Nectar in a Sieve

by Kamala Markandaya

  "I hope you are better," I said.

  "Ah well, one must not expect too much. I am well enough. But I did not come to talk about myself."

  I looked at her without favour: it was plain enough why she had come. She lowered her voice again.

  "Is it true about the baby? People say he is milkwhite!"

  "He is fair," agreed Ira equably. "See for yourself," and she held out the sleeping child in her arms. Kali bent forward eagerly, quivering in her excitement, and at that moment as ill luck would have it the child woke, opened his weak, pinkish eyes, yawned and began to yell piercingly. Kali stepped back as if she had been deliberately affronted: and such pity as she might have had in her perished.

  "He looks peculiar," she said frankly. "Not a bit normal. Who ever heard of pink eyes in a human child?"

  I did not know what to say. Nathan was looking at her sourly: he had never liked her. Ira's face was strained and taut and queerly defensive, as if she had been hurt and was wondering where the next blow would fall. So she does know, I thought with something akin to relief, yet of course not wholly so. She hides her knowledge well. . . . The silence went on, everybody afraid to speak, thoughts crisscrossing in the over-full air, eyes averted, shifting, lowered at last to the ground. Then I heard Selvam clearing his throat to speak, and at once heads turned, surprised, lightened of suspense, very much alert.

  "Just a matter of colouring," he said, "or lack of it. It is only a question of getting used to. Who is to say this colour is right and that is not?"

  The words of a boy -- Selvam was not sixteen -- shaming us all.

  "But pink --" Kali began.

  "A pink-eyed child is no worse than a brown-eyed one," he said, looking at her with cold, rebuking eyes. "I should have thought your instincts as a woman if nothing else would have told you that."

  He turned away from her contemptuously and began clicking his fingers to the child. Sacrabani, who had been screaming vigorously, began to quieten down: he gave one or two more tentative wails, then his mouth split in something like a smile and his fingers curled round Selvam's.

  Selvam turned and smiled at us, raising eloquent eyebrows: Was not the child exactly the same as other babies? Had he not said so?

  Triumphantly he turned to look for Kali but she -- unnoticed -- had gone.

  CHAPTER XXI

  FROM the day construction began on the hospital, Selvam ceased to belong to us. During the preparations, while the site was bought and cleared, and a contractor engaged to find men and material, he spent his time with Kenny, and what they discussed I do not know, but sometimes he came home elated and sometimes he was morose and dejected; and it was clear enough that the many delays they encountered irked his spirit beyond the telling. Then when construction actually started, the bricks stacked high, the cement in heaps, whatever time he could spare he spent at the site watching while brick was laid on brick and mortar flowed between: and occasionally when the labourers let him (which was not often, for they were a jealous crew), he would take a hand in the building himself, for nothing gave him more pleasure than that. What he did not know was that seven more tedious years were to pass before the building was complete: both he and Kenny, possessed by their fierce enthusiasm, had, I think, reckoned on a much shorter time. Maybe it was as well they did not know: seven years is a long time to be patient.

  If things had gone as they had hoped, the hospital would have been completed within a year, and Old Granny would not have had to die in the street as she did. There was nowhere else she could go: she had lived in the street and she died there. Day by day she sat beside her torn gunny sack selling handfuls of nuts and berries, growing progressively older, more ragged, less healthy. She had no relatives left -- no person on whom she had any claim -- certainly there was no one to enquire whether she made a living or how much longer she could continue to do so. Better to avoid such questions, better to pass quickly by with a cheerful word, than to stop and ask, for who would lightly take on the burden of feeding another mouth? And so one day she quietly disappeared. They found her body on the path that led to the well, an empty mud pot beside her and the gunny sacking tied around her waist. She had died of starvation.

  Once a human being is dead there are people enough to provide the last decencies; perhaps it is so because only then can there be no question of further or recurring assistance being sought. Death after all is final. I could not avoid the thought, which came from my own uneasy conscience, harsh and bitter, as I watched them lift her up, light as dust, on to the bier; as mourners came with flowers, as oil and camphor were laid unstinted on the pyre, as rosewater and sandalwood paste were sprinkled on her corpse. So it had been with my sons, so it was now with Old Granny, one day it might be the same for me, for all of us. A man might drift to his death before his time unnoticed, but when he was dead and beyond any care then at last he was sure of attention. . . .

  * * *

  Old Granny's death bore especially hard on me: for apart from the fact that we had been friends since my marriage I could not forgive myself for having accepted the rupee which might have fed her for several days. I wanted to throw it away -- give it to the next old crone I saw -- anything to gain my relief; but the money belonged to Sacrabani, not to me.

  "You are being very childish," Nathan said. "How long would a rupee have kept her?"

  "A few days at least," I said.

  "And what when those few days ran out?"

  "I don't know . . . something may have turned up. It is a pity the hospital was not ready. She could have gone there."

  "A hospital is not a soup kitchen," he said.

  I did not know what he meant by a soup kitchen and I stared at him. He repeated the words, pleased that he knew and I did not.

  "Where the poor are fed free of charge," he explained. "In other countries. Selvam tells me this is a fact."

  "And how should he know? He has not been out of this town since his birth?"

  "From books he has read perhaps -- or Kenny may have told him. I do not know how he knows."

  "Well, anyway," I said, going back to what we had been discussing, "soup kitchen or not, they would not have refused an old ailing woman."

  "Why go on about it?" he said exasperated. "You are only distressing yourself and it might never have been. I tell you a hospital is only for the sick. There is nowhere for the old."

  The hospital was no more than a few months old and a few feet high when people began attempting to stake their claims. They went to Kenny and they came to Selvam and they even approached me, his mother, and from the numbers who came I soon knew that not one-tenth could enter. And what I of little perception knew Kenny and Selvam knew twofold: but we none of us said anything, for we had woven about us a net of silence in whose meshes were precariously held our fears and our misgivings.

  Meanwhile, work on the hospital did not progress smoothly; twice the contractor was changed, and each man in turn appointed new foremen, and these brought their own labourers. One year there were not enough men; the next, not enough material. During one very hot summer the workmen's huts caught fire and before it could be put out it had spread to the timber stacked nearby. The loss had to be made good, as had also the theft, despite the presence of a chowkidar, of a cartload of bricks and the cart itself. Several times work stopped altogether, for what reasons I do not know, while Kenny and Selvam strode about the deserted site in exasperation, dark as thunder, unapproachable. Kenny made frequent trips away from the town from which he came back tired and often dispirited; but always work was resumed on his return.

  "Every pie has to be fought for," Selvam said. "It cannot be easy."

  "He told me he had enough," I said. "He was away a long time collecting the money."

  "There can never be enough," Selvam said, turning away.

  I could not help wonder ing what bottomless pit they were trying to fill, or from what bottomless purse. It is not as simple as Kenny said, I remember thinking to myself. It is not enough to cry out
, not sufficient to lay bare your woes and catalogue your needs; people have only to close their eyes and their ears, you cannot force them to see and to hear -- or to answer your cries if they cannot and will not. Once I dared to say as much to Kenny and he looked at me a little sadly and said there were other ways which he could not explain to me. There was much talk between him and Selvam of various funds and grants and so on, but I do not know whether anything came of these. At any rate building went forward, slowly, painfully slowly, but at least it did go on.

  Before long Selvam began his training. The small whitewashed cottage was once again in use, with my son now assisting Kenny. By the second year of his training he began treating minor cases by himself, and from then onwards Kenny paid him a small wage, not regularly but as and when funds came his way. Once in a moment of thoughtlessness I asked how he would contrive to pay all his staff when the hospital was finally established, for it was certain many people would be needed to run it. His face darkened: he would, he said, find ways and means. It had become his most frequent saying.

  CHAPTER XXII

  SELVAM and Ira had always been close, the years of separation when my daughter went to her husband having affected their relationship not at all; she treated him more as if he were her son than her brother, and he in turn accepted her love and returned it in his own deep, quiet way. He understood her well, better than I did who was her mother; in fact, I wonder whether parents ever know their children as they know one another. At any rate in our family my sons and daughter had always been at one in their thinking: such schism as there was opened between them and us, never between themselves. Kali said this was so because they were better read, more learned, than we were: but ever since the troubles at the tannery in which her sons had become involved, and for other reasons, she had been prejudiced against any kind of learning. In her view most of the troubles in the country sprang from the pages of books.

  Selvam's easy attitude towards her son brought Ira even closer to him. From the beginning Selvam had accepted the child's albinism: accepted it and thought no more of it. From infancy he treated Sacrabani exactly as if he were a normal child. The pity of it was that it was a forlorn battle. No amount of such action on his part or ours could bring others to the same persuasion. Sacrabani was isolated from the start, a white crow in a flock of black, a grain of wheat among the rice. By the time he was four, Sacrabani was used to being a hanger-on -- forever on the fringes of others' activities. Because of his difference, the other children never included him as a matter of course in their games: if they were short of a player, or for some other good reason, they sometimes invited him to join them, but on no account was he to do so of his own accord. In the hope of being thus asked he had to tag along, patient and submissive. His physical disabilities alone would have ensured his dependent rôle; for his skin was unable to stand the sun, and the light affected his eyes. The sight of him crouched in the shade with reddened face and streaming eyes evoked from his companions not pity but ribaldry. Poor child, he had even to suffer the behaviour of his elders, who stared -- those who had not seen him before -- and nudged each other and whispered and rustled, while those who had vied with each other to be the first to enlighten them. Then one day, sprung from who knows what taunts flung at him, his questionings, first of many, began.

  "Mother, what is a bastard?"

  What does one say to a child? What possible answer is there? I saw Ira eyeing the boy, startled, wary, trying to guess how much innocence and how much knowledge lay behind the question, wondering how little and how much she could tell him, questioning in her turn to gain time.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "I want to know".

  "It is a child whose birth his mother did not wish for."

  "Oh," he said, looking at her speculatively. "Did you wish me to be born?"

  "Yes, of course, darling," Ira cried, and all the guilt of her efforts to have an abortion was in her voice. "I would not lose you for anything. Why do you have to ask?"

  "I wanted to know," he repeated lightly, noncommittally, not knowing how cruelly he had hurt his mother.

  Some days later he tackled her again.

  "Mother, have I got a father?"

  "Yes, dear, of course."

  "Where is he?"

  "Not here, my son; he is away."

  "Why does he never come to see us?"

  "He will when he can."

  "But why not now?"

  "Because he cannot. You will understand when you are older."

  "How old?"

  "I do not know myself. Now run away and play. You must not ask so many questions."

  The first lie; many to follow. The distressing, inescapable need for lying.

  "I would have told him his father was dead," I said, "as he certainly is to all intents and purposes. It would have been easier."

  "Do not interfere," Nathan said. "It is for Ira to decide."

  Ira looked heavy-eyed and hurt. "Yes; you are right," she said. "I should have told him that. I was not prepared for the question -- he is such a baby still."

  "He did not think of it himself," I said. "He is as yet too young. No doubt one of his companions."

  "Leave it, leave it," said Nathan. "Do not upset the girl any more."

  He put out his hand to Ira, but she shied away from him. I saw her leave the hut.

  "It is no use going to her," Nathan said sadly. "Such comfort as there is to be had must come from her own spirit."

  Nevertheless, after a little while he did go to her and his gentleness melted her last remnants of control, for she began to weep. I heard her crying for a long time.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  MY third son, Murugan, who was a servant, married a girl from the town in which he worked. We had not seen her, nor did we know her family, and the marriage, in the second year after Sacrabani's birth, was solemnised at her parents' house without either of us being present. Had it been at all possible we would have gone, but it proved beyond our power. The town was over a hundred miles away, and since the harvest had been a poor one and Selvam was earning very little we had not the money to go by rail. Durgan, it is true, had a bullock in addition to his milch cows, and a cart which he offered to lend us for a small sum, but Nathan was not fit enough to undertake the journey there and back. He was nearing fifty and no longer as healthy as he had been. He had begun to suffer from rheumatism, and apart from this had had several attacks of fever, from each of which he recovered more slowly and emerged weaker. Sometimes in the middle of sowing or reaping or tilling, or the innumerable tasks the land demanded, he would stop and straighten up, breathing hard and trembling. Often he was unable to continue work and was forced to lie down in the hut for a while. Ira and I did what we could; but the land is mistress to man, not to woman: the heavy work needed is beyond her strength. Several times Kenny came to see him bringing food and sometimes medicine; he told me bluntly that my husband was not getting enough to eat.

  "We eat well enough when the harvest is good," I answered him, "but of course we have our lean times."

  "Too many," he said. "Your husband needs milk and vegetables and butter, not plain rice day after day."

  I looked at him incredulously. "Those can only come our way when the yield is rich," I said. "It cannot be always or indeed even frequent, for we are not rich, you understand."

  "I was not thinking," he muttered. "Of course I know this too." Then one day he told me that my husband would not recover until he stopped worrying.

  "He is very anxious about you," he said. "You must try and reassure him."

  "I would do so if only it were in my hands. But what comfort can one offer a man who sees his family wholly dependent on him and no one else to see to them?"

  When I had said the words, I thought, Perhaps he will despise me for my weakness; perhaps this will make him think I am a self-pitying good-for-nothing, anxious only for my own well-being, and I added quickly: "There are others to consider besides myself. . . . I do what I can bu
t it is not much."

  "I had not thought otherwise," he said gently. "Tell me, is there no one else apart from your husband?"

  "No one. My sisters have children of their own -- besides, they live very far away, we have not seen them for many years. My sons -- well, they have made their lives elsewhere, as you know."

  There was a silence, and I thought, Now I have wounded him. . . . I did not mean to. I made a move towards him, but he seemed to shrink back. Both hands came up to bury his face.

  "I do not grudge --" I began timidly. He took his hands away, I saw the imprint of pain on his face.

  "And I have taken the last of them," he said. "Why do you not say it? It is true. I have taken him and there is no recompense."