"Portrait of a Lady" is an award winning poem by the renowned Indian English poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote. The poem won First Prize in the Seventh All India Poetry Competition conducted by The Poetry Society (India) in 1995. The poem brought the second major literary award for Hoskote, who also won the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award for life time achievement in 2005.
Contents
Excerpts from the poem
Objects are lesson: from bowls, hairpins, brooches,you learn of forgotten lives. The stories saymy grandmother was a fever tree:two birds sat on her branches, one peckingat a grape, the other singing an aria.What history’s bookkeepers do not showis the tremor down the spine she felt,the tendril of blood that coiled in her nosewhen the whistle of a train announcedher 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 floorsand ember beds. She leaves mea loaf of shortbread in the oven,a page of couplets in a script I cannot readand 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 aboveis the child she was. Voyeur, clairvoyant,she stares in at windows, her head a gourdhollowed by the age she never reachedin life, her hair a silver floss.Objects are lessons: the light seepsthrough the slats, sets off a shimmeron her lace. She’s crocheted the eveningand its creatures: the silken threadthat she pulls from her patternknots 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.
References
Portrait of Lady (poem) Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA