2

Read Text A, and then answer Questions 1 (a) – 1 (e) on the question paper.

Text A: City of Joy

Nissar led his comrades to the mouth of the great Howrah Bridge. Pointing to one
of the overloaded buses, he directed Shambu to cling onto the spare wheel and
ordered the other three to climb onto the rear bumper. Every day, tens of
thousands of people made use of Calcutta’s public transport this way without
paying. They were not the only defrauders. The real champions 5
of this system were some of the conductors themselves who, it was said,
pocketed part of the takings by selling passengers false tickets. In the hellish
traffic, a journey undertaken balancing on the bumpers was an arduous acrobatic
feat.

‘Off, fellows!’ Nissar’s order rang out through the already scorching early morning
air. A mile and a half away to the east, the sky was black with clouds of vultures. 10
They walked for half a mile.

‘We have to be quick and quiet,’ he announced. ‘It’s the hotels and hospitals day.
Mustn't miss out on their goods. Wait on me.’

Just then, the first yellow truck arrived, then another, and then a third. None of
them, however, was carrying the red signal. Nobody moved. Hasari’s son felt as if 15
his pupils were about to burst. The arrival of each vehicle unleashed a frenzied
activity as the others scrambled after it.

The women tended to look for bits of coal and wood. The children preferred
things made out of leather, plastic, or glass. They all picked up anything edible
with equal enthusiasm: rotten fruit, peeling, crusts of bread. This kind of picking 20
was the most difficult and often the most dangerous. Shambu saw a vulture bear
down like a torpedo on the small boy to snatch the piece of meat he had just
found.

The most surprising factor about this nightmare was that signs of normal life had
been established here. Among the heaps of stinking rubbish, Shambu could see 25
ice-cream salesmen on their decorated tricycles, water vendors laden with large
goatskin bottles, fritter makers squatting under sunshades behind their smoking
braziers, retailers surrounded by bottles set out like bowling pins. So that mothers
could forage more effectively among the refuse, there were even baby-sitters to
look after their children. 30

The dumpsite was also a busy trading centre, a bazaar, a money market. A whole
tribe of second-hand salesmen and scrap iron merchants had grafted themselves
onto that of the green ragpickers. Each one had his speciality.

Adapted from City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre

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Read Text B, and then answer Questions 1 (f) on the question paper.

Text B: A Year Later in Nepal

This text highlights the situation in Nepal one year after a tragic earthquake hit the country.

The violence of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake left countless towns and villages
across Nepal in shambles. Almost one year later, however, in shambles they
remain. As far as the eyes can see, debris still lies stacked everywhere like grim
monuments to shattered lives. The country has made almost no progress in
rebuilding hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, and government buildings, as 5
well as some 600 historical structures, including ancient Hindu and Buddhist
temples and monuments

With nearly a million children still having no school to attend, the problem was
further exacerbated with millions of villagers being forced to winter in flimsy pop-up
tents and corrugated tin shacks, erected haphazardly at high altitudes and across 10
rolling plains. The government’s reconstruction agency has so far approved zero
projects. Some citizens have started rebuilding on their own but most are still
waiting – either because they are afraid of running afoul of new building
regulations, or because they still hope to receive government grants. Many of them
are living in rows of temporary shelters made from salvaged wood covered with 15
metals sheets that are likely to be their only protection when the rainy season
returns soon. According to international aid organisation Oxfam, around 26, 000
people still remain displaced in camps where there is no electricity or running
water.

‘This has been home for all of us for the past year and it looks like we are going to 20
be here for a long time. All we hear is that the government is going to give us money
to rebuild our homes, but when is that going to happen? Our kids are getting sick
and we have no money, job or a government that is going to come to our rescue,’
said Keshar Narayan, a farmer living with eight family members in a tin shed on the
outskirts of Kathmandu. Their worries have been aggravated by months of acute 25
shortage of medicines, cooking gas, and petroleum for vehicles

Adapted from AP Malaysia, 2016

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Read Text C, and then answer Questions 2 (a) – (d) and Question 3 on the question paper.

Text C: Miss Anstruther’s Letters

Miss Anstruther’s life had been cut in two on the night of 10 May. Now felt herself a
ghost, without attachments or habitation, neither of which she desired. She sat
alone in the small room she had taken littered with the broken and useless objects
she had salvaged from the ruin round the corner. It was one of the many burnt-out
ruins of that wild night when explosives and incendiaries rained on London and the 5
water had run short: it was now a gaunt roofless tomb, a pile of rubble and smashed
beams.

Miss Anstruther had climbed up to what had been her flat, swarming up broken
beams, searching and scrabbling, but not finding what she sought, only here a pot,
there a pan. She knew the flames had taken the things she sought like a ravaging 10
mouse. They were not among the massed debris on the basement floor either,
where piles of soaked and blackened fragments had fallen through four floors to
lie in indistinguishable anonymity.

The basement tenant, who spent her days there, bravely sorting and burrowing
among the chaotic mass that had invaded her home from the dwellings of her co- 15
tenants above, said, "Is it the one you wrote?" "I don't think so," said Miss
Anstruther.

Miss Anstruther went on digging till twilight came. What she looked for was not
there, it was no more. She had not rescued it while she could, she had forgotten it,
and now it was ashes. All but one torn, burnt corner of note-paper, which she picked 20
up out of a battered saucepan. It had close small writing, the only words left of the
thousands of words in that hand that she looked for. It had been written twenty-one
years ago, and it said, "Leave it at that. I know now that you don't care; if you did
you would ....”. The words, each time she looked at them, seemed to darken and
obliterate a little more of the twenty years that had followed them. She put it in her 25
note-case and went on looking till dark; then she went back to her bedroom, filled
with dirt, sorrow and a few blackened cups.

Each night, Miss Anstruther lay awake in her strange, unhomely room, she relived
the blazing night that had cut her life in two. A wild, blazing hell of a night. Crashes
shook Mortimer House, and it swayed like a reed in the wind. After a series of three 30
close-at-hand screams and crashes, the fourth exploded, a giant earthquake, against
Mortimer House, and sent its front crashing down. Miss Anstruther, dazed and
bruised from the hurtle of plaster flung at her head, and choked with dust, hurried
down the stairs.

"Everyone out of the building!" shouted the police. 35

The police said the gas pipes burst and the whole thing may go up in a bonfire.
Bonfire! Miss Anstruther thought. I must go up and save some things. She rushed
up, while the rescue men were in Mrs Cavendish's flat. Inside her own blasted and
twisted door, her flat lay waiting for death. She got a suitcase, and piled books into
it. She loped downstairs, placed her suitcase on the piled wreckage and started up 40
the stairs again. As she reached the first floor, there was a burst and a hissing, a
huge pst-pst, and a rush of flame leaped. As the burst gas caught and sprang to
heaven, another fiery rose burst into bloom to join the pandemonic red garden of
night. Two rescue men, carrying Mrs Cavendish downstairs, met Miss Anstruther
and pushed her back. 45

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It was at this moment that Miss Anstruther remembered the thing she wanted most,
the thing 40 she had forgotten while she gathered up things she wanted less. She
pushed again into the inferno, but she was dragged back. "No one to go in there,"
said the police, for all human life was by now extricated.

Adapted from the short story, "Miss Anstruther's Letters" (1942), by Rose Macaulay

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