'The Portrait of a Lady' by the famous Indian author Khushwant Singh (Class 11 English, Hornbill) is a deeply personal and touching autobiographical account of his relationship with his grandmother. Here are the most important exam questions.
The title 'The Portrait of a Lady' is beautifully literal. The author uses words instead of paint to draw a vivid, timeless portrait of a highly traditional, deeply religious, and profoundly loving Indian woman.
Answer: The author describes his grandmother as very old, short, fat, and slightly bent over. Her face was a crisscross of wrinkles. She always wore spotless white clothes and walked around the house with one hand resting on her waist to balance her stoop, while the other hand constantly told the beads of her rosary. She had a calm, divine beauty, like the 'winter landscape in the mountains'.
Answer: In the village, they shared an incredibly close bond. Since his parents were in the city, she took complete care of him. She woke him up, bathed him, dressed him, and walked with him to the village school, which was attached to a temple. While he studied the alphabet, she sat inside reading scriptures. On their way back, they would feed stale chapattis to the village dogs.
Answer: The turning point came when the author's parents called them to live in the City.
Answer: With the author busy with his own studies (and later going abroad), the grandmother accepted her loneliness quietly. She spent from sunrise to sunset sitting by her spinning wheel, praying continuously. Her only moment of true happiness in the city was in the afternoon when she would break bread into tiny pieces and feed hundreds of little sparrows in the courtyard.
Answer: When the grandmother died, her body was laid on the floor. Thousands of sparrows gathered and sat silently all over the courtyard around her body. They did not chirp at all. When the author's mother threw breadcrumbs to them, the birds completely ignored the food. Once the grandmother's body was carried away for cremation, the sparrows quietly flew away, showing their deep, silent mourning for the woman who loved them.
On the evening before she died, instead of praying, she gathered the neighborhood women, beat an old drum, and sang songs about warriors returning home to celebrate her grandson's return from abroad. The next morning, she fell ill. Realizing her end was near, she stopped talking to everyone to make up for the prayer she had missed the previous evening.
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