You and your family enjoy eating out. Give a description of your favourite restaurant or food stall, and the sights and smells that attract you to the place. Explain why you like eating here.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 335 words)

BIJOY’S

You smell Bijoy’s before you see it. Half a lane away the air changes — mustard oil at a high heat, green chilli, and under both of them the sweet iron smell of hilsa. On a still evening in July it reaches the tram stop.

The stall itself is four feet of counter under a blue tarpaulin, wedged between a cycle-repair shop and a shuttered bank. There are no tables. There is a shelf along the wall at elbow height, and on it, in a row, the eleven or twelve people who happen to be eating at any moment: college students, a traffic constable, two nurses coming off shift, an old gentleman in a dhoti who has been coming, he says, since 1981.

Bijoy-da works with his back to you. The kadai is black with thirty years of use and it never leaves the flame. He drops the fish in and the oil closes over it with a noise like applause; steam goes up into the tarpaulin and comes back down warm on your face. His son ladles rice onto sal leaves with one hand and takes money with the other and has never, in my memory, written anything down.

The sights are all small ones. The blue of the tarpaulin gone grey-green where the rain sits. A kerosene lamp lit at dusk although there is electricity now. The stack of sal leaves, glossy and veined. The cat under the counter who has an understanding with the family.

We have eaten in better places. My father’s office takes him to restaurants with air-conditioning and printed menus, and he says the food is very good and eats it politely.

But we come here. We come because you stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and nobody minds; because the fish is on the leaf four minutes after you ask for it; because it costs eighty rupees; and because Bijoy-da, who has never once asked our names, knows exactly what my grandmother orders and starts making it when he sees her at the corner.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The question names THREE things and all three must be present:

1. a DESCRIPTION of the place
2. the SIGHTS AND SMELLS that attract you — both words are in the question, and SMELL is the one candidates forget
3. WHY you like eating there

Because the question says "sights and smells", smell should open or dominate rather than being mentioned once in passing. A food description that never smells of anything has missed its own subject.

THE WHY is a separate task with its own marks, so give it its own closing section. And make the reasons PERSONAL rather than general — "the food is delicious and the service is good" could be written about anywhere; being recognised by the cook could not.

Specific nouns carry descriptive marks: hilsa, kadai, sal leaves, tarpaulin. "They serve very tasty food" is the same sentence with the marks removed. 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.