Directions: Read the passage and answer the questions that follow-

When I was a child, everyone I knew celebrated festivals the same way in the family home with a variety of sweets and savories made according to recipes jealously guarded by a grandmother. Days, often weeks, were spent in cutting, chopping, boiling, frying, and storing these goodies to be shared with every neighbor and relative within reach. As children, we became willing couriers, ferrying large platters, covered with crocheted doilies, for the reward of a silver coin that awaited us at each end of the trip. My childhood was spent in Nainital, then a small sleepy town high up in the Himalayan foothills and we lived literally on top of a hill. So, let me tell you that today I wouldn't carry even a feather up and down those steep slopes for all the gold in Fort Knox. In any case, who makes those complicated (and unhealthy) sweets and savories now?

I now package these memories as popular bedtime stories to tell my wide-eyed grandchildren. And they are bestsellers: I barely finish one, when they beg another ("One more, please Ayya, tell us the one with the flowers!"). Since my grandchildren live abroad, additional information has to be provided ("Diwali is like your Fourth of July") to serve as cultural footnotes. Of course, there is an underlying regret for having surrendered something so vital as our language, dress, and cuisine to another culture. But, if I can kindle a fairy world where food was cooked in huge pots and over firewood stoves, where spices were ground on stone grinders and water had to be stored because the kitchen had no taps, why not? In winter, I tell them, our cook had to melt snow to make the morning tea and their eyes become like saucers: this is better than Goldilocks's world, I can sense them think, triumphantly.