See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/345767534

Bapsi Sidhwa: Ice Candy Man

Research · November 2020

CITATIONS READS

0 8,455

1 author:

Asma Mansoor
International Islamic University, Islamabad
38 PUBLICATIONS 88 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Asma Mansoor on 12 November 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Bapsi Sidhwa: Ice Candy Man
(1988)

Asma Mansoor (International Islamic University Islamabad (Pakistan))

Genre: Novel. Country: Pakistan.

Published in 1988 (William Heinemann, London), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man broke on the scene of
Pakistani Anglophone writings and gained critical acclaim due to its poignant handling of the tragedies and riots
framing the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. It won Germany’s LiBerturpreis in 1991 and was
acknowledged by the BBC as one of the hundred most inspiring novels in 2019. The novel’s American edition
(Milkweed, Minneopolis, 1991) was titled Cracking India, on the insistence of Sidhwa’s American publishers,
because “ice-candy-man” is a euphemism for a drug dealer in the United States, although the novel continues to
be sold as Ice-Candy-Man in the UK. In 1998, Deepa Mehta based her movie Earth on Ice-Candy-Man/Cracking
India. The film won the Best Film Award at the first Asian Film Festival and was the second installment of
Mehta’s Elements.

Delving into the human cost of the event, the novel foregrounds the exacerbation of communal divides in the
religious, ethnic and cultural potpourri that was India through the ingenuous gaze of the polio-stricken Parsee
girl called Lenny who accompanies her young Hindu Ayah called Shanta everywhere in the city of Lahore.
Through Lenny’s precocious observations from approximately the ages of four to eight, the novel canvases the
socio-political terrain of pre-partition India as the region stumbles from one politically engineered catastrophe to
another. The story moves from the individual to the collective as it focuses on the vibrant and sexually enticing
Ayah and the long train of admirers, attracted to her radiance like moths, one of them being the eponymous but
egregious trickster-like villain, the popsicle vendor whom Lenny calls Ice-candy-man. The ugliness contouring
Ice-candy-man’s exploitation, and ultimately Ayah’s sexual humbling, operates as a metaphor and a grotesque
travesty of the morally dubious treatment meted out to the exuberant subcontinent not merely by its foreign
colonizers, but also by its own people. One notices a symbolic correlation between the unhealable schism
emerging in Ayah after her eventual abduction, rape, forced conversion and marriage, and the irreversible divide
that cut across India’s communal spectrum. The novel is anchored within this divide, presenting both the
humanity and the inhumanity of actions and emotions which in turn colour Lenny’s perspective as she filters the
complexities of the Partition.

The liminality, i.e., a sense of in-between-ness, characterising the novel adds to its nuanced depiction of the
partition as it circumvents the ideological positions encoded in the official historical narratives of both India and
Pakistan. It flags the massive human suffering across the political divides that had generated the world’s greatest
exodus at the time of the subcontinent’s partition. Approximately a million died and 15 million people were
displaced across the two sides of the border. This liminality operates at a stylistic, thematic and ideological level
in the novel, as well as in terms of character delineation. Lenny’s standing as a polio-stricken Parsee girl adds to
this liminal flavor. Being strolled out on a pram at the beginning and accompanying Ayah on her jaunts, Lenny’s
handicap places her at a strategic location between the world of the adults and that of children, and also between
the male and female characters in the novels. Flaneur-like, she weaves across Lahore registering the desires of
both men and women. Being of the minority Parsee community, she avoids any alliance with either the Muslims,
Sikhs or Hindus, and even humorously critiques her fellow Parsees. This position of in-betweenness enables
Lenny to escape ideological affiliations and to re-humanize the people around her as they are forced into de-
humanizing religious and ideological enclosures. Additionally, it is this Parsee identity that also enables Lenny’s
mother and Godmother to help women of all religious denominations who had suffered horrendous abuse in the
partition riots. Being a Parsee herself, Sidhwa deploys the Parsee identity of her characters in a role of mediation
across the religious divides that led to India’s partition. As a seminal work of Pakistani Anglophone fiction, Ice-
Candy-Man displays a characteristic blend of British and Pakistani literary traditions. Not only does the novel
begin with a quote by Pakistan’s national poet Dr. Muhammad Iqbal’s “Shikwa” (“Complaint to God”), but
Sidhwa intersperses her narrative with more references to Iqbal and even popular Indian songs while also
engaging in code-switching and code-mixing that flag the local cultural ingredients influencing the narrative.
These ingredients include bawdy humour, proverbs, nonsensical anecdotes and absurdist rhymes typical to the
subcontinent. The English that she deploys carries a bilingual flavor as words and references from Urdu add an
indigenous touch to the narrative. Through this bilingual quality, the novel is embedded in a mobile space
wherein meanings engage in a semantic Brownian motion, conjuring up multiple truths rather than a single
Truth, and project multiple histories rather than merely one History. Thus, in the novel the idea of literary
tradition stands reconfigured as it enables a stylistic mixing across western and non-western literary forms and
traditions. For instance, while the novel begins by portraying the inter-faith love affair between the Hindu Ayah
and the handsome Muslim Masseur who promises to protect her if things became more violent, this affair carries
echoes not only of Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy but also of the local romances and legends such as Sohni Mahiwal
and Sassi Pannu, all projecting love-struck characters destroyed by the larger-than-life power games framing the
lives of their families and tribes. Yet all these stories merge in Masseur’s pain-filled romance with Ayah, thus
enabling the novel to cross cultural boundaries.

Despite her tragedy, Ayah’s character is not to be read in terms of irreversible victimhood. What lends depth to
this beautiful and seductive woman is the strength that she channels at the end despite being broken bodily and
mentally. She is initially portrayed as a woman whose gaze can melt the hearts of men of all religious and ethnic
identities. All are enthralled by her, but only Masseur has her heart. Like Mother India, Ayah can attract people
of different castes, sects and creeds around her and bind them in a commonality. However, as the novel
proceeds, we notice that the light-hearted conversation in the motley group of working class people surrounding
Ayah, such as Imam Din the cook, Hari the gardener and Sher Singh the zoo attendant, evolves into something
much more sinister as political divides intensify in the country. Ultimately, these divisive politics lead to the
Partition of India in August 1947 and radically break and pervert the Ice-candy-man when the dismembered
dead bodies of his family members arrive on a train carrying refugees across the newly defined border from
India to Lahore (now Pakistan): “A train from Gurdaspur has just come in… Everyone in it dead. Butchered.
They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead! Only two gunny-bags full of women’s
breasts!” (Sidhwa 149). With this turning point in the novel, things change for India as friends claiming kinship
and undying loyalties turn against each other and Lenny learns that “one man’s religion is another man’s poison”
(Sidhwa 117).

In this changed milieu, Lenny notices that “There is something so dangerous about the tangible colours the
passions around me have assumed that I blink open my eyes and sit up. Some instinct makes me count us. We
are thirteen” (Sidhwa 131-132). This symbolic reference to the unlucky number thirteen also hints at a Judas
Iscariot in their midst who is unleashing his own poison; and it is Ayah who consumes this poison when, in an
apparent act of vengeance, Masseur’s dead body is found heaped in a gunny sack while the lower caste Hari, now
Himmat Ali, newly converted to Islam for his protection amidst the rising religious strife, weeps over Masseur’s
body. Personal and collective betrayals coalesce into a saga of mindless brutality. Cities burn and neighbors
depart never to return. In a major riot a naked child is speared and waved around like a flag and a Hindu man is
tied between two jeeps and ripped apart (Sidhwa 135). On the Indian side, the Sikhs ravage Imam Din’s village,
raping and killing women and children, and knifing men. The graphic story of wanton abuse and torment is
reconstructed in the section entitled “Ranna’s story”. Ranna is Imam Din’s great-grandson, a young boy Lenny
played with on Lenny’s visit to Imam Din’s village, which is now across the border. Ranna’s own journey to
safety in Lahore is marked by unmentionable horrors, regardless of religious affiliations.

This chaos, however, provides Ice-candy-man with an excellent cover to enact his lust for Ayah. He used the
violence of the day as an excuse to not only abduct Ayah, but also to avenge the horrendous murders of his
family on a train destined for Pakistan. He makes a mockery of love when he forces her into prostitution,
preventing her return to her family by keeping her under his control, all the while positing himself in the role of
her protector and saviour. However, all of his stratagems are predicated on the complete suppression of her
dignified selfhood, which does not really happen. Knowing that Lenny’s Godmother was on his tracks, the Ice-
candy-man marries Ayah with the hope that Godmother would convince her to stay. However, when Lenny and
Godmother go to see her, Ayah is a mere shadow of herself, her “radiance and animation gone” as she gazed at
them with soulless icy eyes (Sidhwa 260). This woman is broken but not defeated; she is determined to leave Ice-
candy-man and go to Amritsar (now in India) to her family, even if they were to reject her. Appeals and
affections no longer move her because she has been betrayed by those whom she had trusted. At a rehabilitation
center for women neighboring Lenny’s home, she is received by the loving chants of “Ayah! Ayah! Ayah!
Ayah!” from Lenny and the neighborhood’s children. However, she looks up at them “out of glazed and
unfeeling eyes for a moment, as if we are strangers, and goes in again” (Sidhwa 274). She has come face-to-face
with the very essence of human cruelty and can no longer be touched by warmth. Even so, she chooses to
negotiate her freedom and rebuild her life on her own terms. This is what makes her a powerful character.

Ayah’s story is supplemented by the novel’s many other characters who, in all their heterogeneous religious and
political affiliations, evolve as the fluid political situation of India becomes volatile prior to the Partition. But the
one who damaged her the most deeply is the many-hued popsicle seller. He pursues Ayah doggedly, chameleon-
like morphing into different characters, ranging from a bird-seller to the fake holy man and finally to a rabble-
rousing murderer who, knowing full well Ayah’s unswerving love for Masseur, engineers her abduction by
beguiling the gullible, truthful Lenny to reveal Ayah’s hiding place. Ultimately, Ice-candy-man becomes Ayah’s
pimp and then her poetry-reciting husband bent upon reclaiming his character. Like the lurking Satan in Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Ice-candy-man is also focused on his ambition, changing from a beloved popsicle seller to the
conniving individual whose venom curdles the very life force in Ayah until she is recovered and rescued by
Lenny’s resourceful Godmother. Focused, determined and motherly, Godmother is Lenny’s mentor and guide.
She is a woman to whom Lenny could not tell lies and is her partner in crime as they collectively torment the
obnoxious but dependent Slavesister, Godmother’s younger sibling who lives with her and her husband. Despite
Godmother being an outstanding foil to Ice-candy-man‘s machinations, Godmother and Slavesister’s relationship
is much more fraught than ordinary sibling-rivalry, since Godmother is complicit with the humiliation of her
own sister. Not much is known about why Slavesister lives with them or if she is single, widowed or divorced.
What is obvious is the cruel indifference of Godmother towards her. This is the one disturbing flaw in
Godmother’s character that detracts from her illustrious role as a protector of women working alongside Lenny’s
mother, Mrs. Sethi. While Lahore is burning in communal riots, Mrs. Sethi and Godmother embark on their
daily mission to discover raped women, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, and to repatriate them with their families or to
provide them with shelter in case those women are turned away by their own families as was Hamida, the
Muslim woman who replaced Shanta as Lenny’s Ayah after the latter was carried away by a rabid mob.

Mrs. Sethi is a strong woman. As the marital bliss framing the initial chapters of the novel is replaced by
depictions of bruises on her body and infidelity on the part of her husband. Her courageous defiance of the mob
that attacks their home in search of Ayah, and then her zooming across a burning Lahore with petrol cans in her
car to supply to women requiring a safe passage across the border, clearly show the spirit of a bold woman who
is able to rise above individual pain to provide succor to other suffering women. Suffering in the novel therefore
does not emerge as a debilitating force for all women; rather it becomes the catalyst that enables them to rise out
of domesticity, not by discarding it, but by modifying it into something that enriches the broader communal
spectrum of society. Through the the figures of women like Mrs. Sethi, Godmother and Ayah, the novel
questions the traditional notions of passivity and victimhood associated with the women of the subcontinent, and
projects them, instead, in terms of endurance and an autonomous selfhood.

The novel offers figures of women in all their variety, cataloguing both their strengths and weaknesses. While
Hamida accepts that in her “fallen” state she can never meet her daughters or go back to her family, we also have
the constantly bickering mother-daughter duo of Muccho and Papoo, the latter being only a few years older than
Lenny. Papoo is Lenny’s playmate and a servant in the Sethi household. Frequently beaten up by Muccho, Papoo
has an incredible amount of energy which aggravates her mother who ultimately marries her off to the ageing,
grotesque and lascivious Tota Ram. The only way Muccho is able to organize this wedding was by drugging her
daughter. The novel thus adds child marriage and consequent marital rape to the list of crimes perpetuated by
women on women in support of patriarchal oppression.

However, it is Lenny who remains the lens through which the partition saga is filtered. As a lame child, she is
aware of persistent gaze on her deformed leg and the adorable limp it later on yields. She recognizes the worth of
a woman’s seductive power in a world where it is easy to ignore the girl child if she is not beautiful or unique in
some way. She even welcomes pity as a form of attention, specifically since it is her fair-skinned brother Adi
who elicits adoration from all those around her. She is the gullible child who fails to penetrate the layers of
deception which embalm Ice-candy-man. At the same time, she is a voice articulating the pains and desires, the
hopes and “cumulative sorrows” (Sidhwa 273) of many women across India’s ethno-cultural spectrum. Her
humor and naïve interpretations of the world offer a palatable but cheeky version of life whose meaningfulness
is not lost upon the readers. However, at times, the humor recedes completely because life’s spectacle can no
longer be laughed at. One such moment is when she rips her doll apart after having witnessed a man tied between
two jeeps and ripped apart, “I examine the doll’s spilled insides and, holding them in my hands, collapse on the
bed sobbing” (Sidhwa 138-139).

The novel is told by a woman about women in circumstances where women pay the greatest price for crimes
they did not commit and for circumstances they did not engineer. It is the story of silenced traumas that need to
be accessed so that their consequences can be clearly articulated. The novel figures women as both victims and
instruments of war, but usually being denied a voice. We do not hear Ayah tell of her ordeals, nor do we revisit
the survivors, if any, of the multiple rapes that took place in Imam Din’s village. Lenny speaks, but her
articulation is limited by the constraints imposed on her by her age, language, and the inexpressible trauma of so
many other women that she internalized. Thus these unspoken traumas never become a part of history (Bahri
2019).

What makes Ice-Candy-Man such a crucial text is that it provides important insights into the trauma of Partition
which the sub-continent still needs to confront. More than that, through its careful manipulation of language it
invites a redressal for the traumas of innocent women and children caught up in circumstances beyond their
control. This is precisely why Ice-Candy-Man’s alternative historical account becomes a viable site for rethinking
our collective choices in today’s conflict-ridden world.

Works Cited

Bahri, Deepika. “Telling Tales”. Interventions 1.2 (1999): 217-234. DOI: 10.1080/13698019900510321
Sidhwa, Bapsi. Ice-Candy-Man. London: Penguin Books, 1989 (first published London: William Heinemann
1988).
 Asma Mansoor (International Islamic University Islamabad (Pakistan))

Citation: Mansoor, Asma. "Ice Candy Man ". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 November 2020
[https://www.litencyc.com, accessed 12 November 2020.]

This article is copyright to © The Literary Encyclopedia.

All entries, data and software copyright © The Literary Dictionary Company Limited

ISSN 1747-678X

View publication stats

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)