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‘The miserable plight of the old woman is a comment on the merciless society’. Examine.

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‘An Old Woman’ presents a vivid account of a tourist’s encounter with an old beggar woman who is eeking out an existence offering her services as a tourist guide for the Horseshoe Shrine situated on the barren hills of Jejuri, a popular town in Maharashtra. It refers to a legend centred around a horse-shoe shaped depression in a rock about Khandoba, the presiding deity at Jejuri. This is a legend that the true believer reveres and the sceptic doubts.

While the tourist is moving away from the place, he is accosted in the street by an old beggar woman who clutches his sleeve and tags along with him begging a fifty paise coin. Though he ignores her and moves on, the old woman ‘tightens her grip’ and ‘hobbles’ along and clings to him like a ‘burr’. Irritated by this persistence, the tourist turns around and faces her with an air of finality. The old woman’s matter of fact question “What else could an ‘old woman’ do to survive on these ‘wretched hills’?” strikes the narrator like a thunderbolt.

As he looks closely at her face, her eyes appear like ‘bullet holes’, through which he can see the sky. It seems to him as if he were looking into the very emptiness of her soul. He sees the cracks – wrinkles around her eyes and they seem to spread beyond her; he feels the hills crack, the temples crack and the sky falls around him as the shattering realisation dawns on him. With this realisation, the world as he knew it, seems to fall apart, disintegrating into so much rubble. But the old woman stands indestructible and alone. She is the reality that will not be hidden. The narrator’s world, at this moment, is reduced to the pile of small change in her hand – the sop that we pay to our conscience while actually neglecting our duty. What had appeared to the narrator as a ‘farce’ was, in reality, a compulsion for the old woman for her survival? There is nothing else she can do now at this stage of being abandoned.

The narrator experiences a revelation. The old beggar woman’s fragile physical appearance, her irritating and persistent appeals to the tourists for a fifty paise coin, the ageing barren hills and the horseshoe shrine together symbolize the fast vanishing remnants of our cultural heritage. The poet becomes aware of the cracks in the fabric of our society, our religious beliefs and our traditions. What are these cracks? They signify the moral degeneration our society has fallen prey to. Had we been following our traditions of family values, respect and care of elders, this old woman would have had a family, people to care for her and a home to go to. She would surely not have been on the streets dependent on the occasional kindness of visitors to the shrine nor face the humiliation of refusal, irritation, perhaps even harsh words. Thus, the miserable plight of the old woman as revealed through the poem is a comment on the merciless society.

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