Class 12 English

Alsace has been ordered to teach German from tomorrow. Franz arrives late to a silent classroom and finds out what a language is worth only on the day it is taken away.

Saheb picking rags in Seemapuri and Mukesh welding bangles in Firozabad — two childhoods, and the difference between being poor and being held in place.

William Douglas is thrown into the deep end at eleven and carries the terror for years — then hires an instructor and takes it apart piece by piece.

A peddler who thinks the whole world is a baited trap meets someone who treats him as a captain rather than a thief, and finds the metaphor works both ways.

Champaran, 1917. A sharecropper follows Gandhi around until he agrees to come, and an ordinary land dispute becomes the first lesson in civil disobedience.

Asokamitran on Gemini Studios — the make-up room, the office boy who wanted to be a poet, and an English visitor nobody in the room could understand.

Two halves: why writers from Kipling to Marquez have distrusted the interview, and Umberto Eco explaining how he writes so much in the empty spaces.

Sophie invents a meeting with a footballer and half-believes it herself. A story about daydreaming as the only exit a working-class girl can see.

My Mother at Sixty-six, Keeping Quiet, A Thing of Beauty, A Roadside Stand and Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers — central idea, devices the examiner names, and the lines worth quoting.

Charley finds a platform at Grand Central that does not exist, leading to 1894. Whether it is time travel or escape from anxiety is the question the story refuses to settle.

A Maharaja is told a tiger will kill him, so he kills ninety-nine of them. Kalki’s satire on absolute power, and the wooden tiger that finishes the prophecy.

Tishani Doshi sails to Antarctica with Students on Ice — Gondwana, ice cores holding half a million years of air, and why a continent of ice is the clearest climate record we have.

A Japanese surgeon finds a wounded American washed up outside his house during the war, and has to choose between the oath he took and the country he belongs to.

A boy with a burnt face and an old man with a tin leg meet in a garden. Susan Hill’s play about whether the real disability is the injury or the withdrawal after it.

Two autobiographical accounts — Zitkala-Sa having her hair cut at a Native American school, and Bama learning what her community’s place was supposed to be.

How to attack an unseen passage under time pressure, and the note-making format the marking scheme actually rewards — headings, subheadings, abbreviations and a summary.

The short formats where marks are lost on layout rather than language — notices, formal invitations and replies, and business and application letters.

The two long-form questions — an article that argues a position and a report that records what happened, with the structural differences examiners look for.