There has been heavy rain in your city/town. You went to school but found that it was closed because of the rain. Describe the sights and sounds near the school and narrate how you finally reached home and spent the rest of the day.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 390 words)

THE DAY THE SCHOOL WAS SHUT

The notice was a sheet of foolscap taped to the inside of the gate, and the rain had already got at it, so that the word CLOSED had run down the page in blue streaks.

About sixty of us had arrived before the news reached anybody. The water in front of the gate was over the kerb and halfway up the wheels of the parked scooters; it was brown, moving slowly towards the drain at the corner, and carrying a steady traffic of things — leaves, a plastic bottle, somebody’s slipper going round and round in the eddy by the pillar. The gulmohar outside the office had lost a limb in the night and it lay across the path with its flowers still on it.

The sound was mostly water. Rain on the tin awning of the cycle stand, which is the loudest roof in Kolkata; water off the roof in four places where the gutter had given up; and the long hiss a car makes going through a flooded road, which you hear twice — once coming and once going. Over it, the durwan explaining the same sentence to arriving students again and again, and somebody’s driver leaning on a horn to no purpose whatever.

Getting home took an hour and forty minutes for a distance of four kilometres.

The buses were not running past Rashbehari. I walked to the crossing with two boys from my section, holding my bag on my head because the umbrella had turned itself inside out at the second gust, and we waded the stretch near the fish market where the water was at mid-calf and unspeakably warm. A tempo took nine of us for twenty rupees each, which was robbery, and which we paid gladly.

My mother met me at the door with a towel and a great many opinions.

The rest of the day was the best part. There was no power from noon. We ate khichuri and fried aubergine, which is the meal this country eats when it rains, and my grandmother told the 1978 flood story with two new details. I read for four hours by the window without once being asked what I was doing.

It rained until eleven at night. I have rarely been so happy about anything.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE tasks, and content marks are counted against all three:

1. DESCRIBE the SIGHTS AND SOUNDS near the school
2. NARRATE how you finally reached home
3. how you SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY

Note that this question is a HYBRID — the first task is description, the other two are narrative. Many candidates write 400 words of flood description and never get home, which loses two thirds of the content marks. Budget roughly half, quarter, quarter.

SOUND is named explicitly and must have real space. Rain gives you a great deal to work with: the tin awning, the failed gutter, the hiss of a car through water.

The third section is an opportunity rather than an afterthought. A day off in the rain has its own texture — the power cut, the particular food, the unexpected freedom — and a composition that ends on that note finishes far better than one that ends at the front door. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.