“While the sun shines on you and the fields are green and beautiful to the eye, and your husband sees beauty in you which no one has seen before, and you have a good store of grain laid away for hard times, a roof over you and a sweet stirring in your body, what more can a woman ask for?”
“Nectar in a Sieve” is a moving narrative about Rukmani, an Indian woman’s journey from the time she was given as a child bride to Nathan, a farmer from several villages away, until her twilight years. Her life is marked with hardship, worry, hunger, and ceaseless toil as her family contends with droughts, monsoons, and the onset of industrialization. Yet despite the extreme financial poverty that would mark her entire life, we are awed that such has not impoverished her spirit. When Kenny, the English doctor, expresses frustration over Rukmani and wisps of contempt lace his words, we start asking which of the two is truly suffering from poverty – Kenny who is working amidst people not of his race and whose wife has finally given up on him, on the one hand; or Rukmani, who notwithstanding being bludgeoned by life’s troubles manages to retain a pure ray of hope in her heart and the capacity to see and be thankful for whatever happiness there is.
“Nectar in a Sieve” is a moving narrative about Rukmani, an Indian woman’s journey from the time she was given as a child bride to Nathan, a farmer from several villages away, until her twilight years. Her life is marked with hardship, worry, hunger, and ceaseless toil as her family contends with droughts, monsoons, and the onset of industrialization. Yet despite the extreme financial poverty that would mark her entire life, we are awed that such has not impoverished her spirit. When Kenny, the English doctor, expresses frustration over Rukmani and wisps of contempt lace his words, we start asking which of the two is truly suffering from poverty – Kenny who is working amidst people not of his race and whose wife has finally given up on him, on the one hand; or Rukmani, who notwithstanding being bludgeoned by life’s troubles manages to retain a pure ray of hope in her heart and the capacity to see and be thankful for whatever happiness there is.
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