Chapter 1 — The Portrait of a Lady

'The Portrait of a Lady' is an autobiographical account by Khushwant Singh of his relationship with his grandmother. It follows three phases: their close friendship in the village, a growing distance during his city-school and university years, and her peaceful death the day after he returned from five years abroad.

The author is Khushwant Singh. The chapter is a first-person autobiographical prose piece included in the Class 11 NCERT English textbook Hornbill.

The narrator describes her as always short, fat, and slightly bent, with a criss-cross of wrinkles on her face and silver locks scattered over her pale face. She wore spotless white, hobbled with one hand on her waist, and her lips constantly moved in inaudible prayer. He says she was never pretty but 'was always beautiful' — 'like the winter landscape in the mountains, an expanse of pure white serenity'.

Phase 1 — Village childhood: they were constant companions; she woke him, walked him to the temple school, and fed stale chapattis to village dogs. Phase 2 — City school: moving to the city was a 'turning-point'; she could not go to his English school, was distressed by western science lessons, and disapproved of music, rarely talking to him after that. Phase 3 — University: when he got his own room, the 'common link of friendship was snapped'; she spent her days at the spinning-wheel, praying, and feeding sparrows in the courtyard.

Three reasons emerge from the text: she could no longer accompany him to school as she had done at the temple school; she could not help with his lessons and did not believe in English-medium western science (the law of gravity, Archimedes' Principle, etc.); and she was very disturbed when he announced music lessons, believing music had 'lewd associations' and was 'the monopoly of harlots and beggars'.

She rarely left her spinning-wheel. From sunrise to sunset she sat spinning and reciting prayers. Every afternoon she relaxed to feed sparrows in the verandah, breaking bread into little bits while hundreds of birds sat on her legs, shoulders, and head — 'the happiest half-hour of the day for her'.

That evening the grandmother did not pray — the only time the narrator had ever known this. Instead she collected the women of the neighbourhood, got an old drum, and for several hours thumped the 'sagging skins of the dilapidated drum' and sang of the home-coming of warriors. They had to persuade her to stop to avoid overstraining.

Thousands of sparrows gathered silently all over the verandah and into her room, right up to where she lay dead in the red shroud. When the narrator's mother broke bread the way the grandmother used to and threw it to them, the sparrows took no notice of the bread. When the family carried the grandmother's corpse out, the sparrows flew away quietly. Next morning the sweeper swept the untouched bread crumbs into the dustbin.

Simile is used memorably to describe the grandmother: 'She was like the winter landscape in the mountains, an expanse of pure white serenity breathing peace and contentment.' The text also uses the past perfect tense extensively to recount the remote past, and imagery of white and light (her white clothes, the 'blaze of golden light' at her death) reinforces themes of purity and peace.

The chapter explores the love and gradual separation between generations, the passage of time, and the unchanging dignity of old age and faith. The grandmother remains devoted to prayer and God throughout every phase of change, while the narrator's modern education creates an unbridgeable gap — yet the deep affection on both sides never disappears.

She is not sentimental. She comes to leave him at the railway station but does not talk or show any emotion. Her lips move in prayer, her fingers tell the beads of her rosary. She silently kisses his forehead, and that moist imprint is what he cherishes as 'perhaps the last sign of physical contact between us'.

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