Moments - Five Stories, Ersama to The Beggar

Weathering the Storm in Ersama is by Harsh Mander, a writer who works on the lives of people caught in disaster and injustice. This is not fiction. It is an account of a real super cyclone that struck the coast of Orissa - the state is now spelt Odisha - written in the third person. That detail matters when you answer questions on it: the reporting voice belongs to the writer, while every decision in the story belongs to the boy at its centre.

The boy is Prashant, nineteen years old. He has gone to Ersama, a small coastal town some distance from his own village, to spend the day with a friend. That evening the weather turns. A super cyclone comes in off the sea with winds strong enough to strip roofs and uproot trees, followed by rain and by sea water pushing far inland. Prashant and his friend's family climb onto the roof of the house and stay there while the water rises around them in the dark.

Two coconut trees come down across the house, and for the next two days those trees are the difference between living and not living. The group breaks open the green coconuts for the little food and liquid inside, and drinks the rain water they can collect. When daylight comes there is no street and no village to look at, only a sheet of water stretching away, with the bodies of people and animals turning in it.

On the third day the water begins to fall, and Prashant makes the decision that shapes the rest of the piece: he will walk home. He sets out with a stick, using it to test the depth of the water in front of him, and wades and stumbles for hours past wreckage and floating carcasses until he reaches his own village. It is barely a village any more. He goes to the shelter where the survivors have gathered, and there he finds his family alive - his grandmother, his brother and his sister. After pages of unbroken loss, the story finally gives him something.

Everything after that is the real subject. Prashant does not sit down inside his grief; he starts organising. The shelter is filthy, with waste and dead animals lying about, so he puts together a team of young men and older volunteers to clean it. Food is the next problem, and he persuades a local merchant to release his stock of rice so that people can eat. When a military helicopter drops food once and then stops coming, he has the children lie down on the open sand with empty utensils on their stomachs, so that the crew flying over cannot possibly miss what they are being shown. The drops start again.

Then he does something harder than any of that. Officials want to move orphaned children and widowed women into institutions. Prashant and the villagers refuse. They keep the orphans inside the village instead, with the women of the village taking charge of them, so that no child grows up away from the people he belongs to. He also insists that the grieving women stop sitting with their loss and join the food-for-work schemes that begin, and he gets the children playing games again - not because games matter, but because a child who is playing has started to come back.

The theme is stated by the action rather than by any speech. A disaster has to be survived twice: once physically, and once by refusing to remain a victim of it. Alongside that runs a quieter argument, that a community which looks after its own broken people does it better than an institution can.

The Last Leaf is by O. Henry, an American writer known for endings that send you straight back to the beginning. The version in your book is shortened, but the shape survives: an ordinary situation, one hidden act, and a final revelation that changes the meaning of everything before it.

Sue and Johnsy are two young artists sharing a small flat at the top of an old building. In winter Johnsy falls ill with pneumonia, and she stops fighting it. The doctor speaks to Sue frankly: the odds are heavily against the patient, medicine can only do part of the work, and the one thing that would change the odds is a girl who wants to get better. Johnsy, he says, has made up her mind that she is not going to recover, and he asks Sue whether there is anything in her friend's life worth living for.

What Johnsy does with her illness is the strangest and best part of the story. From her bed she can see an old ivy creeper on the brick wall opposite, and she starts counting its leaves aloud as they drop. She has fixed on an idea and will not be argued out of it: when the last leaf goes, she will go with it. Sue reasons with her, tries to keep the blind down, tries to keep her interested in the drawing she has to finish, and gets nowhere - because Johnsy is not being logical. She is frightened and exhausted, and the falling leaves have simply given her fear a shape she can watch.

Behrman lives on the ground floor of the same building. He is an old painter who has spent a lifetime failing at his art, earns a little by posing as a model for the young artists around him, drinks more than is good for him, and has been announcing for years the masterpiece he will paint one day and has never begun. When Sue tells him about Johnsy and the leaves he is angry rather than moved, calls the whole notion foolish and refuses to believe anybody could be so silly. Then he comes upstairs, looks out at the creeper with her, and says very little.

That night brings rain and a hard wind. In the morning Johnsy insists on the blind being raised, expecting a bare wall - and one leaf is still hanging there, dark green near the stem, yellow at the edges. It is still there after a second night of weather too. Something in Johnsy gives way. She says it was wrong of her to have wanted to die, asks for something to eat and for a mirror so she can sit up properly, and within a day or two the doctor says she is out of danger.

Then comes the news. Behrman has died of pneumonia after being ill for only two days. He was found in his room with his shoes and clothes soaked through and freezing cold; a lantern was still burning, a ladder had been dragged out of its usual place, and there were brushes and a palette with green and yellow paint mixed on it. It is Sue who puts these facts in front of Johnsy and tells her that the leaf on the wall is Behrman's masterpiece. That judgement is a character's, spoken in the story, not a comment by the author, and answers should say so.

The theme is the will to live and what somebody else may pay for it. Two ironies do most of the work. The masterpiece a man boasted about for a lifetime turns out to be a painted leaf on a brick wall that nobody can sell or hang - and it is the only work of his that ever mattered. And the man who was most scornful about Johnsy's fancy is the one who took it seriously enough to climb a ladder in freezing rain.

A House Is Not a Home is by Zan Gaudioso. It is told in the first person by a boy in his first year of high school, and the single most useful habit for this text is to keep the narrator and the writer apart. The I of the story is the student. The feelings described are his, not the author's, and answers should say the narrator rather than the author.

He begins unhappy. He has come from a small school where he knew everybody, where his teachers had felt more like friends than authorities, and where he had a place. The new high school is large and impersonal, the older students make him feel small, and he cannot find anyone to attach himself to. He gets through the days without joining anything. At home he is close to his mother, who is the person he talks to and sits with, and home is the one place where he is not on trial.

Then, on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, he notices smoke. The fire takes hold with frightening speed and moves through the house. He and his mother get out; almost nothing else does. Furniture, clothes, papers, his schoolbooks and his homework all go, and so, for the moment, does his cat, who cannot be found anywhere in the confusion. He stands outside watching the house burn and breaks down in front of neighbours and firefighters, and being seen crying shames him nearly as much as the loss itself.

Monday is worse than Sunday. He has no books, no bag and no clothes of his own; what he is wearing has been given to him and neither fits nor feels like his. He goes to school certain that everybody can see what has happened to him, and dreading their attention. For a boy whose main aim all term has been to escape notice, having nothing is a kind of public exposure.

What happens instead is the turn of the story. The students at that big unfriendly school - most of whom have never spoken to him - collect books, school supplies, clothes and money, and simply hand them over. Teachers help too. People he had classified as strangers behave like people who know him, and they do it without making a performance of it. Slowly he stops standing at the edge of things. He starts talking to his classmates, joins in, and the school he had resented every morning turns into the place he belongs to.

The last piece falls into place weeks later, when his cat is found alive and brought back to him. That is why the narrator's closing thought - that his cat was back and so was he - is not about a journey. He had been absent in a different way, shut in and silent and unwilling to be part of anything, and the return of the cat marks the end of that absence too.

The theme sits in the title, which is doing the work of an argument rather than a label. A house is a structure; a home is made of people and of being wanted by them. The fire destroys the house and, briefly, the boy's idea of himself. What replaces both is not a new building. It is a set of relationships he did not know he already had.

The Accidental Tourist is by Bill Bryson, a travel writer. Unlike the other pieces in this set it is not a story with a plot; it is a humorous personal essay, and the first person in it really is the writer laughing at himself. There is no villain, no crisis and no moral at the end. The pleasure is in the honesty and the timing.

Bryson's claim about himself is simple: he is easily confused, and travelling is the situation that exposes it most reliably. He loses exactly the things a traveller cannot afford to lose - tickets, boarding passes, room keys, luggage receipts. He forgets numbers and directions he has been given a minute earlier. He cannot keep track of where he has left things. The essay's method is to prove all this with scenes rather than with adjectives, which is a lesson worth borrowing for your own answers.

In the first scene he is at an airport with his family and gives the zip of his carry-on bag a good pull. The zip gives way, the bag opens, and the contents go across the floor in every direction - papers, coins, small objects rolling away under seats - while he crawls after them in front of a queue of people who now have something to watch. In the middle of the same episode he cuts his finger badly enough to bleed, and cannot afterwards explain how he managed it. The best detail is his wife's reaction. She is calm rather than shocked or especially sympathetic, and that calm reads as the response of somebody who has seen all of this before; a bleeding, kneeling, apologising husband seems to be the standard cost of going anywhere with him.

On the aircraft he improves on his own record. He bends down to tie a shoelace, and at that exact moment the passenger in front flings his seat back, pinning him head-down in the position airline crews keep for emergencies. He is stuck there, unable to sit up, and has to struggle to get himself free again. Later the passenger beside him turns and looks at him in open horror - because he has been chewing the end of a pen without thinking about it, and the ink has spread over his mouth, chin and teeth while he sat there quite unaware.

The running joke is finished off by his own family. When the meal arrives, his wife tells the children to take the lids off the food for their father. She is not being unkind and she is not joking for the reader's benefit; she is preventing the next accident, because every person at that table knows what happens when he opens a sealed container of anything. One short instruction tells you that an entire household has quietly organised itself around his clumsiness.

What makes the essay work is the tone. Bryson never complains and never asks to be pitied. He reports his own disasters in a calm, reasonable voice, as though describing somebody else, and the gap between that flat voice and the chaos it is describing is where the comedy lives. This is self-deprecating humour: the writer makes himself the target, so we laugh with him rather than at him.

The title carries the same idea in two words. Bryson is a professional traveller - travel is his subject and his living - and yet nothing on any journey ever seems to happen to him on purpose. He is a tourist by accident, in a life spent on the move.

The Beggar is by Anton Chekhov, a Russian writer. It is told in the third person and stays close to a lawyer named Sergei, and that choice matters for the ending. Because we watch events from his side of them, we quietly accept his version of what has happened - until a character takes it away from him in the last conversation.

A ragged man stops Sergei in the street and asks for help. He gives an account of himself: he was a village schoolteacher, he lost his post through the scheming of other people, and he has been out of work ever since. Sergei recognises him immediately. Two days earlier the same man had told him a completely different story, that he was a student who had been expelled. Sergei says so, calls him a liar and a scoundrel, and threatens to hand him to the police.

Cornered, the beggar admits it. His name is Lushkoff. He was neither a teacher nor a student but a singer in a Russian choir, and he was thrown out for drinking. His defence is uncomfortable and, on its own terms, honest: when he tells the truth nobody gives him anything, so he lies. That is the story's first real idea - begging has taught him exactly what listeners want to hear, and the truth is not it.

Sergei's answer is to offer work instead of money. Lushkoff can come to the house and chop wood, and he will be paid for it. He agrees, though everything about him suggests he has agreed out of shame and confusion rather than willingness. At the house he is handed over to Olga, the cook, and taken out to the woodshed - where it is immediately obvious that he cannot do the job. He is weak and unsteady, he is cold, the axe is beyond him, and he has clearly never done such work in his life.

What Olga does next is the hinge of the whole story, and the reader is not told about it while it is happening. She scolds him, sharply and often, the way one scolds a useless member of one's own family. She pities him. She weeps over him. And then she quietly chops the wood herself and lets the work be counted as his. From inside the house, Sergei sees a man earning his keep and congratulates himself on a plan that is working. He goes on employing Lushkoff, sends him out with a load of furniture when the household moves, and eventually uses his influence to place him as a clerk copying documents for a notary at thirty-five roubles a month. Lushkoff then disappears from his life.

Long afterwards the two men meet by chance at a theatre. Sergei is pleased with himself and says as much: he believes his own straight talking is what set this man on his feet. Lushkoff thanks him warmly and then corrects him. It was not the lecture. It was Olga - her scolding, her tears, and above all the fact that she did his work for him while he stood by unable to lift the axe. Watching her chop wood on his behalf shamed and moved him in a way no sermon could have done.

The theme is what real charity actually looks like. Sergei gives advice, a job and a reference, and collects the credit for a saved life. Olga gives labour, anger and grief, takes no credit at all, and is not even present at the end to hear herself named. Chekhov never states the contrast; he lets a character state it, which lands much harder.

Read one after another, these five pieces circle the same handful of questions. A comparison question asks you to notice that, so it helps to have the connections ready rather than inventing them under pressure.

Who actually does the helping? In three of the five, the person who makes the difference is not the person you would name first. Olga, a cook, saves Lushkoff while a lawyer collects the thanks. Behrman, an old failed painter, saves Johnsy while the doctor can only quote the odds. In A House Is Not a Home the help comes from classmates the narrator had dismissed as strangers who did not care. Only in Weathering the Storm in Ersama does the obvious hero do the obvious work - and even there, most of the actual lifting is done by unnamed women, young men and children.

Action beats sympathy. Nobody in these texts is rescued by kind words. Prashant makes grieving women work and shocked children play. Olga chops wood. Behrman climbs a ladder in freezing rain. The school does not console the narrator with speeches; it hands him books and clothes. Wherever a character offers only talk - Sergei's lecture in the street, Sue's arguments with Johnsy about the ivy - it changes nothing at all.

Appearance and reality. A beggar is not a schoolteacher. A leaf on a wall is not a leaf. A house that has burnt down was never the home. A professional travel writer turns out to be hopeless at travelling. Each text sets up a gap between what something looks like and what it is, and in each the ending is the moment that gap closes. That is one idea strong enough to hold a long answer on any two of them.

Loss, and the days after it. Four of the five turn on something being taken away: a village, a girl's health, a house, a man's dignity. None of them is really about the loss. They are about what the person does next, and whether anyone reaches them in time. Bryson's essay is the odd one out, because nothing is at stake in it at all - and that is exactly why it sits well in the set. It shows the same ordinary human clumsiness with all the pressure taken off, so you can laugh at it.

If you are asked to compare two texts, resist the urge to summarise both. Choose one idea, state it in a sentence, then bring one specific incident from each text to prove it, and finish with one sentence on how the two differ. A comparison built out of two plot summaries stuck together says almost nothing; a comparison built out of two incidents says a great deal in half the space.

Between them, these five pieces use four different narrative voices. Telling them apart protects you from an easy mistake in a literature answer - handing the author credit for something one of the characters said.

Third-person reporting of real events. Weathering the Storm in Ersama is written by Harsh Mander about people who existed and an event that happened. Prashant's decisions belong to Prashant; the selecting, ordering and shaping of the account belong to the writer. The safe form of words is that the writer describes how Prashant did such and such.

Third-person storytelling. The Last Leaf and The Beggar both use a narrator standing outside the story, and both save the key statement for a character to make. Sue is the one who explains what Behrman did and what it amounted to. Lushkoff is the one who explains what Olga did. If your answer says that O. Henry calls the leaf a masterpiece, or that Chekhov tells us Olga saved Lushkoff, you have described the book from the outside instead of reading the text. Say that Sue calls it his masterpiece; say that Lushkoff credits Olga.

First person with a persona. In A House Is Not a Home the I is a boy in his first year of high school. Zan Gaudioso is the writer who tells the story in that voice. Attribute the loneliness, the embarrassment and the recovery to the narrator.

First person as the writer. In The Accidental Tourist the I genuinely is Bill Bryson, writing about his own life. Here you can safely say that Bryson loses his boarding pass, because that is precisely the claim he is making about himself.

Four habits will lift almost any answer on this set of texts:

• Name the incident. Saying that Prashant is resourceful is worth very little on its own. Saying that he had the children lie on the open sand with empty utensils on their stomachs so the helicopter crew could not miss them proves it in one line.
• Use the present tense for what happens in a text. Johnsy counts the leaves; Lushkoff admits he lied; the zip gives way. Keep it consistent from the first sentence to the last.
• Answer the question that was actually asked. A short answer wants a decision and a reason for it. It does not want the plot retold from the beginning, and a long retelling crowds out the one sentence that actually answers the question.
• Spell names correctly. Johnsy, Behrman, Sue, Prashant, Lushkoff, Olga, Sergei. A well-argued answer about a character whose name is wrong throughout reads as though you half remember the text.

One last thing that is easy to forget under time pressure: these are five separate texts by five different writers, gathered in one reader. Nothing that happens on a flooded coast explains anything that happens in a sick girl's room. When a question asks about a theme they share, you are being invited to build the link yourself, in your own sentence, and to support it from both texts.