Nectar in a Sieve Read online

  For a moment the words would not come; there was room in me only for feeling, very deep, very tender, for this man who felt for me.

  "You have taken nothing that was or would have been ours," I said at last. " Selvam never belonged to the land; he would never have been a farmer like his father. Do not torment yourself that he has turned from it and found his peace with you. We would not have had it otherwise."

  "Yet in your hearts you may have wished for something else."

  "If so, we have long since forgotten it. We would not wish for our son other than what he would wish for himself. He has chosen well."

  Another silence.

  "Do you never," he said, "think of your future? While you still have your strength and can plan?"

  "Naturally we think. But plan! How can we? It is not within our means."

  "Is there nothing you can do?" he asked. "Nothing at all?"

  "What can we do? There are many like ourselves who cannot provide for the future. You know it yourself."

  "Yes; I know. . . . I do not know why I asked; it was needless. There is no provision at all," he said, speaking half to himself, "neither for old nor young nor sick. They accept it; they have no option."

  He looked so stern that I grew alarmed.

  "Do not concern yourself," I said diffidently. "We are in God's hands."

  He looked up sharply, abruptly as if some chain of thought had been rudely broken: then he left me.

  Nathan was lying within. "What happened?" he asked, turning to face me. "You were a long time."

  "We were talking, that is all."

  "What about?"

  "You are as persistent as your grandson," I said, "but being older you should know better. We were talking about Selvam. Kenny thinks he will be good. He is shaping well."

  "I am glad. Tell me, did he not say anything about me?"

  "Only that you were not to worry and then you would soon be on your feet."

  "Worry? What about? Did he say?"

  "About anything. You are to rest."

  "Well," he said. "I can see you are guarding your tongue. Never mind; I can guess. But I shall be well soon -- you will see."

  A few days later he was up and to my astonishment for the next year or so he had no further trouble. Then one day when I was congratulating myself on his recovery the blow fell.

  I was out gathering cow dung, I did not see Sivaji come, and he left quickly as soon as he had delivered his message. I came with my basket half-laden and saw my husband sitting on the floor staring out before him, a dazed expression on his face and his lips trembling loosely. Sacrabani was crouched in a corner, hugging his knees in his arms and his pink, fascinated eyes halfcurious, half-terrified, fixed on his grandfather. I sent the child out and went to Nathan, thinking he had had another of his attacks, but he seemed to wake up when he heard my voice and waved me away.

  "I am all right."

  "Here -- drink this. You will feel better." I tipped the mud pot and filling his bowl handed it to him. He drank obediently as if to please me, spilling a little in the process. He was still shaking. I sat beside him waiting.

  "The land is to be sold," he said. "We are to move. Sivaji came this morning. He says there is nothing to be done."

  I could not take it in. I gaped at him unbelieving. He nodded as if to emphasize that what he had said was so.

  "The tannery owners are buying the land. They pay good prices."

  The tannery! That word brought instant understanding. Realisation came like a rocket, swift and fiery.

  "They can't," I remember saying helplessly. "It is our land; we have been here thirty years."

  Nathan opened his hands, trembling, impotent.

  " Sivaji tells me there is a profit to be made. The landlord has completed the deal, papers have been signed. We must leave."

  Where can we go? I wanted to ask; but that was a question at present without an answer, and I refrained. Instead he put the question. "Where are we to go? What shall we do?"

  "How much time have we got?" I asked, preparing for the worst.

  "He does not expect us to leave at once. He has given us two weeks' time in which to go, which is lenient."

  A dozen lines of thought began and continued in my brain without ending; crossing, tangling, like threads on some meaningless warp. My head was whirling. I must sit down and think, I said to myself, but not now, later. Follow each thought to its conclusion, decide what we are to do for ourselves, plan as Kenny said for ourselves and our children. This present chaos is madness.

  "I do not know why they need this bit of land," I said, in the manner of people who must say something for the sake of the sanity which speech can bring.

  "Certainly they cannot build on it; it is a swamp, meant only for rice-growing."

  Nathan shrugged. "Who knows. Perhaps they can drain it, tighten the soil; they have resources beyond our imagining. Or perhaps they wish to grow rice for their own men."

  He too was speaking like me, automatically, for the sake of speaking. I made another effort, a pitiful one, for the words I said were the last to bring comfort.

  "At least we shall not have much to carry. The granary is almost empty."

  He nodded in dull agreement. Then once again we relapsed into silence, sunk in our own thoughts.

  Somehow I had always felt the tannery would eventually be our undoing. I had known it since the day the carts had come with their loads of bricks and noisy dusty men, staining the clear soft greens that had once coloured our village and cleaving its cool silences with clamour. Since then it had spread like weeds in an untended garden, strangling whatever life grew in its way. It had changed the face of our village beyond recognition and altered the lives of its inhabitants in a myriad ways. Some -- a few -- had been raised up; many others cast down, lost in its clutches. And because it grew and flourished it got the power that money brings, so that to attempt to withstand it was like trying to stop the onward rush of the great juggernaut. Well, I suppose there were some families who saw in it hope for their sons: indeed, many still depended on such earnings, and if my sons had still been there my thoughts might have been different; but for us as we were now, and others like us, there could be only resignation and resentment. There had been a time when we, too, had benefited -- those days seemed very remote now, almost belonging to another life -- but we had lost more than we had gained or could ever regain. Ira had ruined herself at the hands of the throngs that the tannery attracted. None but these would have laid hands on her, even at her bidding. My sons had left because it frowned on them; one of them had been destroyed by its ruthlessness. And there were others its touch had scathed. Janaki and her family, the hapless chakkli Kannan, Kunthi even. . . .

  Yet I must be honest, as my husband and sons have always been: the tannery cannot be blamed for every misfortune we suffered. Tannery or not, the land might have been taken from us. It had never belonged to us, we had never prospered to the extent where we could buy, and Nathan, himself the son of a landless man, had inherited nothing. And whatever extraneous influence the tannery may have exercised, the calamities of the land belong to it alone, born of wind and rain and weather, immensities not to be tempered by man or his creations. To those who live by the land there must always come times of hardship, of fear and of hunger, even as there are years of plenty. This is one of the truths of our existence as those who live by the land know: that sometimes we eat and sometimes we starve. We live by our labours from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune.

  Still, while there was land there was hope. Nothing now, nothing whatever. My being was full of the husks of despair, dry, lifeless. I went into the hut and looked about me. Brown mud walls that had crumbled many a time and been rebuilt many a time. Coconut thatching, some of it still
part of the old palm lightning had destroyed, as I could tell from the colour. Bare, beaten floor of baked mud, hardened with dung-wash. This home my husband had built for me with his own hands in the time he was waiting for me; brought me to it with a pride which I, used to better living, had so very nearly crushed. In it we had lain together, and our children had been born. This hut with all its memories was to be taken from us, for it stood on land that belonged to another. And the land itself by which we lived. It is a cruel thing, I thought. They do not know what they do to us.

  When Selvam came home that night from his studies my husband broke the news to him. I do not know what I expected -- indignation, anger, perhaps sorrow: but he betrayed no emotion. He put the books he was carrying in the wooden crate he had made, then he sat down, still keeping his own counsel; the wavering light from the wick in its saucer of oil fell on his face, sombre and serious as it always was in repose. Well, I thought, this cannot affect the life he has chosen and so he is tranquil; and then I reminded myself that he was ever like this, that he seldom spoke until he had paused to reflect, and I felt ashamed.

  In the brooding silence I heard Nathan shift his position again, and I thought, Naturally he is impatient; he has good cause.

  "We have two weeks before we leave," I said. "They have agreed to let us stay till then."

  "You think that is good of them?" Selvam said, his voice hard and sharp like crystals. He lifted his eyes to mine, I saw they were black and smouldering as if some deep flame of anger or hatred burned in him. Nathan made reply for me.

  "It is better than being sent out at once, as others have been."

  Selvam turned on his father.

  "You have accepted it? You have made no protest?"

  "What option have I, my son! Naturally, I protested, but it has availed me nothing."

  "It is not just," Selvam said. "It is not right."

  "Yet there is no law against it," said Nathan wearily.

  "We may grieve, but there is no redress."

  "Where will you go?"

  "We must go to Murugan. He has a good job -- I am sure he will welcome his parents."

  "It is a long way. With respect, you are not as young or as fit as you were."

  "Yet the effort must be made," said Nathan, "for we cannot live except by the land, for I have no other knowledge or skill; and as you say I am getting on and for me it would be impossible to find another landlord.

  Who indeed would rent his land to such as I am, past hard labour and uncertain of paying what I owe?"

  His words pierced me, hardened though I was, realist as I wished to be.

  "Do not say these things," I said. "I cannot bear to hear them."

  "They are true."

  "Whether they are true or not," I cried, "I will not have you saying them."

  "I would not distress you," Nathan said quietly, "yet must we not face the truth so that we can make our decisions? Have I told you anything you do not know yourself?"

  No, I thought desolately, but I could not say it. Could not. I closed my eyes and felt his hands on my temples where the pulses beat, gently stroking, soothing me in the only way he could. He suffered for me, not so much for himself, and I likewise, so that although together there was more strength there was also more suffering, and if each had been alone the way might not have seemed so hard; yet I knew neither could have borne it alone. Thus confused, my mind turned this way and that, like a paper kite dipping to every current of air, unsure of its own meanings.

  At length in the midst of the blackness I heard Selvam speaking and I opened my eyes. He seemed to be struggling with himself, for the words did not come easily and the fierce inner battle he waged had brought the sweat out on his forehead and left his lips dry. He was addressing his father alone -- No doubt he dismisses me as an hysterical woman, I thought. He is not far wrong.

  "I can always return to the land," he was saying. "I am young and able-bodied . . . together we can rent another piece of land . . . live as we did."

  I saw my husband's eyes kindle, I saw in them, fearfully, the light of hope. You should not have said it, I cried silently to my son. It is too difficult for him, cruelly difficult. But already Nathan was shaking his head.

  "No, my son. I would not have it so." He spoke resolutely. "There are some things that cannot be sacrificed . . . besides I would never be happy. Certainly your mother would not let me rest," he added, smiling a little.

  "No; we must go. Ira and Sacrabani must come with us of course; there is nothing for them here."

  "I will stay," said Ira, whom we had supposed asleep, and she rose and came and knelt beside her father. "I will not be a burden to you. I am happy enough here, people are used to me and to my son. I cannot start a new life now."

  "If I can," said Nathan, "whose youth is only a memory now, why should not you, my child? You are very young; it will not be difficult for you."

  "I must think of my son," she replied.

  "How will you eat?" I said. "Where will you live?"

  "If she decides to stay," said Selvam, "she will be with me. I will look after her. I swear it."

  "And the child?"

  "And the child, of course."

  "Is it possible?" Nathan asked. "It is little enough you have for yourself."

  "Do I not know it?" said Selvam bitterly. "It is perpetual shame to me that I have nothing to offer my parents. Yet I promise they shall not go in need."

  If it had not been so late at night -- if we had been less tired and dispirited -- we might have argued with Ira, partly for her sake and partly for Selvam's. As it was we said no more -- not that night at any rate, although subsequently we had more discussions than I can recount -- accepting only that we were to go and that our children and grandchild were to stay.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER XXIV

  I TOOK down the mats on which we slept from the wall where they hung and rolled them up. Inside I placed the cloth bundle which contained two ollocks of rice, some chillies, tamarind and salt, and the two wooden bowls, Nathan's and mine, tying the ends of the rolled mats to make sure nothing fell out on the way. Most of the cooking vessels I had brought with me on my marriage had been sold to pay our debts, of the remainder I left two for Ira and the other two I put aside for ourselves. The grindstone, pestle and mortar were too heavy to take; in any case my daughter-in-law would be providing these. My cooking days are over, I thought a little sadly, and suddenly what I had formerly performed without thought, or even with impatience -- the gathering of fuel, and the blowing of the fire, and the waxing of the flames under the steaming pot, with all the business of smoke down the lungs and in the eyes -- acquired a sweet and piercing poignancy. There would be meals to cook on the journey, however, since we were travelling by bullock cart and expected to be on the road at least two days, and for these I took the hand-made bellows and six cakes of dung. Under the granary floor our money lay buried: three rupees of our own, three that Selvam had given us out of his earnings, and a ten-rupee note that Kenny had sent through Selvam. When everything was done I took out the money, counted it and tucked it in securely at my waist. Then we were ready.

  The morning of our departure comes. It is a still morning, hazy, dewy for it is yet early. The bullock cart lumbers up, the bells around the animals' necks jangling, they have tiny bells fixed to caps on the tips of their horns too, which tinkle as they move. The cart is piled high with bales of tightly packed skins, for we are passengers on a return journey, but there is room enough for two. We clamber on. Selvam hands us the two or three bundles we are taking with us which we hold on our laps until the carter tells us to stow them on top of the bales. We do so, carefully.

  Then it is time to go. Selvain steps back. Ira comes forward from the courtyard where she has been standing, she is holding her son by the hand. The three of them stand in line waiting to see us on our way. The carter flicks both bullocks with his whip, the animals strain forward, the cart gives a lurch. Nathan holds out his hands, our chil
dren bow their heads. Then we begin to move and the three of them come after us a little of the way, walking in the dust the wheels grind out of the earth, until the bullocks begin to trot and they fall back. The bullocks have found their own rhythm now, moving so that their hoofs strike the earth together and the yoke is borne steadily on their shoulders: we are travelling fast. The hut -- its inhabitants -- recedes behind us and yet in front of us, for we are sitting with our backs to the bullocks. Our beloved green fields fall away to a blur, the hut becomes a smudge on the horizon. Still we strain our eyes to pierce the reddish dust the wheels throw up. We are farther away with every turn of the wheels. I stare at them fascinated until the spokes begin to revolve backwards while the rim is inexorably borne forward. I feel dizzy, my throat is dry. I lean against my husband, he is already leaning on me, together we achieve a kind of comfort.