Class 6 English Chapter 4: The Unlikely Best Friends

Everything except company

Gajaraj has the finest stall the royal stables can offer. The king is fond of him, and has left standing orders about his care. By any measure he is a fortunate elephant. Nothing about his situation needs improving, which is what makes the next sentence surprising.

And yet he is sad

The story says so plainly. All that comfort, and the elephant is miserable, for the single reason that he has nobody. Comfort and company are not the same thing, and he has only one of them. The story states this in its second paragraph and then spends the rest of itself proving it.

A good man, but not a friend

The mahout is the only one he deals with. He brings food, he takes him to the pond every day, he is kind. The story calls him a good caretaker and then, deliberately, says he is not a friend. Those two words are put side by side so that we cannot blame anybody for the loneliness.

A visitor one evening

Then a dog strays into the stable. It is late, and the animal is tired and hungry. Gajaraj can see both of those things at a glance.

The first kindness

He pushes some of the food he is eating towards the dog. That is the whole beginning. No speech, no introductions, just a share of dinner moved across the floor. It costs the elephant almost nothing, and it is the whole beginning of the story.

Thanks and sleep

The dog wags his tail, looks up to say thank you in the only way he has, and then gives his full attention to the food. When it is finished he falls asleep where he is.

The mahout allows it

Next morning the mahout finds the stray and does not mind. He notices something more important: Gajaraj seems to like the company. So he throws the dog some crumbs.

At the pond

From then on the dog goes everywhere. At the bath the elephant showers himself with his trunk while the dog watches, and then splashes him for fun. The dog yelps, because he hates showers, and the mahout laughs. He goes back to the pond the next day, and the day after that.

A ride home

On the way back the elephant lifts the dog with his trunk and sets him on his back. The dog is delighted. It is the picture the farmer will remember later.

Buntee

A farmer passing by calls a name, and the dog runs to him. He has a home and an owner, and both have been looking for him. The mahout has no objection, and a rope goes round the dog's neck.

Nobody notices

Only when the rope pulls does the dog understand what is happening. He yelps. The elephant winces. Neither man sees that the two friends are in tears.

The food stays untouched

The next day the mahout serves Gajaraj his favourite food and comes back to find it exactly where he left it. Not that night either, nor the day after.

The same thing, elsewhere

And at the farmer's house, the dog has not eaten since he arrived. Two animals, two houses, and the same silent refusal in both.

The farmer decides

He remembers how the dog had looked, perched up there on his friend. Watching him starve is more than the farmer will do, so the rope comes off. The dog licks his hand once and runs.

A joyous swing

At the stable the elephant lifts him up and swings him in the air. The mahout brings food and tells them both to eat first.

Two friendships

The farmer has followed his dog, and the two men stand watching the animals eat. The elephant is not the only one who has gained something today, the mahout tells him. The story is by Subba Rao. Two men who had no reason to meet have spent a week worrying about the same thing, and are now standing side by side.

Scenario:

Tara says the elephant had no reason to be unhappy at the start of the story. She lists what he had. The finest stall in the royal stables. Food brought to him. A bath every day, from a mahout who never missed one. Rehan agrees with every item on her list and disagrees with her conclusion. He says the story calls the mahout a good caretaker. It never once calls him a friend. That difference is the whole point. Tara answers that being well looked after should be enough. Their teacher asks what changes on the evening the stray dog wanders in. His stall, his food and his bath all stay exactly the same.

Analysis:

Nothing in the elephant's conditions changes, and he becomes happy anyway.

Activity:

List three things a friend gives you that somebody paid to look after you could not.

Title:

The kindness that costs nothing

What You Notice:

The thing that starts a friendship in the story is not grand. An elephant moves some food across a floor. Most of what you noted down will be that size too, and almost none of it will have cost you anything you actually needed. That is the point the story is making quietly, underneath the elephant.

A mahout is an elephant's keeper and trainer, and in many families the work passes from parent to child along with the same elephant.

This story belongs to the Jataka tales, a collection of ancient Buddhist stories about wisdom that have been retold for more than two thousand years.

Elephants really do form long friendships and show distress when a companion is taken away, so the story is closer to life than it may look.

How the friendship begins — SHARE - STAY - SPLASH - RIDE — Food pushed across the floor, a dog who stays the night, a playful splash at the pond, and a ride home on an elephant's back. Four steps from stranger to friend.

How the story ends — Two friendships, not one — The animals are reunited, and the mahout and the farmer discover they have found each other. The title turns out to cover four characters rather than two.

An opposite you can build

Gajaraj is sad at the start and filled with joy by the end. Those are opposites made from completely different words. English also has a cheaper way of doing it. One that costs you no new vocabulary at all.

A few letters in front

Take a word you already have and put a small piece at the front. Kind becomes unkind. Correct becomes incorrect. Appear becomes disappear. Use becomes misuse.

What a prefix is

That small piece is called a prefix. It attaches to the front and changes the meaning, and it does not alter the word it joins. Kind is still sitting there whole inside unkind.

The four that reverse

Four of them turn up constantly: un-, in-, dis- and mis-. All four flip a word into its opposite, and un- is much the commonest of them. Meet a word with one of these on the front and you can usually work out what it means without asking anybody.

One from our own story

The mahout comes back to find the food untouched. That is touched with un- in front of it, and it is doing exactly the job the story needs in a single word.

You have to learn which

Here is the catch. There is no rule that tells you which prefix a word will take. Unhappy is correct and inhappy is not a word at all, and knowing that is a matter of having met them. That is the only genuinely hard part of this, and no amount of thinking will replace it.

Now the past

The second half of this topic is about verbs. Everything in the story has already happened, and English has three different ways of saying so.

Done and finished

The first is the simple past. The dog yelped. The mahout laughed. The elephant gave him a swing. Something happened, it finished, and we move on.

How it is made

Most verbs simply add -d or -ed. Looked, yelped, noticed, served. Others change shape instead, which has to be learned: give becomes gave, go becomes went, tell becomes told. These are the commonest verbs in the language, which is exactly why they are the irregular ones. The words we use most are the ones that never got tidied up.

Still going on

The second is the past progressive, built from was or were plus an -ing verb. The farmer was looking for his dog. Gajaraj was munching his food.

Why that matters

It paints the action as unfinished at that moment. The farmer was looking, which is precisely why he had not yet found him. Was looking and looked tell two different stories.

Already over

The third is the past perfect, made from had plus the third form. The king had ordered that the elephant be well looked after. The farmer had followed his dog.

Stepping further back

This one lets a story move backwards without confusing anybody. One small word, had, and the reader knows that this happened before the part we were just in.

Three pictures, not three boxes

So the choice is not about being correct in a grammar exercise. Each form puts a different picture in the reader's head: finished, still happening, or finished before something else.

Why this story needs all three

It has a present that moves forward, a farmer who spent days searching, and a king whose order came long before any of it. Each of those needs a different form, and using the wrong one would quietly describe a different story. Three kinds of past, because it has three kinds of thing to say.

Scenario:

A teacher writes one event on the board: the mahout brought the food. She asks the class to rewrite it three ways so that a reader pictures three different things. Sameer writes that the mahout brought the food, that the mahout was bringing the food, and that the mahout had brought the food. He then says all three mean the same and the exercise is pointless. The teacher adds six words to the end of each: when the dog walked in. She asks him to read all three again and say, for each one, whether the food was already there when the dog arrived.

Analysis:

Three forms that looked interchangeable, until something else was put beside them.

Activity:

Take any sentence from the story and write it all three ways, then add when the dog walked in to each.

Title:

Three pasts, one afternoon

What You Notice:

Put in that order, the three sentences almost tell themselves. The past perfect sets the scene, the progressive holds the moment open, and the simple past says what finally happened. That is the order most storytellers use without thinking about it, and you have just built it deliberately out of three verb forms.

Untouched appears in this very story. The mahout comes back to find Gajaraj's favourite food untouched, and the word is simply touched with un- in front.

A few words have two opposites with different meanings. Disinterested once meant fair and uninterested meant bored, and people still argue about them.

English borrowed in- from Latin and un- from its own older roots, which is why both survive and why you have to learn which word takes which.

The four opposite-making prefixes — UN - IN - DIS - MIS — Four short pieces that flip a word over. Unkind, incorrect, disappear, misuse. Each one leaves the original word completely untouched behind it.

Which past to use — DONE - DOING - DONE BEFORE — Simple past for finished. Past progressive for still going on at the time. Past perfect for finished before something else in the story happened.

Two jobs in one piece of writing

Suppose you are asked to write about a friend. A good description does two things at once. It says how the two of you are alike, and it says how you are different. Leaving either one out is the commonest weakness in this kind of writing.

Why one is not enough

Write only the similarities and you sound like the same person twice. Write only the differences and nobody understands why you are friends at all.

The story is the model

Gajaraj and Buntee are a good place to start. An elephant and a stray dog, different in size, in home, in owner, and even in whether they enjoy water.

And the one thing shared

What they had in common was that each was alone. Nothing else about them matched at all, and it did not need to. That single shared thing was enough, and the title calls the friendship unlikely rather than impossible.

The small joining words

A comparison is held together by a handful of small words. They are easy to overlook and they do most of the work in the sentence.

And, for agreement

And links things that sit comfortably together. We both like cricket and we both play after school. Nothing is pulling in the opposite direction.

But, for the turn

But is the word a comparison usually turns on. I like cricket, but my friend prefers drawing. Everything after but is what the reader will actually remember. That is worth knowing when you decide which half to put second.

Still, for keeping both

Still is the useful one. We are very different, and we are still best friends. It admits the difference and refuses to let it settle the matter.

Both, for two together

Both gathers two people into one statement. Both of us walk home the same way. It is shorter than naming each person and saying the same thing twice.

Like and unlike

These two mean resembling and differing. Unlike my friend, I cannot swim. Notice that this has nothing to do with enjoying anything, which is what like usually means elsewhere.

Neither and either

The last pair need care. Neither of us likes cricket closes both doors. We will either walk or cycle opens exactly one. Choosing the wrong one of the two says something you did not mean. Both are useful and they are not interchangeable.

Keep the pairs together

Neither belongs with nor, and either belongs with or. Splitting them up produces neither this or that, which is the commonest mistake in this whole topic.

Listening for exact words

There is a listening task in this unit too, and it asks for exact words from what you hear. That is a different job from understanding it.

Meaning is not enough there

You may follow a story perfectly and still fail a gap that wanted the speaker's own word. Write down what is actually said, not what it amounts to.

Putting heard events in order

The second listening task asks you to number events. Catch them as they come and sort them afterwards, which is easier on paper than in your head.

Why all of it belongs together

Comparing, joining and listening closely are one habit really. Each of them is about noticing the difference between two things that look similar at first. Two friends, two joining words, or two words in a gap that sound almost the same. In every case the work is the same. Look harder at whatever seemed obvious at first glance. Then say exactly what you found, rather than roughly what you took it to mean.

Scenario:

A Class 6 class in Bhopal was paired up and asked to write about each other. Rehana and Jyoti found they both walked the same way to school and both hated the smell of the science lab. Their first draft was a list of things they shared, and their teacher said it read as though one girl had been described twice. So they added the differences. Jyoti plays kho kho and Rehana will not go near a field. Rehana reads through lunch and Jyoti finds that baffling. Their final line was: we agree about almost nothing after three o'clock, and we are still each other's first choice in the morning. The class voted it the best piece on the wall.

Analysis:

The draft that failed and the draft that worked differed by one thing: the second one carried both halves of the comparison.

Activity:

Write six sentences about a classmate, making sure at least two of them describe a difference, and end with a sentence using still.

Title:

A comparison in six lines

What You Notice:

With the difference lines gone, the person you described stops sounding like anybody in particular. That is the test. A comparison built only from what is shared produces two copies of one person, and a comparison built only from differences produces two strangers who happen to be in the same paragraph. The turn in the middle is what makes it a comparison at all, which is why but does more work here than and.

Gajaraj and Buntee differ in size, in owner, in home and in whether they enjoy water, and the story still calls them best friends.

The word unlikely in the title is the same un- prefix you met in the grammar topic, added to likely.

Writers often describe a character by comparison because a reader grasps a new person faster when they are placed beside a familiar one.

What a comparison needs — SAME - BUT - DIFFERENT — Start with what you share, turn on the word but, and finish with how you differ. Three steps, and almost any comparison will fit into them.

Keeping the pairs straight — Neither goes with nor, either goes with or — Both words begin with the same sound as their partner. Neither and nor, either and or. Splitting a pair is the mistake almost everybody makes.