Portrait of Lady (poem)

Excerpts from the poem

Objects are lesson: from bowls, hairpins, brooches, you learn of forgotten lives. The stories say my grandmother was a fever tree: two birds sat on her branches, one pecking at a grape, the other singing an aria. What history’s bookkeepers do not show is the tremor down the spine she felt, the tendril of blood that coiled in her nose when the whistle of a train announced her husband’s return from a tour of duty. In the stories, she’s an actor, a pilgrim: shadow-boxing with a thunderstorm, she slips through brick walls, treads a theatre of scrubbed floors and ember beds. She leaves me a loaf of shortbread in the oven, a page of couplets in a script I cannot read and wrapped in a peel of green appleskin, a tea cup glazed with a Dutch windmill, the last one of the set. The urchin-cut waif in the vignette above is the child she was. Voyeur, clairvoyant, she stares in at windows, her head a gourd hollowed by the age she never reached in life, her hair a silver floss. Objects are lessons: the light seeps through the slats, sets off a shimmer on her lace. She’s crocheted the evening and its creatures: the silken thread that she pulls from her pattern knots tight around my neck.

Comments and criticism

The poem has received rave reviews since its first publication in 1997 in the book Emerging Voices and has since been widely anthologised. The poem has been frequently quoted in scholarly analysis of contemporary Indian English Poetry.