With each birth, however, the family has a little less to eat. In quick succession, Rukmani bears five sons.

He treats her infertility without Nathan's knowledge. Troubled that she cannot produce a son for Nathan, Rukmani visits her ill mother and there meets Kenny, a foreign doctor. During the next six years, Rukmani does not conceive. Within a year they have a beautiful daughter, Ira, and good rice harvests. Nathan treats her with kindness and respect as she learns the chores her new life requires. The educated daughter of a village headman fallen on hard times, she is married at the age of 12 to Nathan, a tenant farmer. Rukmani, an old woman, reflects on her life. Each time her situation worsens, she endures quietly, holding on to the hope that things will soon be better. Throughout the novel, Rukmani is faced with struggle after struggle with no indication that her circumstances will improve. At the end, Rukmani goes to live with her youngest son, now a doctor at the hospital Kenny has built. Although Rukmani's fatalistic attitude toward hardship exasperates him, he feels compassion for her and helps her when he can. Kennington, or 'Kenny', an itinerant English doctor, is an important presence in the novel. Although matters continue to worsen, they quietly resign themselves to ever-increasing hardships-flood, famine, even death-and cling to their hopes for a better future.ĭr.

As the tannery grows larger and more prosperous, Rukmani and Nathan struggle to feed their children and to pay the rent on the land that gives them life. When a large tannery is built in the neighboring village, it begins insidiously destroying their lives. Rukmani and Nathan love each other and their marriage begins in relative peace and plenty. 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.' In the novel, Rukmani comments, 'Change I had known before, and it had been gradual. Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live. An excerpt from the poem is the epigraph of the novel: The title of the novel is taken from the 1825 poem ' Work Without Hope', by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The story is told in the first person by Rukmani, beginning from her arranged marriage to Nathan at the age of 12 to his death many years later. The book is set in India during a period of intense urban development and is the chronicle of the marriage between Rukmani, youngest daughter of a village headman, and Nathan, a tenant farmer. Nectar in a Sieve is a 1954 novel by Kamala Markandaya.

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya