Summary
Narrated in the first person by the novel’s protagonist, Rukmani, Nectar In A Sieve opens with Rukmani commenting on how she sometimes thinks that her husband is with her again, but the illusion vanishes when she wakes up. A widow, Rukmani lives with her son, her daughter, and Puli, a child she adopted who has lost his fingers from a disease. In the distance on a clear day, Rukmani can see the large white building where her son Selvam works.
Rukmani goes back in her memory. As a child, the youngest of four sisters, Rukmani believes she will have a grand wedding as a daughter of the village headman. However, her brother calls her a fool for not knowing that the Collector, who comes to the village yearly, has the real power. Rukmani is married at twelve to a tenant farmer “poor in everything but in love and care.” After getting married, she travels six hours by cattle-drawn cart to her husband Nathan’s farm, settling in one of his mud-and-thatch huts.
One day, Rukmani washes her garments in the brook and meets women neighbors; she learns from Kali that Nathan built Rukmani’s hut by hand and refused any help. Rukmani is proud. Though they don’t own their land, Rukmani appreciates her husband’s devotion to her and enjoys going about her work. She gets to know others in the little town. She learns from Kali and Janaki how to milk the goat, plant seed, hull rice, and churn butter from milk. Despite her lack of knowledge, she grows successful pumpkins, beans, brinjals (eggplants), sweet potatoes, and chilies.
While Kunthi’s husband goes to get a midwife, Rukmani tries to help with the difficult labor, several months pregnant herself. She spends all day attending to Kunthi, as the midwife never arrives. For the first time, she sees Nathan angry when she gets home; he is cross at her for not taking care of herself that day. After that, she leaves more of the farm work to him and takes up writing again. Her father insisted she learn to read and write, despite her mother’s insistence that she herself got along fine being illiterate. Nathan doesn’t forbid her from writing despite not being able to write his own name.
Rukmani’s first child is born a month early, but is healthy. She is dismayed that her firstborn is not a boy. Rukmani names her daughter Irawaddy, soon shortened to Ira. Nathan is also disappointed she isn’t a boy, only a girl who will take with her a dowry, but he takes a shine to her when she starts calling him “Apa.” Rukmani returns to her farm work while Ira gives the couple no trouble, sitting happily in the sun while her parents repair patches of thatch ruined in monsoon rains.
As years pass, Rukmani and Nathan worry that Ira will be their only child. When Ira is six, Rukmani’s mother begins dying of consumption. Kennington (Kenny), a white doctor, attends to her. Rukmani stares when she meets him because she has never seen a white person before. When her mother dies, Rukmani confesses to Kenny that she grieves not only for her mother but because she can’t seem to bear sons. Kenny offers to help her. Rukmani goes to the doctor, and without saying what Kenny does, Rukmani comments that she soon has a first son, followed by four more. She doesn’t tell her husband that she has put herself in the “hands of a foreigner.”
With six children to feed, Rukmani starts selling some of her vegetables to a kind local woman called Old Granny. One day, Biswas, a money lender Rukmani dislikes, offers double what Granny can pay. Reluctant but needing the money, Rukmani sells most of her crop every week to him, reserving a few items for Granny.
Change comes “blasting its way” into Rukmani’s village when a tannery is constructed by about fifty men who bring bricks shaped and fired in neighboring villages. Everyone in the village gathers to watch the spectacle of the strangers building the structure. Led by a red-faced white man, the workers build huts to live in around the tannery, their decent wage of two rupees a day meaning they have money to spend at the market. Prices for locals go up. Then they leave, the building complete, their huts empty. Rukmani is angry that the men have invaded their maidan (a field akin to a town square), and is happy to see them gone. However, new tannery workers arrive and occupy the huts. The arrival coincides with Ira turning thirteen and attracting attention for her beauty. Kali warns Nathan and Rukmani to be “careful” with her, otherwise a young man might get to her before she is married.
One day Rukmani is collecting dung, used for fuel and for filling cracks in huts, out in the field. Kenny appears unexpectedly. She bends to kiss his shoed feet, calling him her benefactor and lord. She brings him into the house to meet the children, worrying that he will comment to her husband about his involvement in her fertility. But Kenny says nothing, and makes a habit of visiting the family often. He never speaks of himself or his family and Rukmani doesn’t ask about his private life, worried she’ll offend him. She only knows he works healing men at the tannery, and then disappears for days or years at a time. He starts sending or bringing cow’s milk when he learns Rukmani is still breastfeeding her three-year-old because she can’t afford other milk for him.
When Ira is fourteen, Rukmani asks Old Granny to be a go-between for finding a suitable husband. Ira comes with a dowry of one hundred rupees and is “a maiden like a flower.” Granny believes her beauty will make up for the small dowry. Eventually Old Granny finds a suitable match, a man who lives ten villages away. On her wedding day, Ira wears the same red sari Rukmani wore when she married Nathan. The small ceremony is full of cheer and merriment as people enjoy the stores of food Rukmani has been secreting away in preparation for the big day. Rukmani lies awake that night thinking about how Ira, for the first time, is not sleeping under their roof.
Analysis
In the opening paragraphs of Nectar In A Sieve, Kamala Markandaya introduces the reader to Rukmani, the novel’s protagonist and narrator. Markandaya subtly establishes the major theme of grief as Rukmani comments on her habit of dreaming that her deceased husband, Nathan, is still with her. In reality, she is an older woman, now living with her adult daughter and adult son, and a child she has recently adopted. From this present-day frame, Rukmani looks back on what brought her to this place in her life.
The major themes of poverty, gender roles, and resignation to suffering arise as Rukmani comments on the arranged marriage she had at age twelve. Following her family’s Hindu tradition, Rukmani doesn’t think it is strange that she was a child bride to an older man who was essentially a stranger to her family and community, living in another village far away. Rukmani, as a girl, is raised to believe that it is her destiny to be set up with a husband and establish a life with him. She also resigns herself to the pain of consummating her marriage before she is sexually mature, taking this too as merely a necessary component of the ritual she, as a woman, must go through.
Because Nathan is far poorer than Rukmani’s father, living with him is a step down in standard of living; but Rukmani insists to her husband that she is fine with living in a mud hut in a farming village with no amenities. Rukmani shows perseverance and optimism as she adjusts to her dramatically different life as a farmer’s wife, taking instruction from local women about how to perform various duties and chores expected of her. Rukmani, however, stands apart from other villagers with her literacy. In the context of the novel, it is a rarity for a girl to have learned to read and write, and even Rukmani’s mother tried to dismiss the skill as unnecessary for a woman. Luckily for Rukmani, Nathan is more open-minded and isn’t threatened by his wife’s education.
The theme of motherhood enters the narrative when Rukmani gives birth to her first child. Markandaya also builds on the theme of gender roles by showing Rukmani’s and Nathan’s displeased reaction to the fact Ira is a girl. In the patriarchal social context depicted in the novel, a girl represents to a poor Hindu family only a drain on scarce resources as the family must save money for her dowry—a sum of money paid by a woman’s family to the woman’s husband upon marriage.
The theme of shame arises when Rukmani goes six years without being able to conceive another child. In the social context of the novel, there is pressure put on women to bear sons who can help earn money for the family. However, Rukmani is assisted in fulfilling her role as a wife by an English doctor who heals impoverished Indians. Ashamed both of her inability to conceive and of the fertility treatments she receives from Kenny, Rukmani omits to tell her husband the reason behind the sudden success of their procreative efforts.
Markandaya also introduces the theme of urbanization with the arrival of the tannery in Rukmani’s village. Constructed out of bricks, the building is a marvel to people who are used to living in simple structures made of built-up mud walls, thatched palm frond roofs, and cow dung (excrement)—all materials readily available in the natural environment. Used to her bucolic landscape and quaint way of life, Rukmani perceives the tannery to be the beginning of the end of their humble peasant way of life. However, her apprehension isn’t matched by many of the locals, who see the new industry as an opportunity to lift people out of extreme poverty.
