Summary
In the morning, the couple leaves the temple. Nathan wants to spend some money on fresh fried bread, but Rukmani discovers her silver coins are gone. They return to the temple and confirm they have been pickpocketed. They spend most of the day wandering the streets, being sent this way and that in search of their son’s home. Eventually they learn from a starving beggar child that there are three or four streets called Koil. The child, Puli, offers to bring them to Birla, the doctor who employs Murugan, for a small fee. Rukmani sees a disease has taken away the impudent but charming boy’s fingers to the knuckles.
At the house of the doctor (to their surprise, a woman wearing trousers), Rukmani and Nathan learn that Murugan left two years ago to work for the Collector on Chamundi Hill. She sees the old couple are faint and brings them inside the servants’ quarters to eat something before they seek their son. The servants are more than happy to serve generous portions of rice and dhal to the couple. Rukmani is unnerved to use a latrine for the first time; she is used to covering her excrement with dirt. Nathan says this is how they live in the city and she’ll have to get used to it.
The Collector’s house is taller than the trees around it and so white it appears freshly painted. Guards surround the walled property. One assumes the couple are beggars, but he changes attitude when Rukmani says she is Murugan’s mother. The guard leads them to his wife, Ammu, who lives in the servants’ quarters. She has young children around her. She informs them that she doesn’t know where he is and that he left her two years earlier. Rukmani sees that the girl is thin, as are the grandchildren. There is no way Nathan and Rukmani could also live in the tiny room.
Ammu cleans and sweeps the house for fifteen rupees a month and a place to live. She says the baby on her hip is not their grandchild. After her shift in the house, Ammu returns; she cooks a meal for her children, Rukmani, and Nathan. They say they will return to their village. Ammu says she can take care of herself and her children. Rukmani is upset to learn that women and gambling were the vices that drew Murugan away from his parental duty. On the way out of the property, a guard shouts at Rukmani and Nathan for leaving through the front gate, not the back gate designated for servants.
Rukmani and Nathan become regulars at the temple in the city. They calculate that they will need to earn ten rupees to afford the trip back to the village. Rukmani tries her luck reading people’s letters for one anna by the entrance to the bizarre. Passersby mock the idea that a woman and a villager can read or write. Time passes with her earning two annas a day. One day she runs into Puli, who demands the payment they owe him for leading them to the doctor’s house. They make do with sharing their meal from the temple. Puli sleeps next to them, saying he has no parent or guardian to worry about him.
In the morning, Puli tells the couple they can make better money breaking rocks at the stone quarry, where you are paid according to the sacks of rock you break. He would work there himself, but without full fingers he can’t hold the hammer. He leads them to the quarry, where men break larger boulders and women and children chip away at smaller rocks. Great blasts shake the ground and send stones scattering in the air. Puli explains that you have to break the rocks to the right size, about the size of a fist. Rukmani and Nathan find it difficult without hammers, only other rocks to do the work. They work until dark, then exchange their sack of rocks for eight annas. Rukmani and Nathan are delighted.
The couple continue working at the quarry and sleeping at the temple. Puli always accompanies them. They entrust their earnings to Puli, knowing, having been pickpocketed, that the money is safer with him. They calculate that they can afford to return in forty days. Nathan invites Puli to join, but he says he will not starve with them in the village. He asks what they intend to do, not owning any land. Nathan says Puli doesn’t understand. Puli insists that once they are gone, he’ll go back to his street urchin ways, surviving as he did before.
The couple watches their savings grow. One day Rukmani and Puli go to the market without Nathan and treat themselves to pancakes, rice cakes, and, for two annas, a little wheeled drummer toy on a string for Puli. Rukmani buys a second, intending to give it to Sacrabani. Nathan comes down with a fever that persists through a week of breaking rocks during monsoon rain.
While Rukmani exchanges their not-full sack of rocks for six annas, Nathan falls in the mud. People gather. Eventually, two men lift him up and carry him. Rukmani tastes her tears and rainwater on her lips. At the temple, he is laid on the floor, caked in mud. Rukmani kneels with him and he asks her to hold him as he dies. He says he is at peace and she need not grieve. They agree they have been happy together. The light leaves his eyes.
In the last chapter of Nectar In A Sieve, Rukmani returns to the village with Puli. She weeps for happiness to be back in her village. Selvam rushes out of a building, still being constructed, and says, “Thank God.” Ira joins them. Rukmani says she and Nathan adopted Puli. Ira takes Puli by the hand, offering to show him where he can rest while she makes the rice. Selvam tells his mother not to worry; they will manage. There is a silence. Selvam tells her that she doesn’t need to talk of Nathan’s death, unless she must. Rukmani says, “It was a gentle passing. I will tell you later.”
Analysis
Markandaya continues building on the themes of urbanization and poverty with Nathan’s and Rukmani’s alienating introduction to the unnamed big city in which their son Murugan supposedly lives. Having been unable to find him the first night, the poor couple seeks free food and shelter from a charitable temple, only to be shamed by the people there for seemingly trying to cheat the system and get more food than others.
The couple’s poverty worsens further when they wake up to discover that not only have they lost their bundles of possessions, someone has picked their pocket for the last of their cash while they slept. Ashamed to be turning up without anything to contribute to the household, Rukmani and Nathan journey to the house of Murugan’s employer, who is a Collector—an official appointed by the British to oversee a jurisdiction and collect taxes.
The colonial official lives in opulence that puts the couple to shame, and his guards mistake them for beggars. In an instance of situational irony, Rukmani and Nathan learn from Murugan’s wife that their son abandoned her and his child two years earlier. In another portrait of unconventional motherhood, Markandaya establishes that Ammu supports herself and her two children alone, working as a cleaner in the Collector’s home. Ammu also hints that she engages in sex work as needed, which is how she became pregnant with her second child, who is not Murugan’s.
Set adrift in the daunting city, Rukmani and Nathan find themselves penniless and homeless, relying on the temple for a daily meal and a place to sleep. Having spent their working lives as farmers, the couple have few marketable skills in an urban context. Puli, a street-smart beggar boy who has lost his fingers to an unspecified disease, helpfully gets them set up at a quarry where they can break rocks alongside other poor people. Despite the degrading, back-breaking labor, the couple is delighted by the meager amount of money they earn because it means they will soon be able to return to the village they never should have left.
The novel reaches its climax when Nathan falls ill just as he and Rukmani have saved enough for their return journey. In an undignified death, Nathan collapses in the mud after exhausting himself at the quarry because he was so determined to escape the unforgiving city. In this way, Markandaya shows how a rapidly urbanizing India has no place for humble people like Nathan and Rukmani, whose skills and dignity are completely ignored with the establishment of new industries and ways of living.
Markandaya returns to the theme of grief in the final chapter. Upon arriving at her village with Puli, who she has adopted, Rukmani makes an implicit agreement with Selvam and Ira to remain optimistic despite the poverty and adversity they continue to face. With any luck, Selvam will manage to support the family from working at Kenny’s newly established hospital—the “white building” Rukmani mentions in the opening frame of the novel. With the closing line, “I will tell you later,” Markandaya connects the end and beginning of the book by establishing Rukmani’s reason for narrating the story we have just read.
