Write an original short story entitled 'A Strange Visitor'.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 330 words)

A STRANGE VISITOR

The parrot arrived on the third day of the power cut, and it could say my mother’s name.

We found it on the kitchen window ledge at six in the morning, a green bird with a red beak, entirely unbothered by us. My mother reached past it for the sugar tin and it said, quite distinctly, "Shyamali."

She dropped the tin.

For a week we tried to find out where it had come from. My father asked at the tea shop. I put up a notice at the bus stop. Nobody in Barrackpore had lost a parrot, and nobody knew of anyone who kept one. Meanwhile the bird moved in. It sat on the back of the cane chair, ate guava, and said my mother’s name perhaps four times a day, always in the same voice — an old voice, cracked, with the second syllable drawn out.

My mother stopped putting it out at night.

What I did not understand then, and understood eleven days later, was why she had gone so quiet. It was my aunt who explained, in the way families explain things, sideways and in the kitchen. My grandmother had died in March. She had lived in Habra, forty kilometres off, in a house my mother had not visited in six years after a quarrel neither of them would describe. And my grandmother, my aunt said, had kept birds.

We drove to Habra that Sunday. The house had been sold, the cages were gone, and the neighbour said yes, there had been a green one, and it had got out during the funeral and nobody had had the heart to chase it.

My mother sat in the car for a long time without starting it.

The parrot is still with us. It is, I am fairly sure, an ordinary bird that learnt an ordinary word from an old woman who said it often. I have worked this out carefully and I believe it.

But my mother talks to it in the evenings, and I have never once told her what I believe.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The TITLE IS GIVEN, and it is the only instruction. That is more demanding than it looks, because the whole story must earn the word STRANGE — the visitor cannot simply be unexpected, it must be genuinely odd.

Two paths are open, and the second scores better: the SUPERNATURAL route — a ghost, an alien, a mysterious stranger. Written by most candidates every year, and very hard to end without anticlimax. the ORDINARY-MADE-STRANGE route — something real whose strangeness lies in what it means to the people involved. Easier to make convincing and far more likely to stand out.

Note that a "visitor" need not be human. That is worth remembering across every story question: the widest reading of the title is usually the most original one.

THE ENDING is where this type is won. Resist explaining the mystery away completely — but do show what the visit changed. 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.