Ice Candy Man
Ice Candy Man
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Bapsi Sidhwa on Ice Candy Man
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Memory that would not stay privateSidhwa was nine years old during the 1947 Partition, living in Lahore in a Parsi Zoroastrian household that sat outside the Hindu-Muslim violence convulsing the city. That outside position did not mean safety. A mob entered the family home, and only a cook’s quick announcement of the family’s religion turned them away. That real intrusion became the novel’s central horror: the kidnapping of Ayah, Lenny’s beloved caretaker.
The roar of mobs and the fires were a constant of my childhood pre-partition. A mob came into our house to loot but departed when told that we were Parsi by our cook. I have used this scrambled memory for the ayah kidnapping scene.
Her polio, contracted at two, kept her out of school and confined to the domestic world of servants and adult conversations. That isolation, which would shape Lenny’s entire vantage point in the novel, Sidhwa traced back to a simple, persistent feeling.
I was a lonely child and motivated to give voice to the silences in my life, I guess.
Being Parsi gave her a structural advantage that she came to understand as a novelist’s resource. Because her community stood apart from the two sides tearing Lahore apart, she could see what people inside the conflict could not.
As a Parsi, I can see things objectively. I see all the common people suffering while the politicians on either side have the fun. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
A child who is not her, carrying everything she knewSidhwa needed a narrator who could witness without being expected to understand, someone close enough to the adult world to overhear its cruelties but young enough to record them without the weight of ideology. She found that narrator by transplanting the precise circumstances of her own girlhood onto a fictional Parsi child named Lenny.
In the beginning of ‘Cracking India’, it’s what I went through as a child but the child is not me. I’ve given the child the circumstances of my life: the constant being with servants and adults, not going to school and so having the chance to observe what’s happening around her and hear adult conversations. It acted as a very useful ploy for the book.
The boundary between what she remembered and what she invented kept dissolving as she wrote. Real people from her Lahore childhood appear in the novel: she visited Gandhi with her mother at a neighbour’s house as a small child and wrote that meeting into the book. Sikh children from her street, Rosy and Peter, are there too, and after publication they found her by email to share news of their own families. The Lenny she put on the page sat somewhere between a mirror and a mask.
Even I often don’t know where fact ends and fiction begins... Lenny is not me, perhaps my alter ego.
Much of what she knew about Partition, she had not consciously gathered. The writing, she found, kept producing details she could not account for rationally.
I felt that some inherited knowledge or inherited memory comes out, which we call the muse or what you like, and your subconscious plays a part. I wrote things that I was surprised I knew about.
The book’s title changed between its original publication and its American release. The American publisher’s concern was practical: the original title carried an unintended association with drug culture in the United States.
The name of the book was renamed Cracking India in America since drug dealers there are sometimes referred to as ‘candy men’. The publisher thought the title Cracking India suited the contents of the book better and I agreed with them.
The personal thread
What the neighbours left behindWhen Lahore’s Hindu and Sikh residents fled during Partition, Sidhwa’s family stored their belongings. The arrangement was made on the assumption of a temporary emergency, and it became permanent.
We kept the goods of our Hindu and Sikh neighbours in our godowns, and they all thought that they would come back and collect them, but they never did get the chance.
One of those neighbours’ homes was where Sidhwa, as a small child, met Gandhi. The visit was so specific in her memory that she carried it straight into the novel.
I remember going to one of their houses as a small child with my mother to meet Gandhiji -- I have described this meeting in Ice Candy Man.
The detail is minor in the novel and enormous in the biography behind it: it places Sidhwa, as a Parsi child in Lahore, inside the last months before a world she knew was erased.
On what the book is wrestling with
Whose body pays for historyAyah, Lenny’s Hindu caretaker, moves through the first half of the novel as a figure of warmth and autonomy, desired and admired by men of every community. Her fate in the second half is the book’s argument in the starkest possible form. Sidhwa named what that argument was.
Victory is celebrated on women body. Vengeance is taken on a woman’s body. That is very much the way things are, particularly in my part of the world. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s scope is deliberately national. Sidhwa did not frame it as a story of one family or one street but as the account of an event with consequences that have never been fully reckoned with.
Ice-Candy Man is a story of India and Pakistan and it deals exhaustively with the partition. And I would like to be known for these books.
What she wants us to sit with
The ones who never came back for their thingsSidhwa spent her career writing about communities at the edges of their historical moment: Parsis during Partition, women during violence, ordinary people during political decisions made without them. She wanted the record to exist. The godowns full of neighbours’ belongings that her family stored and that were never collected stand as the novel’s quietest image of what Partition actually cost.
We kept the goods of our Hindu and Sikh neighbours in our godowns, and they all thought that they would come back and collect them, but they never did get the chance.
The child narrator Lenny watches the adult world undo itself and can name what she sees without being able to stop it. That gap between witness and agency is what the novel insists the reader feel. Sidhwa described the design behind Lenny’s voice as a ploy, and it is: a method for drawing the reader into complicity with a child who does not yet have the language for what is happening.
In the beginning of ‘Cracking India’, it’s what I went through as a child but the child is not me. I’ve given the child the circumstances of my life: the constant being with servants and adults, not going to school and so having the chance to observe what’s happening around her and hear adult conversations. It acted as a very useful ploy for the book.
The ploy works because Lenny’s limitations are the reader’s. She sees everything and understands just enough for the horror to land fully, without the buffering distance of adult analysis.