Commentary on Nectar In a Sieve Essay

Nectar in a Sieve Essay

Nature can, and often does, work against us. It can wreak havoc and wreck lives. Nature is like an untamable vicious animal; you never know what it will do next. There are so many ways in which nature can hurt us, and there is never any one time when one is safe. For example, whenever it snows, one can usually find a multitude of accidents and crashes on the roads. Another very good example would be hurricane Katrina. This was a massive hurricane that destroyed one of the bigger cities in the United States; New Orleans. There was nothing anybody could do to stop this hurricane and the devastation and flooding it caused. This particular hurricane forced almost the entire city of New Orleans to evacuate and relocate elsewhere. Things like this can happen at almost any given time without warning. In the book Nectar in a Sieve, Rukmani and her family must face several hardships caused by nature. These nature-caused hardships affect Rukmani even more severely than they would affect us because Ruku and her family are dependent on the land for everything. Some specific examples how nature makes life difficult for Rukmani and her family are her inability to birth, the monsoon, and the drought. Always when these things happen, Rukmani is able to carry on and persevere, even when she is faced with hardships we can barely imagine.

One hardship that nature has put upon Rukmani is unable to have another child until Kenny helps her. This can be extremely devastating and hard to deal with. For Ruku, all she wanted to do was have a child, actually have multiple children, and she had to deal with the anxiety for a few years that she might not be able to birth a child. She realizes that Dr. Kennington might be able to help her, but she is apprehensive about going to him, because he was a white foreigner.she is desperate for children however, and she ends up going to Kenny for help. She says At last I went to him again, begging him to do what he could (20). Rukmani shows tremendous perseverance, but most of all courage. She was so apprehensive of Kenny, the white man, and it took her a little while, but she finally came around and went to him for help. To her, white men are weird, strange creatures. She has never seen one before, so the courage it must have taken her to go to him and let him do what he did is incredible. Rukmani does this all to make her husband and her family happy.

The monsoon is one of the most devastating things that Ruku and her family experience during the novel. Rukmani and her husband are poor. They live off the land; her husband is a farmer who not only makes a living growing food, but also uses that same food to feed his family. When the monsoons come, it creates complete devastation. The monsoon rains last so long that Rukmani says It rained so hard, so long and so incessantly that the thought of no rain provoked a mild wonder. It was as if nothing had ever been except rain (39). The familys entire crop for the year is destroyed by the rains. This is everything Ruku and her family live for, their whole lives are focused around the crops and doing everything they can to have a plentiful harvest. It must be extremely frustrating to see all of your work go to waste. Nathan remarks It is a bad season. The rains have destroyed much of our work; there will be little eating this year (40). That Nathan can sort of accept this is incredible. He realizes that there is nothing that he can do about the ruined harvest, so he just gets o with his life. He does not try to change that which he cannot possible change, namely nature, and that is an incredibly wise thing to do. He is just going to work harder to ensure a better harvest next year. As strange as it sounds, we here in the U.S. could take some lessons from Ruku and her family; the way they accept the things they are not able to change, that way that the whole family comes together in times of need. These are things that are extremely admirable, and we can learn from them.

At another point in the novel, a drought occurs, and it almost destroys Ruku and her family. Again, just like when the monsoon happens, all the work that Nathan and Ruku have done in the paddy was useless. It has all gone to waste, and the amount of frustration this must cause is almost unimaginable. Because the harvest fails again, Ruku and Nathan do not have enough money to pay their dues to the landlord. The collector is a kind man, and he lets them pay only half. They sell almost everything they have, and are still not able to reach the agreed half. The money collector is kind, and he lets it go in return for a promise of extra next year. The conversation between Sivaji, the money collector, and Nathan shows the ruthlessness of these peoples lives; There is nothing Nathan repeated do you not see the crops are dead?

Yet such was the contract, else the land would not have been rented to you.

What would you have me do? The last harvest was meager, we have nothing saved.

I do not know. It is your concern. I must do as I bid.

What then?

The land is to be given to another if you cannot make payment (72). It is almost unimaginable, to be just booted off your land after you have lived there for so long. It was not even Nathans fault that there was no money. It all happened because of the drought. Once again however, Ruku and Nathan are able to come together and somehow persevere. It must have been extremely difficult for them, selling all of their possessions, but it was necessary for their survival.

We can see that Ruku leads an extremely difficult life, one that most of us would not survive in. She is able to survive a drought and a monsoon, and on top of that has dealt with the inability to have children. It would already be amazing if she lived through just one of those things, but she lives through all of them. Through perseverance and tenacity, she is able to come out of every disaster still alive, and with fresh energy to make things better. This is in some ways similar to disaster victims all over the world. A good example is the Hurricane Katrina victims. Both have to deal with incredible hardships and being ejected from their homes. Both had people they knew and loved die. It is almost impossible for us fortunate citizens of Mountain Lakes to actually imagine being in such a situation. And in this way, primitive as the society Ruku lives in, there is plenty that we can learn from them.