Write an original short story in which a poor tailor wins an award which changes his/her life.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 330 words)

THE GOLDEN NEEDLE

Manohar had inherited three things from his father: a treadle sewing machine, a shop the size of a cupboard, and a sentence. "Your grandfather was a tailor, your father is a tailor, and you will be a tailor." He had heard it at fourteen, when he had asked to be sent to the city to study, and he had never asked again.

So he stitched. School uniforms in June, wedding blouses in November, and in between the endless falling hems of Shivpur. At night, when the shutter was down, he opened the fashion magazines the barber next door passed on to him and copied the drawings onto the backs of old bills. Nobody in Shivpur wanted those clothes. He drew them anyway.

The travelling theatre changed everything, though it did not look like it at the time. Their leading lady took one look at her costume — a shapeless green sack — and refused to go on. Someone remembered the tailor across the road. Manohar was marched in, handed the offending dress, and given forty minutes.

He worked the way he drew: a snip at the shoulder, two tucks at the waist, a slit at the hem. When she came out, the troupe fell silent. The dress had not been repaired. It had been redesigned.

A journalist in the third row photographed the costume and, without asking, entered it for the State Handicraft Award. Manohar learnt he had won from the barber, who had read it in the paper.

The prize was fifteen thousand rupees and a certificate he could not stop touching. But the thing that changed his life came a week later, in an envelope from a design house in Mumbai offering him a place as an apprentice cutter.

He was thirty-one. He took it.

Years afterwards, when people asked about the award, Manohar would say it had not given him his talent — that had always been there, drawn on the backs of old bills. What it had given him was permission to believe the sentence he had grown up with was not a life sentence.

HOW TO BUILD A STORY THAT SCORES

Structure the narrative in four movements, and give each its own paragraph or two:

1. The situation and the constraint — who the tailor is and what is holding him back. Establish this quickly; do not spend a third of your words on background.
2. The hidden talent — show it rather than announce it. "He copied the drawings onto the backs of old bills" does the work of a whole paragraph of explanation.
3. The turning point — the award. The question REQUIRES it, so it must actually appear in the story, not be implied.
4. The change — the question says the award "changes his/her life", so the ending must show a life that is different. A story that stops at the award has not answered the question.

What the examiner looks for beyond the plot: a definite opening and closing (not "and then I woke up"), dialogue used sparingly and punctuated correctly, and consistent past tense throughout.

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.