronts and demands; Sivasubramania Iyer demonstrates and waits. Both of them succeed. A strong long answer names both, describes what each one did, and then says why each method suited its own situation: a teacher misusing authority over children has to be stopped at once, while a person's private belief inside her own kitchen changes only when she is shown something she cannot argue with.

His father. Jainulabdeen had little formal education and little money, and Kalam does not hide either fact. What he credits his father with is "great innate wisdom and a true generosity of spirit". The man lived austerely, keeping away from every comfort that was not necessary, but he made sure his children never lacked food, medicine or clothing. That is the balance the chapter draws: simplicity is not the same thing as deprivation.

His mother. Ashiamma is presented as an ideal partner to him. The picture we are given of her is domestic and warm: she is the mother who seats the boy beside her and serves his food herself, and she is one of the women of the house who told the children stories from the Ramayana and from the life of the Prophet. She is also the parent who hesitates when the boy wants to leave home, which is the most human moment in the closing section.

What he says he inherited. Kalam is exact about this, and so should you be. From his father he says he inherited honesty and self-discipline; from his mother, faith in goodness and deep kindness. The textbook asks for exactly this pairing, so learn which quality belongs to which parent rather than listing all four together.

Permission to leave. After the war ended and independence came into view, Kalam wanted to continue his studies at the district headquarters, which meant leaving home. He asked his father. The reply is the emotional peak of the extract. His father did not argue and did not hold him back. He said he knew the boy had to go away in order to grow, and asked whether the seagull does not fly across the sun "alone and without a nest".

Then, turning to the boy's hesitant mother, his father quoted the poet Khalil Gibran (the name is also spelt Kahlil Gibran) — the lines saying that children are not their parents' possession, that they come through their parents but not from them, and that they have thoughts of their own. Be careful here in answers. The seagull sentence is the father's own way of speaking to his son; the lines about children belong to Gibran and are repeated by the father to comfort the mother. Crediting Gibran's words to the father as his own invention, or to Kalam, changes who said what, and it is easy to avoid.

What the ending shows is a poor and barely schooled man who understands that love sometimes means letting go, and who has the language to say so gently to the wife who is not ready.

Living together as an everyday habit. The best-known theme of the chapter is living peacefully across religions, but notice how it is presented. Nobody delivers a lecture. A Muslim family helps carry idols to a Hindu festival; a Muslim boy's close friend is a priest's son; children hear bedtime stories from two traditions. Tolerance appears as something practised, not preached, which is why the chapter is convincing rather than preachy.

Prejudice is real, and it can be corrected. The chapter is honest that the society kept social groups strictly apart, and that a teacher could act on that rigidity inside a classroom. Yet both prejudiced adults change. That is the chapter's quiet argument: bias is learnt behaviour, so it can be unlearnt when somebody with courage or with patience insists on it.

The adults who shape a child. Count how many grown-ups contribute to this boy: a father who gives permission, a mother who gives warmth, a brother-in-law who brings news of the world, a cousin who gives him work, a priest who defends him, and a teacher who feeds him at his own table. The chapter suggests that a child is built by many hands rather than one.

Work and self-respect. Collecting tamarind seeds and catching newspaper bundles are tiny jobs, but Kalam gives them real weight: the pride of a first earning stayed with him for fifty years. Effort and dignity are joined together from the very beginning of his life.

How to write your answers.

• Name people exactly. Jainulabdeen (father), Ashiamma (mother), Jallaluddin (brother-in-law), Samsuddin (cousin), Pakshi Lakshmana Sastry (high priest), Sivasubramania Iyer (science teacher), and the friends Ramanadha Sastry, Aravindan and Sivaprakasan. The new teacher is never named in the extract, so do not invent a name for him.
• Say who spoke. Words spoken by the father, the priest or the science teacher belong to them, not to the author.
• Use one concrete detail per point. The banana leaf, the cap and the sacred thread, the kitchen door, the bundle of papers thrown from the train.
• Do not exaggerate. The science teacher's wife changes on the next visit, not on the spot; the new teacher is reformed, not thrown out.
• Answer exactly what is asked. If the question asks for two incidents, give two, each in its own short paragraph, and end with one sentence saying what they prove.