The author's grandmother had a divine believe. How does the author bring this out? (The Potrait of a Lady)
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The author’s grandmother was an old woman. Her face was a criss-cross of wrinkles. She was fat, short and slightly bent. Her silvery white hair used to spread out on her wrinkled face. She hobbled about the house in spotless white clothes with one hand resting on her waist to balance her stoop and the other telling the beads of her rosary. Her lips constantly moved in silent prayer. For twenty years the author had seen no change in her looks and behavior. She was an extremely religious person. He finds it difficult to conceptualise that once she too was young and pretty like other women. The stories about her childhood games were like fairy tales to him.
The narrator and his grandmother were good friends. His parents had left him with her in the village. They were always together there. She used to wake him up in the morning, get him ready for the school, plaster his wooden slate with yellow chalk, prepare his breakfast and accompany him to the school. They fed street dogs with stale chapaties on their way to school which was a great fun for them. She helped him in his lessons also.
The turning point came in their relationship when the narrator came to city to stay with his parents. In city he joined an English School. Now she could not go with him to the school. In spite of her immense interest in his studies, she could not help him in his lessons as he was learning English, laws of gravity, Archimedes’ principle and many more such things which she could not understand and this made her distressed. Another thing which disquieted her much was that the kids were not learning about God and scriptures in the school instead they were given music lessons. To her music was not meant for gentlefolk. It was meant for beggars and prostitutes only. She was dismayed and withdrew herself to some level.
After finishing school the narrator went to university. He was given a separate room. The common link of their friendship was snapped. His grandmother confined herself to a self-imposed reclusiveness. She spent most of her time in reciting prayers and by sitting beside her spinning wheel. She rarely talked to anyone. The only diversion for her was in the afternoon when she relaxed for a while to feed the sparrows. In village she used to feed street dogs, here in city she fed the sparrows and they too became very friendly with her. Feeding the sparrows was the happiest half hour of the day for her.
After completing his university education, he decided to go abroad for higher studies. His grandmother came to see him off at the railway station. She was quite calm, busy in telling the beads of her rosary and reciting prayers as ever. When he came back after five years he found her more and more religious and more and more self-possessed. She spent even more time in prayers and spinning the wheel. Feeding the birds was her only happy pursuit. But just the day before her death for the first time she broke this routine and abandoned her prayers. That day she sang the songs of the home coming warriors with the women of neighborhood to celebrate her grandson’s return from abroad.
Next morning she was taken ill. The doctor said it was a mild fever and would go but she took it differently. She declared her end was near. She did not want to waste any more time talking to anybody. She lay peacefully in bed praying and telling the beads till her lips stopped moving and rosary fell from her lifeless fingers.
In the evening thousands of sparrows flew in to mourn her death and sat scattered around her body in complete silence. They even disregarded the breadcrumbs thrown to them by the narrator’s mother. When they carried her dead body outside, the sparrows flew away quietly