The portrait lady

 

                   Story

MY grandmother, like everybody’s grandmother, was an old

woman. She had been old and wrinkled for the twenty years

that I had known her. People said that she had once been

young and pretty and had even had a husband, but that was

hard to believe. My grandfather’s portrait hung above the

mantelpiece in the drawing room. He wore a big turban and

loose-fitting clothes. His long, white beard covered the best

part of his chest and he looked at least a hundred years old.

He did not look the sort of person who would have a wife or

children. He looked as if he could only have lots and lots of

grandchildren. As for my grandmother being young and pretty,

the thought was almost revolting. She often told us of the

games she used to play as a child. That seemed quite absurd

and undignified on her part and we treated it like the fables

of the Prophets she used to tell us.

She had always been short and fat and slightly bent. Her

face was a criss-cross of wrinkles running from everywhere to

everywhere. 

No, we were certain she had always been as we had known her. Old, so terribly old that she could not have grown

older, and had stayed at the same age for twenty years. She

could never have been pretty; but she was always beautiful.

She hobbled about the house in spotless white with one hand

resting on her waist to balance her stoop and the other telling

the beads of her rosary. Her silver locks were scattered untidily

ver her pale, puckered face, and her lips constantly moved in

inaudible prayer. Yes, she was beautiful. She was like the winter

landscape in the mountains, an expanse of pure white serenity

breathing peace and contentment.

My grandmother and I were good friends. My parents left me

with her when they went to live in the city and we were constantly

together. She used to wake me up in the morning and get me

ready for school. She said her morning prayer in a monotonous

sing-song while she bathed and dressed me in the hope that I

would listen and get to know it by heart; I listened because I

loved her voice but never bothered to learn it. Then she would

fetch my wooden slate which she had already washed and

plastered with yellow chalk, a tiny earthen ink-pot and a red

pen, tie them all in a bundle and hand it to me. After a breakfast

of a thick, stale chapatti with a little butter and sugar spread on

it, we went to school. She carried several stale chapattis with

her for the village dogs.

My grandmother always went to school with me because

the school was attached to the temple. The priest taught us

the alphabet and the morning prayer. While the children sat in

rows on either side of the verandah singing the alphabet or the

prayer in a chorus, my grandmother sat inside reading the

scriptures. When we had both finished, we would walk back

together. This time the village dogs would meet us at the temple

door. They followed us to our home growling and fighting with

each other for the chapattis we threw to them.

When my parents were comfortably settled in the city, they

sent for us. That was a turning-point in our friendship. Although

we shared the same room, my grandmother no longer came to

school with me. I used to go to an English school in a motor

bus. There were no dogs in the streets and she took to feeding

sparrows in the courtyard of our city house.

As the years rolled by we saw less of each other. For some

time she continued to wake me up and get me ready for school.

When I came back she would ask me what the teacher had

taught me. I would tell her English words and little things of

western science and learning, the law of gravity, Archimedes’

Principle, the world being round, etc. This made her unhappy.

She could not help me with my lessons. She did not believe in

the things they taught at the English school and was distressed

that there was no teaching about God and the scriptures. One

day I announced that we were being given music lessons. She

was very disturbed. To her music had lewd associations. It was

the monopoly of harlots and beggars and not meant for gentlefolk.

She said nothing but her silence meant disapproval. She rarely

talked to me after that.

When I went up to University, I was given a room of my own.

The common link of friendship was snapped. My grandmother

accepted her seclusion with resignation. She rarely left her

spinning-wheel to talk to anyone. From sunrise to sunset she

sat by her wheel spinning and reciting prayers. Only in the

afternoon she relaxed for a while to feed the sparrows. While

she sat in the verandah breaking the bread into little bits,

hundreds of little birds collected round her creating a veritable

bedlam of chirrupings. Some came and perched on her legs,

others on her shoulders. Some even sat on her head. She smiled

but never shooed them away. It used to be the happiest half￾hour of the day for her.

When I decided to go abroad for further studies, I was sure

my grandmother would be upset. I would be away for five years,

and at her age one could never tell. But my grandmother could.

She was not even sentimental. She came to leave me at the

railway station but did not talk or show any emotion. Her lips

moved in prayer, her mind was lost in prayer. Her fingers were

busy telling the beads of her rosary. Silently she kissed my

forehead, and when I left I cherished the moist imprint as perhaps

the last sign of physical contact between us.

But that was not so. After five years I came back home and

was met by her at the station. She did not look a day older. She

still had no time for words, and while she clasped me in her

arms I could hear her reciting her prayers. Even on the first day

of my arrival, her happiest moments were with her sparrows

whom she fed longer and with frivolous rebukes.

In the evening a change came over her. She did not pray.

She collected the women of the neighbourhood, got an old drum

and started to sing. For several hours she thumped the sagging skins of the dilapidated drum and sang of the home-coming

of warriors. We had to persuade her to stop to avoid

overstraining. That was the first time since I had known her

that she did not pray.

The next morning she was taken ill. It was a mild fever and

the doctor told us that it would go. But my grandmother thought

differently. She told us that her end was near. She said that,

since only a few hours before the close of the last chapter of her

life she had omitted to pray, she was not going to waste any

more time talking to us.

We protested. But she ignored our protests. She lay peacefully

in bed praying and telling her beads. Even before we could

suspect, her lips stopped moving and the rosary fell from her

lifeless fingers. A peaceful pallor spread on her face and we knew

that she was dead.

We lifted her off the bed and, as is customary, laid her on

the ground and covered her with a red shroud. After a few hours

of mourning we left her alone to make arrangements for her

funeral. In the evening we went to her room with a crude stretcher

to take her to be cremated. The sun was setting and had lit her

room and verandah with a blaze of golden light. We stopped

half-way in the courtyard. All over the verandah and in her room

right up to where she lay dead and stiff wrapped in the red

shroud, thousands of sparrows sat scattered on the floor. There

was no chirruping. We felt sorry for the birds and my mother

fetched some bread for them. She broke it into little crumbs,

the way my grandmother used to, and threw it to them. The

sparrows took no notice of the bread. When we carried my

grandmother’s corpse off, they flew away quietly. Next morning

the sweeper swept the bread crumbs into the dustbin.