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The portrait of a lady poem summary -Kushwant Singh English class11 prose section lesson no-1(NCERT) english - Deep-talks blog

Class11 English Prose section 

Lesson no-1

The portrait of a lady~Khushwant Singh  

Summary

In the lesson "The portrait of a lady" Khushwant Singh draws a pen picture of his grandmother. She was quite an old woman. Though people said that in her youth she had been pretty and beautiful it was rather hard to believe. His grandfather's picture hung above the mantlepiece in the drawing room. He looked at least a hundred years old.
         Khushwant Singh's grandmother was a short and fat lady and slightly bent. Her face was wrinkled. Though she was very old she looked the same at least for twenty years. She hobbled about the house in spotless white with one hand on her waist to balance her stoop. She held a rosary in the other hand always telling the beads. Her silver locks were scattered untidily over her pale face. She always prayed to herself.
       Khushwant Singh and his grandmother
were good friends. His parents left to live in the city leaving him under the care of his grandmother. Since then they had always been together. She would wake him up in the morning and got him ready for school. She would wash his wooden slate and plaster it with yellow chalk. She would take an earthen inkpot and a red pen and tie them in a bundle and hand it to him. In the breakfast, she would give him a thick stale chapatti with a little butter and sugar spread on it. While accompanying him to school she would carry several stale chapattis with her for the village dogs.
         His grandmother accompanied him to school because it was attached to the temple. There the priest of the temple taught the children alphabet and morning prayer. The children sat in rows on either side of the veranda and sang in unison the alphabet and the morning prayer. The grandmother sat inside the temple reading holy books. After school, they returned home together. The village dogs gathered at the temple and they would growl and fight for the chapattis thrown to them.
          At one time Khushwant and grandmother were taken to the city to live there permanently. It was a turning point in their friendship. His grandmother no longer accompanied him to school. There he went to an English school in a motor bus. As there were no dogs in the streets grandmother now took to feeding sparrows in the courtyard of their city house. Years passed by and the distance between grandmother and him widened. She hated western music and science. As there was no teaching about the God in school she was unhappy.
                When Khushwant Singh went up to university he was given a separate room for study. The common link between them was broken. The grandmother accepted her loneliness quietly and began spending most of her time sitting by her wheel spinning and reciting prayers. She relaxed for some time only in the afternoon. She took immense delight in feeding the sparrows. Hundreds of sparrows gathered there and they eat the pieces of bread thrown at them.
           When her grandchild decided to go abroad for higher studies, she was not at all upset. She came to the railway station to see him off.
        The grandchild returned home after five years. And his grandmother came to the railway station to receive him. Surprisingly she did not look a day older.
         In the evening the grandmother collected women in the neighbourhood, got an old drum and began singing for several hours. It was the first time she forgot to pray.
          The next morning she took to bed. She declared that her end was approaching nearer. She lay peacefully in her bed and started praying, the rosary was on her hand. Then her lips stopped moving and the rosary fell down from her lifeless finger. She was dead.
             She was laid on the ground and her body was covered with a red shroud. In the evening they went to her room with a wooden stretcher to take her to the cremation ground. There were thousands of sparrows sitting around her dead body. Surprisingly they made no noise and they also took no notice of the bread which was given by the author's mother. The dead body was carried away. Next morning the sweeper swept the bread crumbs into the dustbin.
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