Summary of the portrait of a lady
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The author wrote this chapter as a pen portrait of his grandmother. She had been so much old that she could not get any older. She had wrinkled skin. The author couldn't believe the fact that she had been young , pretty and even had a husband. The stories which had been told by her about her plays of childhood appeared like the fables of the Prophets. According to the author she had always been short, fat and slightly bent. She used to wear white clothes and had a rosary of beads with her. She was a very religious lady.
This story is in three phases. The first first face is of their relationship in the village. She wake up in the morning and got him ready for school. She give him breakfast to eat also she used to accompany him at school and help him with his studies.
The second phase of their relationship begin when they went to city in the author got admission in English School. Now grandmother could not help him in studies anymore. She used to ask him about his education at school.
The third page is when she learnt that the author was learning music at school. Then, she really talked with author.
After that for higher education author went abroad but he didn't find his grandmother being sentimental. When he returned back to the country is found that grandmother was still the same. On that day she did not play but collected the women from neighbourhood and started to sing. She fall ill and gota mild fever and the doctor said that she would be fine. But the grandmother declined and told author and his family that it was her end. Before the protest she was gone. Even the sparrows expressed their sorrow by sitting quiet all over the room.
The writer recalls his Grandmother as short, healthy and slightly bent. Her hairs were silver in colour and were scattered messily on her wrinkled face. She used to walk around the whole house in white clothes. She kept her one hand resting on her waist and the other hand was telling the beads of her rosary.
The writer thinks of her as not very pretty but constantly beautiful all the time. He compares her calm face with the winter landscape. During their lengthy stay in the village, Grandmother woke him up from the bed in the early morning, plastered his wooden slate, organized his breakfast, and sent him to the school.
On their way back to the home she used to give the stale chapattis to the street dogs. A turning point in their beautiful relationship arrived when they went to live in a city. Now, the writer used to go to the city school on a school bus and studied subjects like English, Physics, mathematics and many more subjects those his grandmother could not understand at all.
His grandmother could no longer go to school with him to send him. She felt upset that there was no teaching about God and scriptures at the city school. Instead, he was given music lessons, but she said nothing.
When the writer went to a university, he got a separate room in his house. The common link of the relationship between the grandson and the grandmother was broken now. Grandmother rarely talked to anyone in the house now. She spent plenty of her time sitting beside her spinning wheel and reciting prayers of god. She started feeding the sparrow birds in the afternoon.
When the writer left for abroad for his further studies, his grandmother did not get disturbed at all. Rather, she saw him off at the airport. Seeing her grandmother at this old age, the writer was thinking that it might be his last meeting with his grandmother. But when he came back home after a duration of 5 years, his grandmother was there to welcome him back and he saw her celebrate his return.
The next morning after the return of his grandson she got ill. Although the doctor told that it was a slight fever and would go away very soon, still she could foresee that her time to leave this world was near. She did not want to waste her time talking to someone.
She went to her bed praying and telling the beads till her lips stopped moving and the rosary fell down from her lifeless hand. To grieve her death, thousands of sparrows flew in and sat dispersed around her body. All the sparrows flew away without making any noise when the dead body of the old lady was carried away for the last rites.