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Bapsi Sidwa and Ice Candy Man PDF
Bapsi Sidwa and Ice Candy Man PDF
Book Review by
Ayesha Fatimah Rasul
One wonders how humanity survived at all. But it did, and one measure of that
survival is that tragedy gave birth to literature. In the first three decades after
partition, only a handful of writers -- Saadat Hasan Manto in Urdu, Amrita
Pritam in Punjabi, Khushwant Singh and Manohar Malgaonkar in English --
could be said to have produced memorable fiction about the catastrophe.
When, in more recent years, sub-continental novelists (led by Salman Rushdie)
again returned to the period, they tended to prefer the grand historical sweep to
the individual story. These writers have, by and large, taken on the shaping
forces, rather than allowing a few ordinary lives to illuminate those forces.
So Lenny and her family are not personally threatened, but they live amid
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who are. Ms. Sidhwa's superb re-creation of
Lenny's early life richly evokes the colours, sounds and smells of pre-partition
Lahore. She has a particular talent for the larger-than-life Parsi eccentrics she
portrayed so well in her first novel, The Crow Eaters. But her most successful
characters here are the working-class adults little Lenny spends most time
with: her Hindu nursemaid, Ayah; the gruffly paternal cook Imam Din; the
untouchable gardener Hari; the Sikh zoo attendant Sher Singh, and Ayah's
Muslim admirers -- a nameless masseur, the knife-sharpener Sharbat Khan and
the mercurial Ice-candy-man.
It is the suggestively zaftig Ayah, desired by every man, who is the focus of
the book. "Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsee are, as always, unified around her,"
Lenny observes. But looming over the narrative is the enigmatic shadow of
Ice-candy-man, who undergoes transformations that dramatically prefigure
those of the world around him. Through Lenny's eyes, we see him as the eager
popsicle vendor whose toes sneak under Ayah's sari early in the story; the fake
Sufi, with copper wiring coiled around his neck and chest, who declares he is
Allah's telephone; the fanatic mob leader who sickeningly betrays his love;
and the pimp-poet with amber eyes and oval face, reciting Urdu verses to woo
the woman he has destroyed. It is impossible not to see in Ice-candy-man a
metaphor for his society, as well as for the dangerous, transient unreliability of
humankind.
"One day everybody is themselves," Lenny observes, "and the next day they
are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols."
But Ms. Sidhwa sees beyond the symbols to the poignant humanity of both
fanatic and victim. The scene in which an inflamed Muslim mob comes to
Lenny's house looking for Hindus, while intensely moving, is written with
remarkable power and restraint. Ms. Sidhwa leaves us with an unforgettable
image of the woman they abduct, "staring at us as if she wanted to leave
behind her wide-open and terrified eyes."