The story of the handle-less sieve

I have a lot of sieves in my kitchen. A small one that is perfect for a single cup of tea. A few bigger ones for sieving copious amounts of tea. One for pouring tamarind juice through so that sambars, rasams and fish curries are sufficiently tangy but have no bits of tamarind seeds for unwary teeth to encounter. One for pouring golden ghee so that the burnt bits stay arrested in the sieve and don’t sully its beautiful perfection. And really big ones for flour and so on. I also have a small handle-less sieve. It wasn’t handle-less to start with and that is the story I choose to tell you today – the story of the handle-less sieve.

This particular sieve that I am talking about was a disaster. It looked great. It was shiny and bright. It had an amusing conical shape with a rather heavy handle. Now while it looked good, the handle was too big for the head which made it a really bad sieve. You couldn’t put it on a cup without risking it falling and tea leaves spattering everywhere. I never liked it, but like many other things (and people) in my life, I put up with it.

Then one day, my maid dropped it and its handle fell off. She then hid it and left. Many days later I found it and asked her about it. She blamed the fall on the sieve. I didn’t care in any case and left the conical sieve in the kitchen drawer and forgot all about it.

Last month, I was trying to skim cream off cold milk to make into butter. It’s a messy process at the best of times and I was struggling that morning. My husband came into the kitchen and told me to use the old handle-less sieve instead of the flat spoons. I tried it and lo and behold, in a few minutes I had rich cream sitting contentedly in a dabba in the freezer. After that, the sieve was used exclusively for skimming milk. It made me think.

Sometimes we find ourselves at a stage in life where we don’t fit. We don’t feel accomplished enough. We don’t feel loved enough. We don’t feel good enough. And then by some miracle or by the grace of God, along comes a purpose that fits us perfectly. Whatever characteristics kept us from being good at what we thought we were meant to do, made us perfect for something that we had never even imagined. That is the beauty of life. If we believe that there is something that each of us is exceptional at, we would wait patiently till we find that something and not settle for whatever our family or society or partner tells us we are supposed to do. So find that one thing. And go for it. Your self-doubt and awkwardness will fall by the wayside. And finally, you will be a creature of perfect balance. Just like my little sieve.