CC - III: Nissim Ezekiel : Night Of The Scorpion Short Question & Answer

 

1. How was the mother bitten by the Scorpion?

-Due to ten hours of continuous rain, a scorpion entered the poet's house and had to take shelter beneath a sack of rice. After having stung the poet's mother, it risked the rain again, i.e. escaped from the house. The poison was spreading through the body of the mother as evident in her groaning on a mat endlessly.

2. How did the villagers come to the aid of the mother? 

-The peasants in the  village came to know that the mother was bitten by a Scorpion. They rushed to her house like "Swarms of flies" and uttered the name of god to paralyze the Evil one (i.e. the scorpion) that had entered the mother's body. They had candles and lanterns in their hands. They threw giant-sized Scorpion shadows on the wall in order to search for the scorpion but they could not find it.

3.How did the peasants view the stinging/ How did they respond to it? /What kind of attitude is reflected in their response?

- The view held by the illiterate peasants is one of the traditional, popular Indian view which is a curious mixture of metaphysics, faith and superstation. in other words, they with their unending remarks and commentaries represent superstition, magic and the popular Hindu view of sin, punishment and sin. To  them, the mother's suffering by the scorpion burns away  her sins in the previous birth; it also decreases the misfortunes in her next birth; the mother's flesh and sprit are purified from desire because of this suffering. Obviously, they unconsciously raise some issues of Hindu philosophy and faith by referring to the doctrines of rebirth and 'karma' what is most ironical to note here is their apparent callousness and indifference about the pain of the suffering woman as they are rooted in their superstition and blind faith.

4. What type of man was the father? How did he treat his wife?

-The poet's father was a sceptic, rationalist and pragmatic. For him a scorpion-bite is just a case for the employment of experimental medicine, i.e. "powder, mixture, herb and hybrid". 

 He treated his wife by following medical science completely. He even poured a little paraffin on the bitten toe and set fire to it. But even after his trying every means to relieve his wife of her pain, the modern science did not register any success, i.e. it worked only after twenty hours of suffering

5. How did the mother respond after the recovery?/ comment on the concluding lines of the poem?

-After twenty hours of prolonged suffering, the mother felt relieved of her pain. After her recovery she thanked God because the scorpion had bitten her, and spared her children. Her utterance is obviously typical of a mother's anxiety for her children. The concluding lines record the last of the four reactions which is more ancient than all the three noted so far, for it is maternal love, rooted in the biological instinct. Her response comes as a fitting climax in a series of contrasted responses to the same phenomenon. It is striking to note that the narrator makes no comment on his mother's final words, suggesting thereby his deeply-felt love, affection and sympathy. Even after enduring such an excruciating pain and suffering, her first response is related to her concern for children who are whole world to her.