Chapter 1 Solutions — The Portrait of a Lady

The relationship between the author and his grandmother passed through three distinct phases before he went abroad.

Phase 1 — Village years: In the village, they shared a very close bond. The grandmother woke the author up every morning, got him ready, and accompanied him to the school attached to the temple. She carried chapattis for the village dogs on the way. They spent the day together and walked home together.

Phase 2 — City school years: When the family moved to the city, the grandmother could no longer accompany the author to his English school. She continued to wake him up and ask about his lessons, but she was troubled by the absence of religious teaching. She disapproved of music lessons and gradually grew more distant. She spent her time feeding sparrows in the courtyard.

Phase 3 — University years: When the author moved into his own room at university, their common link was completely severed. The grandmother accepted her seclusion without complaint and spent her days spinning and reciting prayers, relaxing only in the afternoon to feed the sparrows.

The author, Khushwant Singh, is a Punjabi writer, and the story is set in a Punjabi household in pre-partition India. The grandmother is depicted as a deeply traditional woman who reads scriptures, sings religious songs, and has no connection with English education. She is also shown to be troubled by the English-medium city school and cannot help the author with his lessons.

It is reasonable to infer that the author and his grandmother communicated in Punjabi, their shared mother tongue. This would have been the natural language of their home, their prayers, and the conversations about school and daily life. The grandmother's recitation of prayers, her singing of songs about warriors' homecomings, and her reading of scriptures would all have been in Punjabi or a related devotional language.

'She took to feeding sparrows in the courtyard of our city house.' — Here 'took to' means she began feeding the sparrows as a regular habit after the family moved to the city. It was a new daily activity she adopted and continued.

'The next morning she was taken ill.' — Here 'taken ill' means she suddenly became ill. The phrasing suggests the illness came upon her unexpectedly, which fits the narrative: the family and the doctor did not think it was serious, but the grandmother sensed it was the end.