Madam Rides the Bus – Class 10 English Chapter 7 Notes & NCERT PDF

Overview

This chapter pairs a gentle coming-of-age story with a comic ballad. "Madam Rides the Bus" (translated from the Tamil by K. S. Sundaram) follows eight-year-old Valli on her first bus ride — and her first real brush with death. "The Tale of Custard the Dragon" by Ogden Nash is a light-hearted ballad about a "cowardly" dragon who turns out to be the bravest of all. Both pieces ask the same quiet question: how well do we really know the world, and the people, around us?

Madam Rides the Bus (prose)

Valli's desire. Valliammai — "Valli" for short — is eight and "very curious about things". Her favourite pastime is standing in the front doorway watching the street. The bus that runs between her village and the nearest town is "a source of unending joy", and gradually "a tiny wish crept into her head": to ride it, even once. The wish becomes "an overwhelming desire".

Careful planning. Valli quietly gathers facts from neighbours and passengers:

She saves sixty paise by resisting peppermints, toys, balloons — and even the merry-go-round at the village fair.

The ride. One spring afternoon she stops the bus with "a tiny hand … raised commandingly". The jolly conductor teases her as "madam" because she insists on her independence: "I can get on by myself. You don't have to help me." When an elderly man tells her to sit, she replies haughtily, "There's nobody here who's a child. I've paid my thirty paise like everyone else." She finds an elderly woman chewing betel "absolutely repulsive" and refuses her friendship.

Standing on the seat to see over the canvas blind, Valli sees the canal, palm trees, distant mountains and "green, green, green" fields. A young cow running in front of the bus makes her laugh till she cries. In town she stays on the bus, pays another thirty paise, and politely refuses the conductor's offer of a free cold drink — she will not take what she cannot pay for.

The dead cow. On the way back she sees the same young cow lying dead by the roadside, "legs spreadeagled, a fixed stare in its lifeless eyes". The memory haunts her and dampens her enthusiasm; she no longer looks out of the window.

The ending. She reaches home at three-forty. Her mother tells the aunt, "How can we possibly know about everything? And even when we do know about something, we often can't understand it completely." Valli says, "Oh, yes!" — and smiles a secret smile that the adults cannot understand.

Themes: a child's curiosity and independence; careful planning and self-respect; the gap between knowing that there is death and understanding it; the world seen through an eight-year-old's eyes.

The Tale of Custard the Dragon (poem) — Ogden Nash

A humorous ballad, close to a parody. Belinda lives in a little white house with Ink (a black kitten), Blink (a grey mouse), Mustard (a yellow dog) and Custard (a "realio, trulio" pet dragon). Everyone boasts of bravery — "Belinda was as brave as a barrel full of bears" — while Custard "cried for a nice safe cage" and is teased as a coward ("they rudely called him Percival").

When a pirate climbs in the window with two pistols and a cutlass, the brave ones collapse: Belinda cries for help, Mustard flees, Ink hides and Blink "strategically mouseholed". Custard alone attacks — "He went at the pirate like a robin at a worm" — and gobbles him up. Afterwards the others claim they would have been braver "if [they] hadn't been flustered", and Custard modestly agrees that "everybody is braver than me". The last stanza repeats the first situation: Custard "keeps crying for a nice safe cage".

Devices: similes (brave as a tiger in a rage; snorting like an engine; clashed his tail like irons in a dungeon), coined words for rhythm (realio, trulio; winda to rhyme with Belinda), onomatopoeia (Meowch!, Weeck!), repetition/refrain, rhyming couplets (aabb).

Message: true courage shows in action, not in boasting; appearances deceive.

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