Change I had known before, and it had been gradual. My father had been headman once, a person of consequence in our village: I had lived to see him relinquish this importance, but the alteration was so slow that we hardly knew when it came. I had seen both my parents sink into old age and death, and here too there was no violence. But the change that now came into my life, into all our lives, blasting its way into our village, seemed wrought in the twinkling of an eye.
Early in the novel, Rukmani comments on how much of the change she knew when young was gradual change. For example, her parents gradually grew old before dying, like slowly sinking ships; before that, her father's place of prominence as headman of their village was hollowed out by the incursion of modern, colonial authority. Rukmani juxtaposes this type of change, which happens slowly enough that one gets used to it, with the violent suddenness of a tannery being built in the heart of the village. The passage is significant because it speaks to the major theme of industrialization. As tenant farmers, Rukmani and her neighbors have only known the humble lives of peasants. With the tannery comes a threat to their simple way of life. Beyond bringing male laborers and their vices, the tannery draws away children who turn away from farming. Eventually, the tannery owners will buy up the farmland around the village, subsuming the land and displacing the original community.
It is true, one gets used to anything. I had got used to the noise and the smell of the tannery; they no longer affected me. I had seen the slow, calm beauty of our village wilt in the blast from the town, and I grieved no more; so now I accepted the future and Ira's lot in it, and thrust it from me.
When Ira's husband "returns" Ira to her family, saying he needs a wife who can bear him sons, Rukmani worries about Ira's future. In her cultural context, an unmarried woman with no husband to support her is liable to turn out like Old Granny, living on the street and barely scraping by on meager, haphazard earnings. Sensing Rukmani's concern, Old Granny assures Rukmani that one gets used to being poor and alone. The elderly homeless woman's words are little comfort to Rukmani at first, but she reflects in this passage that she herself had gotten used to many unpleasant things. From this lesson, she stops worrying so much about her daughter's fate, accepting it is another thing she cannot influence.
My husband is behind me. He supports me a little with his arm and we go home. And wait. At last they come, long after dusk, with the faces of angered men, though neither is yet twenty.
"What has happened?" we ask with trepidation. They are still our sons, but suddenly they have outgrown us. "Trouble," they say. "We asked for more money and they took from us our eating time." I bring out some dried fish and rice cakes. They are ravenous.
"More money," I say, "What for? Do they not pay you well already?"
"What for?" one echoes. "Why, to eat our fill, and to marry, and for the sons we shall beget." And the other says, "No, it is not enough."
I do not know what reply to make—these men are strangers. Nathan says we do not understand, we must not interfere: he takes my hand and draws me away.
Although she never likes that the tannery has moved into her village, Rukmani enjoys the elevated quality of life that comes from the wages two of her sons earn working there. One day, however, Nathan and Rukmani try to meet their sons on their lunch break to discover that the tannery is under lockdown. Her sons are not allowed to leave work until that evening. They explain that their bosses punished the workers because they asked for higher wages. The idea that a worker could ask for a better wage astounds Rukmani, and her sons become "strangers" to her. The exchange is significant because it shows how the literate youth in the village have a better understanding of the exploitative conditions under which they live and work. Influenced by foreign notions of collective action, the sons organize fellow tannery workers into a strike to show how the tannery owners depend on their labor.
"The people will never learn," Arjun said savagely. "They will rot before they do."
People will never learn! Kenny had said it, and I had not understood, now here were my own sons saying the same thing, and still I did not understand. What was it we had to learn? To fight against tremendous odds? What was the use? One only lost the little one had. Of what use to fight when the conclusion is known? I asked myself, and got no answer.
When the tannery workers' walkout ends with men returning to work having won nothing, Arjun comments that peasants like them will die before they learn the necessity of defending their human rights. Rukmani realizes she has heard Kenny, the English doctor, say the same thing in exasperation. The concept of not adhering to the class system and refusing to obey one's boss or husband is completely foreign to a person of Rukmani's age and upbringing. In this passage, Rukmani's inner monologue outlines her fatalistic belief that one has no choice but to suffer in silence; to revolt against unjust working or living conditions would only risk losing what little one has. She cannot fathom that there is anything to gain through civil disobedience.
"Yet, since you have asked, I will tell you," he said. "I have the usual encumbrances that men have—wife, children, home—that would have put chains about me, but I resisted, and so I am alone. As for coming and going, I do as I please, for am I not my own master? I work among you when my spirit wills it. . . . I go when I am tired of your follies and stupidities, your eternal, shameful poverty. I can only take you people," he said, "in small doses."
I was silent, taking no offence. Barbed words, but what matter from one so gentle? Harsh talk from one in whom the springs of tenderness gushed abundant, as I knew.
"I told you what I did, in a moment of lunacy," he said. "I do not want it repeated."
Early in the novel, Rukmani develops a friendly relationship with Kennington (Kenny), a British doctor living in India. Out of fear of offending him, she never inquires about his private life. However, in this exchange, Rukmani finally asks him whether he is "alone." Kenny admits that he has a wife, children, and a house (presumably in England), but he makes a habit of leaving them for long periods while he heals people in India. He then leaves when he grows too frustrated with the foolishness of Rukmani's people, who irk Kenny for being resigned to suffer in silence. Rukmani isn't offended to hear Kenny speak this way, as she senses the deeper feelings of care and affection he has in abundance. Ashamed of what he has admitted, Kenny swears Rukmani to secrecy, not wishing locals to know that he has abandoned his family in search of independence.
"Go from the land after all these years? Where would we go? How would we live?"
"It is your concern. I have my orders and must obey them."
Nathan stood there sweating and trembling.
"Give me time," he said at last humbly, "until the next crop. I will pay then, somehow."
"Pay half now," Sivaji said, "and I will try and do as you wish."
He spoke quickly, as if to give himself no time to repent of his offer, and hurried away even before my husband had assented.
"No easy job for him," I said. "He is answerable, even as we are."
"That is why he and his kind are employed," Nathan said bitterly. "To protect their overlords from such unpleasant tasks. Now the landlord can wring from us his moneys and care not for the misery he evokes, for indeed it would be difficult for any man to see another starve and his wife and children as well; or to enjoy the profits born of such travail."
In this exchange, Markandaya highlights the major theme of exploitation. As tenant farmers, Nathan and Rukmani lease their rice paddy from a distant landowner who sends Sivaji once a year to collect the rent. Although the family and every farmer in their area has lost their harvest to drought and now face starvation, Sivaji insists on collecting at least half the rent, threatening to evict the couple if they cannot pay. When Sivaji goes away, Nathan comments on the landowner's purposeful tactic of putting a middleman between himself and his tenants. By not seeing the misery and desperation of the farmers himself, the landowner is spared the pain of empathizing with the people he is exploiting. With this buffer, the overlords are free to enjoy their ill-gotten profits without thinking about what the poor peasants had to go through.
In that field, in the grain which had not yet begun to form, lay our future and our hope. Hope, and fear. Twin forces that tugged at us first in one direction and then in another, and which was the stronger no one could say. Of the latter we never spoke, but it was always with us. Fear, constant companion of the peasant. Hunger, ever at hand to jog his elbow should he relax. Despair, ready to engulf him should he falter. Fear; fear of the dark future; fear of the sharpness of hunger; fear of the blackness of death.
Once rain falls, bringing moisture back to the parched earth, Rukmani and Nathan plant their seedlings and watch their new crop grow. In this passage, Rukmani comments on the "twin forces" of hope and fear that peasant farmers are caught between. With nothing to guarantee their survival but what they grow, Rukmani and Nathan put all their hope in their rice crop, struggling to maintain faith that a bountiful harvest will come. Almost superstitiously, the couple never acknowledges the fear that haunts them, gnawing away at their optimism with the reminder that hunger and death are ready to claim them if their crops fail.
"Kunthi took it all, I swear it. She forced me, I did not want you to know."
Presently he was quiet.
"She has a strange power, this woman," I said, half to myself.
"Not strange," Nathan said. "I am the father of her sons. She would have told you, and I was weak."
Disbelief first; disillusionment; anger, reproach, pain. To find out, after so many years, in such a cruel way. Kali's words: "She has fire in her body, men burn before and after." My husband was of those men. He had known her not once but twice; he had gone back to give her a second son. And between, how many times, I thought, bleak of spirit, while her husband in his impotence and I in my innocence did nothing.
At the height of the famine, Rukmani carefully divides her last reserves of rice into portions, measuring out just enough for the family to eat enough to survive another three weeks. However, Kunthi arrives to extort Rukmani, taking half the reserves that she keeps in the granary. Rukmani checks on her other reserve, buried in the field, but finds that too has been pilfered. In this exchange, Rukmani learns from her husband, Nathan, that he gave those buried reserves to Kunthi because she was threatening to tell Rukmani that Nathan had fathered her sons. Upon learning that her husband has impregnated her nemesis, Rukmani is struck by immediate and complex feelings associated with grief. With this revelation, she discovers that her husband, despite his apparent care for and devotion to her, is just as susceptible to the allure of a woman like Kunthi as any other man.
Sometimes from sheer rebellion we ate grass, although it always resulted in stomach cramps and violent retching. For hunger is a curious thing: at first it is with you all the time, waking and sleeping and in your dreams, and your belly cries out insistently, and there is a gnawing and a pain as if your very vitals were being devoured, and you must stop it at any cost, and you buy a moment's respite even while you know and fear the sequel. Then the pain is no longer sharp but dull, and this too is with you always, so that you think of food many times a day and each time a terrible sickness assails you, and because you know this you try to avoid the thought, but you cannot, it is with you. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in drought, and it is now that the strength drains from your limbs, and you try to rise and find you cannot, or to swallow water and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost.
When a prolonged drought leads to the ruination of an entire year's rice harvest, Rukmani and her family must survive on water rice has been soaked in, and the occasional few grains of rice. In this passage, Rukmani comments on how the starving family resorts to eating grass during the famine despite the stomach pain and retching it induces. In vivid language, Rukmani describes the sensations and states of mind that come with true starvation. She also outlines the doubly torturous issue of starvation draining all of one's strength and hope, both of which are necessary to get her family through the famine as they tend to their new crops and try to maintain faith that they will eat again.
"Do not worry," Selvam said. "We shall manage."
There was a silence, I struggled to say what had to be said.
"Do not talk of it," he said tenderly, "unless you must."
"It was a gentle passing," I said. "I will tell you later."
In this exchange, taken from the last paragraphs of the novel, Rukmani returns to her village having adopted Puli and lost her husband. Her son Selvam assures her that despite their poverty, they will manage to survive. In the silence that follows, mother and son both sense the absence of Nathan. Selvam tells his mother that she doesn't need to upset herself by explaining how Nathan died. Rukmani makes do with simply saying that he died in a gentle way, and she will explain the details later. For readers of the first-person novel, this line returns us to the opening frame of the story, providing an occasion for Rukmani to work through her grief while narrating the story we have just read.
