Prose Non-Fiction Questionbank

The following memoir recounts the narrator’s childhood habit of retreating to the fire escape to escape family tension and observe the world below.

The first time I climbed onto the fire escape, I was nine. It was summer, and the heat inside the apartment pressed against the walls like it was trying to escape too. My parents were arguing about something in the kitchen—money, probably—and I had quietly slid the window open and slipped through, barefoot. The fire escape was rusted and creaked beneath me, but it was cooler than inside. I sat down on the metal grating, knees pulled to my chest, and looked out at the other buildings. All of them packed together like a cluttered shelf, windows blinking yellow, blue, and television white. The city didn’t sleep. It just got quieter.

That became my place. When the apartment felt too small, too loud, or too full of questions I didn’t know how to ask, I climbed out there. Sometimes with a book, sometimes with a slice of toast, sometimes with nothing but myself. I liked watching people on the street below—delivery bikes darting past, couples arguing, someone chasing their dog into traffic. Life was always moving. I stayed still.

From that vantage point, I saw time change. The laundromat across the street changed owners twice. A tree lost its leaves and grew them back, again and again. The man who played saxophone on the corner disappeared one spring and didn’t come back. I didn’t ask why. I’d learned that adults rarely answered honestly when it came to disappearances. By the time I was twelve, I knew every crack in the metal frame. I had scratched a constellation into the paint beside where I sat. I called it my “escape map”—not a way out, but a way through.

It was there I watched my father leave for the last time. He didn’t know I was above him, pressed into the shadows, the metal cool against my back. He walked quickly, like the sidewalk burned. He didn’t take much. A suitcase, a jacket, the keys he never returned.

My mother cried in the living room while I counted blinking windows in the dark. Years later, when I came back to visit the building, everything was smaller. The windows, the stairwell, even the fire escape. I climbed out again, careful not to wake the sleeping city. The grating still creaked. The street had changed—new shops, different cars, fewer trees. But some things remained: the hum of traffic, the buzz of neon, the distant music of someone else's life.

I sat there and touched the constellation I had carved. It was faded, but still there. Like me.

The following text is an excerpt from The Shoe Repair Man, a prose non-fiction piece. The narrator recounts a childhood connection with Salim, a humble cobbler who repaired shoes beneath an underpass. Through vivid memories and quiet observations, the piece explores the dignity of unnoticed labour, the artistry of craft, and the deep human stories that exist in everyday encounters.

I first met him when I was ten, my school shoes worn to the soles. He sat at the edge of the underpass, his stall no more than a plank of wood, a hammer, and a collection of leather scraps folded into a biscuit tin. His hands were stained with polish and time. I held out my shoes timidly. He nodded without speaking, gesturing for me to sit. His fingers moved with quiet precision, tapping nails into the sole like a composer setting a rhythm. He never hurried.

His name, I later learned, was Salim. He had been fixing shoes in that same corner for thirty years. “Your shoes tell you how far you’ve walked,” he once told me. “But not where you’re going.”

I began to visit more often—sometimes with torn sandals, sometimes with no shoes at all. He told me stories: of monsoons that swept shoes away in streams, of brides whose heels snapped before ceremonies, of a German tourist who mailed him a thank-you card and a packet of Swiss chocolate. He spoke sparingly, but always with purpose. It was as though every word was measured like the leather he cut.

One day, I brought my grandfather’s old boots. The leather was cracked and tired. Salim ran his hand along the seam and said nothing for a long time. Then, slowly, he began to stitch. It was the only time I saw him pause, not for thought, but for memory.

He kept a small transistor radio by his foot, always tuned to the same station that played classical Bengali songs. Sometimes, he would hum. People passed him every day without noticing. But for those who stopped, he gave more than just mended soles. He offered quiet ritual, and something resembling grace.

When he died, a woman took his place. The sign changed. The biscuit tin was gone. Her hands were just as skilled, but the radio played something else. The rhythm was different.

Years later, I still pass that underpass. The bench has been replaced. The cracks in the pavement have been filled. But I remember the feel of his bench under my legs, the smell of glue and polish, and the way Salim stitched stories into shoes without needing to say a word.

The following text is an excerpt from Market Days, a piece of prose non-fiction. The narrator reflects on the vibrancy and rituals of a local Sunday market, using rich sensory detail and personal anecdotes to explore themes of community, tradition, and the beauty of the everyday.

On Sundays, the market breathes. It doesn’t wake up slowly. It exhales all at once—rattling shutters, boots on gravel, the clang of crates being stacked like fragile monuments to commerce. At six in the morning, the light is bruised and soft, but already the air smells of rosemary and oranges, fish scales and diesel. Vendors shout greetings in half-laughed syllables, stretching vowels like dough.

I come for the noise as much as the goods. The cheese seller, Luca, always waves with his knife. “You again?” he says with mock disbelief, as though I haven’t come every Sunday for the past three years. His stall smells like caves and old winters, and I never leave without a wedge of something wrapped in wax paper and warning.

Further down, there’s Rosa with her heirloom tomatoes—gorgeously imperfect, all craters and folds, like the faces of the women who sit behind her gossiping in dialect too fast for me to catch. They sell basil in bunches so thick your fingers stay green until lunch.

The market is not a place for secrets. People here speak with their hands, with their faces. Prices are negotiable, especially if your child is cute, your smile sincere, or your dog elderly. Grandmothers barter over beans while babies nap on crates of cucumbers. A man plays accordion near the eggs, and a woman dances in place with a baguette under her arm.

I find poetry in the mundane. The way the scales tip. The soft crack of bread crust being tested by a tap. The flash of a silver fish mid-scoop, a flicker of life before it’s weighed and bagged. These are the details the city forgets during the week, when everything is boxed, barcode-scanned, and silent.

Once, I asked Rosa why she didn’t move to a bigger shop, somewhere indoors, insulated, predictable. She looked at me as though I’d offered her tinned peaches at a wedding. “This is the shop,” she said, gesturing to the morning—sun slicing through the awnings, voices overlapping like birdsong. “This is the roof. The wind. The walls. The mess. The life.”

It’s hard to argue with that.

At ten, the market is thick with elbows and baskets. Tourists gawk at mushrooms. Teenagers eat ricotta with their fingers. Old men inspect lemons like they’re holding time. I carry a bag filled with too much of everything and none of what I planned.

By noon, the stalls begin to disappear. A slow vanishing act. Bread goes first. Then fruit. Then fish. Plastic sheets cover whatever remains. The air changes—less olive oil, more sweat and departure. Vendors count coins. Children cry. Shouted goodbyes fold into tired waves.

By one, the market is gone.

But if you know where to look, you’ll see traces: a single tomato rolled into the gutter, a grape crushed on the cobblestones like a burst jewel, the ghost of fennel on your sleeve.

And next Sunday, it will breathe again.

The following text is an excerpt from The Last Light in Dhaka, a prose non-fiction piece. The narrator reflects on daily life during power cuts in the city, focusing on their grandmother’s wisdom and the quiet resilience of both family and place.

It was just after six when the power went out, the third time that week. The hum of ceiling fans halted mid-whir. The street outside the apartment sighed into silence, the traffic dimmed by resignation rather than regulation.

I lit the candle, the wax sticky in the humid air. It flickered uncertainly, like even it wasn’t sure if the light was worth the effort. My grandmother didn’t pause her sewing. Her fingers moved through the fabric by memory. She wore a white sari, starched and stiff, but the thread she used was the softest shade of blue I’d ever seen. “The city is tired,” she said, not looking up.

She spoke like that often—sentences that felt like they belonged to an older time, or maybe to poetry. I never asked her to explain them. Some things were meant to be felt, not solved.

We lived in an apartment where time had softened the walls and the furniture smelled of turmeric and old books. The air carried the scent of mangoes left too long on the windowsill. The neighbour’s television was a ghost behind the plaster. The floor tiles were cracked but cool underfoot, and the ceiling fan's shadow spun on the wall like a watch hand that had stopped ticking.

When I was younger, I thought of Dhaka as loud and infinite. Now, it felt tired, like an old man still working because no one told him to stop. Power cuts, water shortages, cracked roads that stitched the city together like a threadbare quilt. But it breathed. It endured. My grandmother remembered another Dhaka. One of fountains and theatres and rain that came without warning. She had danced, once. She told me in fragments—music, ankle bells, the feeling of silk against skin. But she never showed me. She only danced in words.

That night, we ate dinner by candlelight. Daal, rice, and green chillies. My grandmother chewed with care, her hands resting between bites as if to listen for something. “The city waits for rain,” she said. “It remembers how to begin again.”

Outside, the street returned to life slowly. The fruit seller lit a hurricane lamp. A boy chased a paper kite across the rooftops. The mosque’s loudspeaker sputtered into the final evening call.

Later, I stood on the balcony, the candle between my hands. I looked at the skyline, jagged and flickering like a heartbeat on a monitor. Dhaka was not beautiful. But it was ours.

And somehow, I understood.