5 Creation

Contemporary Reading: From Nectar in a Sieve, by Kamala Markandaya

Now that I did not work in the fields I spent most of may time tending my small garden: the beans, the brinjals, the chillies and the pumpkin vine which had been the first to grow under my hand. And their growth to me was constant wonder—from the time the seed split and the first green shoots broke through, to the time when the young buds and fruit began to form. I was young and fanciful then, and it seemed to me not that they grew as I did, unconsciously, but that each of the dry, hard pellets I held in my palm had within it the very secret of life itself. Curled tightly within, under leaf after protective leaf for safekeeping, fragile, vanishing with the first touch or sight. With each tender seedling that unfurled its small green leaf to my eager gaze, my excitement would rise and mount; winged, wondrous.

“You will get used to it,” (my husband) said. “After many sowings and harvestings you will not notice these things.” There have been many sowings and harvestings, but the wonder has not departed.