NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 3 The Magic Brush of Dreams — Let us write

Use the checklist backwards. Write your essay first, then go down these eight items and mark the line in your own draft that satisfies each one. Any item you cannot point to is a paragraph you still have to write — most often number 6 (sensory detail and comparison) and number 7 (a real turning point).

Sample answer — Topic 1

The Journey of a Blue Scarf

For eleven months I hung in a steel almirah, folded flat between two woollen shawls, and I thought that was the whole of the world. Then came a Tuesday in March when Amma washed me and pegged me on the clothesline, and a gust came over the terrace wall and took me the way a hand takes a leaf. One peg held. The other did not. I went up over the water tank and did not come down for a very long time.

The first place I landed was a gulmohar tree at the end of our lane, and I hung there for two days among the red flowers while crows examined me and decided I was not food. On the third morning a kite pulled me loose and I fell into a vegetable cart, and by evening I was in the wholesale market, lying across a mound of green chillies that smelt so sharp I would have sneezed if I had a nose. A porter used me to wipe his forehead, tied me round his head against the sun, and carried me twelve kilometres on top of a sack of onions.

He left me on the wall of a railway platform. That was the noisiest night of my life — announcements, the shudder of engines, a woman with three bags and no seat. Towards morning she picked me up, looked round for an owner, found none, and wrapped me twice round her small son because the wind on the platform had turned cold. I stayed with that child for nine days. I have been many things, but nothing has ever fitted me as well as being wrapped round a sleeping boy on a station bench.

It was the child who brought me home, though he never knew it. His mother found work in our colony, and one afternoon she hung me out to dry — on our own terrace, on the same line, three houses from where I had begun. Amma saw the blue, came up, and said only, “So you came back.” She washed me a second time and put me away.

The most valuable thing I learnt was this: a scarf folded in an almirah is safe and is worth nothing. I was useful only when I was out in the wind — round a porter's forehead, over a market cart, around a child who was cold. I would fly away again tomorrow if the peg gave way.

Outline for Topic 2, if you choose it: begin in the quietest corner of the library, with dust and afternoon light. Let the book be strangely ordinary — no glow, no lock, just a page you cannot stop reading. Choose one period and one small scene inside it (the building of a stepwell; a morning in Nalanda; a printing press in 1750) rather than sweeping across a century. End with the librarian calling out that it is closing time, and one detail — dust on your sleeve, a word you now know — that proves you were really there.