Books: The Short & Simple Annals

NECTAR IN A SIEVE (248 pp.)—Kamala Markandaya—John Day ($3.50).

When Rukmani was twelve and ready for marriage, she was obviously no bargain. She was not much to look at, and her father had gone broke providing dowries for her older sisters. The best the old man could find for her was a tenant farmer named Nathan who came from a poor village a day's travel away by bullock cart. When the child bride reached her new home, she saw a thatched mud hut. Holding back her tears, she lied bravely: "No, I am not frightened. It suits me quite well to live here." Often, in the years to come, it was to be not so much living as a living death.

Rukmani is the heroine of Nectar in a Sieve, a first novel by a young Indian woman who lives and writes in London under the pseudonym Kamala Markandaya. Hers is a simple, unaffected story of human suffering, and it does more than a shelf of books on history and economics to explain the people of India.

Taken at its simplest, Nectar is about hunger. Nathan was a good man, but all his hard work meant nothing if his small rice crop failed. When it did, his growing family starved. They sold their clothes, looked for scraps in the streets, ate grass like cattle when there was nothing else. For a time, to save her parents and brothers from death by starvation. Rukmani's gentle daughter became a prostitute, with the result that soon there was another mouth to feed. The family survived the famine, but a local tannery bought their land, and the now middle-aged couple went to a distant city to look for a son who might support them. They never found him. wound up sleeping on a temple floor, begging for handouts, working in a stoneyard for a few pennies. Nathan dies, but Rukmani makes it back to her village, her spirit still so strong that she dares to adopt a crippled waif to share whatever life has in store for herself and her own children.

In other hands, Nectar could easily have become an embittered, even sordid book. It is, instead, free from bitterness and its ignorant villagers are at least as dignified as they are pathetic. Author Markandaya proves the old truth that in fiction sympathy is more effective than anger. Few readers will be able to forget that most of India is still a land of Rukmanis, Nathans and their children.