NCERT Board English Flamingo Question and Answer The Enemy
Categories: Study Intermediate class NCERT
NCERT Board English Flamingo Question and Answer
The Enemy
Q1. Who was Dr. Sadao? Where was his house?
Answer. Dr. Sadao Hoki was an eminent Japanese surgeon and scientist. He had spent eight valuable years of his youth in America to learn all that could be learnt of surgery and medicine there. He was perfecting a discovery which would· render wounds entirely clean. Dr. Sadao's house was built on rocks well above a narrow beach that was outlined with bent pines. It was on a spot of the Japanese coast.
Q2. Will Dr. Sadao be arrested on the charge of harboring an enemy?
Answer. Dr. Sadao knew that they would be arrested if they sheltered a white man in their house. The wounded man was a prisoner of war who had escaped with a bullet on his back. Since Japan was at war with America, harboring an enemy meant being a traitor to Japan. Dr. Sadao could be arrested if anyone complained against him and accused him of harboring an enemy.
Q3. Will Hana help the wounded man and wash him herself?
Answer. The wounded American was in a very bad state and needed to be washed before being operated on. Hana did not want Dr. Sadao to clean the dirty and unconscious prisoner, and so asked their servant, Yumi, to do so. However, Yumi defied her master’s order and opted out of it. As a result, Hana had no other option but to wash him herself. Although this act was impulsive and dipped in a sense of superiority over her servant, Yumi, she did it with sincerity.
Q4. What will Dr. Sadao and his wife do with the man?
Answer. Dr. Sadao and Hana found an unconscious wounded war prisoner who posed a huge threat to their own safety. However, Dr. Sadao decided to go with his gut feeling and operate on him. He saved his life even though it was for the time being. Though half-heartedly, both took good care of the patient’s health and other needs. Hana even washed and fed him with her own hands. Although they knew that they would have to hand him over to the army sooner or later, they did their best to help the injured man.
Q5. Will Dr. Sadao be arrested on the charge of harbouring an enemy?
Answer. Dr. Sadao, on humanitarian grounds as well as professional grounds, tended a wounded war prisoner which was officially a serious crime. However, he did not get punished for this offense as it was never revealed to anyone, except his wife, loyal but timid servants, and a General who was too self-obsessed with his own treatment that he would never let the doctor leave him.
Q6. What will Dr. Sadao do to get rid of the man?
Answer. With the injured American's health gradually improving, Dr. Sadao and Hana were in a fix as to what should be done with him. Their loyal servants had left them and keeping him in their house could pose a threat to their lives. As Hana’s impatience and distress grew, Dr. Sadao revealed the matter to the General who decided to send assassins to kill the young American in his sleep. Keen on getting rid of the escaped war prisoner, Dr. Sadao agreed. However, the matter could not be resolved because the assassins never came. Dr. Sadao then planned another way to get rid of him which was overpowered with sympathy and a distant gratitude towards the people he had been linked to in America. He decided to save his patient one more time. He secretly sent him to an isolated island with food, bottled water, clothes, a blanket, and his own flashlight on a boat from where he boarded a Korean ship to freedom and safety.
Q7. There are moments in life when we have to make hard choices between our roles as private individuals and as citizens with a sense of national loyalty. Discuss with reference to the story you have just read.
Answer. Dr. Sadao encounters with the dilemma-to live as a private individual whose moral and ethical responsibility is to save the soldier & second is a Japanese to make the soldier arrest. So as a doctor and as an individual his first job is to save man-takes ethical responsibility, he risks his life, fame and social status- takes him to his house and makes efforts to save him. But his other side-sense of patriotism as well as nationalism also involves a report to police, takes the general in confidence and plans to make him killed but later on again helps the soldier in escaping off. Thus Dr. Sadao personality is displayed.
Q8. Dr Sadao was compelled by duty as a doctor to help the enemy soldier. What made Hana, his wife, sympathetic to him in the face of open defiance from the domestic staff?
Answer. Dr. Sadao and Hana knew that their decision to save the enemy soldier would be questioned by everyone. However, they firmly followed their sense of duty. For Dr. Sadao this sense of duty came from the profession he was in; but for Hana, the duty was purely humanitarian. From bearing the unrest in her domestic staff to being forced to do all the chores of the household herself, she does all with grace and dignity. Hana’s loving, considerate and sympathetic nature shines out. She washed and fed the soldier although it was not her job. Her care helped recuperate the soldier fast. It is also apparent from the story that she respected her husband, and as a sense of duty towards him, did the needful. This explains why she, even after feeling sick, comes back to the room and readily does whatever is told by her husband during the operation.