Grandmother in the village

In 'The Portrait of a Lady', Khushwant Singh remembers his grandmother. He finds it impossible to imagine that she was ever young. To him she had always been old: short, fat and slightly bent, her face criss-crossed with wrinkles. People said she had once been young and pretty, but that seemed as hard to believe as the idea that his grandfather, in the portrait on the wall, had once been a young man.

Yet he says she was not pretty, but always beautiful. She was always dressed in spotless white. She hobbled about the house, one hand resting on her waist to balance her stoop, while the fingers of the other hand told the beads of her rosary, her lips moving in silent prayer. Her calm, peaceful presence reminded him of a winter landscape in the mountains: white, serene and content.

When they lived in the village, the two were inseparable. His parents lived in the city, and she looked after him. Every morning she woke him, got him ready for school, and sang her morning prayer in a monotonous sing-song while she bathed and dressed him, hoping he would learn it by heart. She packed his wooden slate, his ink-pot and his pen, gave him a thick, stale chapatti with butter and sugar, and walked him to school.

The school was attached to the temple. While the priest taught the children the alphabet and the morning prayer, the grandmother sat inside the temple reading the scriptures. Then they walked home together. She always carried a bundle of stale chapattis for the village dogs, who followed them home, growling and fighting over the bread.

The margin of the book explains some expressions, such as 'a turning-point' (a moment when things change decisively) and 'frivolous rebukes' (scolding for no serious reason). Work out what other words mean from their context.