Ice Candy Man

Ice Candy Man is a novel by Bapsi Sidhwa, published in England in 1988 and in the United States in 1991 as Cracking India. Set in Lahore between 1943 and 1948, it tells the story of the 1947 Partition of India through the eyes of Lenny, a young Parsi girl, and of her Hindu ayah, whose abduction becomes the human centre of the city's collapse into communal violence.

About the book

The novel was Sidhwa's third. It draws directly on her own childhood: like Lenny, she was a Parsi girl in Lahore who had polio in infancy, and she was a child of nine in the summer of 1947. The University of Southampton's summary notes that the book draws on her childhood experiences in Lahore at the time of Partition, and the parallels are deliberate. The Sethi family's protected, affluent world is the world Sidhwa grew up in, and the violence enters it the way it entered hers: first as talk, then as news, then as fire on the horizon.

The book carries two titles. In England it appeared as Ice Candy Man, named for one of Ayah's admirers, the street seller of ice candies whose charm curdles into something terrible. For American readers the publisher retitled it Cracking India, a name that points at the subject, the breaking of a country, but loses the man. Editions since have kept one title or the other, and a reader looking for the book needs to know both.

What is Ice Candy Man about?

Ice Candy Man is about how Partition came to one Lahore household: a Parsi family, its servants and its circle of visitors, between 1943 and 1948. At its centre stands Ayah, Shanta, an eighteen year old Hindu girl from Amritsar who looks after Lenny. Ayah's admirers, who gather around her in the park, are a cross section of the old city: a masseur, a butcher, a zoo keeper, a gardener, a Pathan knife sharpener and the Ice-Candy-Man himself, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh together in one flirting, joking circle. As the politics of 1947 hardens, the circle hardens with it, and Lenny, listening, learns what the adults' new words, religion, Pakistan and Hindustan, come to mean in practice.

During the chaos of 1947 Lenny, worked on by the Ice-Candy-Man, accidentally betrays Ayah's hiding place, and a mob carries Ayah away. The rest of the novel is shadowed by that betrayal. Lenny's mother and aunt join the work of recovering abducted women, and Ayah is eventually found, kept captive by the Ice-Candy-Man in the Kotha, the old city's quarter of courtesans, where he presents himself as an Urdu poet and lives off her. Lenny's godmother intervenes, frees her, and Ayah is sent home to her family village.

Themes: a child, a minority and a city

The Parsi position is the novel's vantage point. The Parsis were a tiny community, courted by all sides and owned by none, and Lenny's family can watch Hindu, Muslim and Sikh neighbours turn on each other from a nearly neutral doorstep. That lets Sidhwa show the violence without taking a communal side. Against Lenny's sheltered narration the book sets one section in the past tense, Ranna's story, in which the great grandson of the family cook describes how his village was destroyed and he alone escaped: the one place where the child's voice is set aside, because what has to be told is beyond it.

Women carry the cost of the book. Ayah's path, from courted girl to abducted woman to rescued 'fallen woman' whom families might not take back, is the novel's measure of what Partition did to women on every side, and the work of Lenny's mother and aunt among the recovered women shows the rescue effort that followed the violence. Even the household staff register the change: Hari, the gardener, converts and takes a Muslim name to stay safe. The present tense narration keeps everything at a child's eye level. Politics arrives as overheard sentences, and horror as a changed name, a crowded train, a sack by the roadside.

ਲੇਖਕ

Bapsi Sidhwa (1938 to 2024) was born in Karachi, raised in Lahore and educated at Kinnaird College for Women. The Crow Eaters (1978) and The Bride (1982) came before Ice Candy Man; An American Brat (1993) and Water: A Novel (2006) followed it. Pakistan awarded her the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 1991. She spent her later life in the United States, taught at several American universities, and died in Houston on 25 December 2024. Her life is told in her people entry in this Kosh.

Reception and legacy

Deepa Mehta filmed the novel as Earth in 1998. The film won a number of awards, including the Grand Prize at the Deauville Panasian Film Festival, and it carried the story to audiences who had never read a Partition novel. In 2019 BBC News named Ice Candy Man on its list of the 100 most influential novels. On the shelf of novels through which most readers now meet 1947 in Punjab, it stands with Train to Pakistan and Pinjar, both in this Kosh: Khushwant Singh's border village and Amrita Pritam's Puro answer Sidhwa's Lahore street, and the three together triangulate the disaster.

Read it if

Read it if you want Partition told from inside Lahore rather than from the border or the refugee train; if you are tracing what 1947 did to women; or if you have seen Earth and want the larger, funnier and sadder book behind the film. Take the opening chapters slowly. The comedy of Ayah's circle is the measure of everything that is about to be lost.