by Bapsi Sidhwa
Brand-new flags flutter, too, from the filigreed turrets of the pink High Court and the General Post Office and other government offices and the new fronts of bazaar shops in the Shalmi and Gowalmandi and the oil and engineering companies—those ubiquitous visitants from foreign lands and the domes and minarets of new mosques erupting all over Lahore ... some beautiful as poems and some bedraggled.
And armed with the might of a small and fluttering green flag, a posse of policemen in a jeep—and a wired black van—squeezed their way right into the constricted, drain-divided heart of the Hira Mandi and stopped before the popsicle-man’s splintered door. The police, waving signed papers and batons, swarmed through the rooms of Ice-candy-man’s Kotha and finding Ayah there took her away, a willing accompanist, to the black van. And all the Mandi pimps and poets and musicians ... and all the flower-sellers, prostitutes, butchers, cigarette and paan vendors, wrestlers and toughs of the cultured Kotha could do nothing about it. Nor do Ice-candy-man’s threats, pleading, remonstrance, bellows, declamations, courtly manners, resourcefulness or wailing impede the progression of the van in its determination to deposit Ayah, with her scant belongings wrapped in cloth bundles and a small tin trunk, at the Recovered Women’s Camp on Warris Road. To be followed there in three galloping carts by Ice-candy-man and his cronies—all their outrage and broken bones and pimpy influence to no avail.
Chapter 32
Give me the (mastic) wine that burns all veils,
The wine by which life’s secret is revealed,
The wine whose essence is eternity,
The wine which opens mysteries concealed.
Lift up the curtain, give me power to talk.
And make the sparrow struggle with the hawk.
-Iqbal
Ice-candy-man has taken to patrolling Warris Road, his broken left arm supported in a sling and pressed to his chest as if affirming a truth.
Sometimes he squats across the road from our wall and sometimes inside Rosy-Peter’s compound—patiently, and from a distance, watching the tin-sheet gates. Occasionally he recites Zauq:“Why did you make a home in my heart?
Inhabit it. Both the house and I are desolate.
Am I a thief that your watchman stops me?
Tell him, I know this man. He is my fate.”
The guard is getting used to his presence; and to his poetic outbursts. When he first spied him, the Sikh advanced threatening to tear him limb from limb and stuff his genitals every-which- where. Our household, attracted to the wall by the shouting, saw Ice-candy-man’s splintered arm raised to defend himself from the blows, and his tearing eyes, and Imam Din and Yousaf shouted: “Let him be, yaar, he’s harmless.”
The Sikh merely pulled the popsicle-man to his feet by his unbroken and frail arm and Ice-candy-man meekly walked away.
Even the Sikh has given way to his indefatigable persistence and now eyes him with a certain awe. For Ice-candy-man is acquiring a new aspect—that of a moonstruck fakir who has renounced the world for his beloved: be it woman or God. Repeating a couplet by Faiz as if it is a prayer, he murmurs:“There are other wounds besides the wounds of love—
Other nights besides passionate nights of love—”
Driven more, I suspect, by private demons than by fear of Mother’s threats, Ice-candy-man has not stepped inside our gates. Sometimes he brings with him his thermos of popsicles and does business in a desultory fashion, giving away more ices than he sells. And sometimes, when the Sikh guard accompanies our unseeing and unfeeling Ayah to Mr. Phailbus for homeopathic treatment, Ice-candy-man squats patiently outside the Phailbuses’ wall.
Often I accompany Ayah to Mr. Phailbus’s; and when we walk past the candy-man, he greets us courteously and does not stare at Ayah, but casts his eyes down. Ayah behaves as if he is invisible. And, his overgrown hair shading his eyes, he sometimes murmurs a couplet by another romantic poet, Ghalib:“My passion has brought me to your street—
Where can I now find the strength to take me back?”
Ayah behaves as if he is inaudible too.
He has become a truly harmless fellow. My heart not only melts—it evaporates when I breathe out, leaving me faint with pity. Even the guard lets down his guard and at times, when in the mood for company, squats by Ice-candy-man, gleaning wisdom from his comments on life and its ways and the wayward ways of God and men and women, until it’s time to accompany Ayah back. Then, Zauq’s poems and Ice-candy-man’s voice humming in our minds, we murmur:“Don’t berate me, beloved, I’m God-intoxicated!
I’ll wrap myself about you; I’m mystically mad.”
Each morning I awaken now to the fragrance of flowers flung over our garden wall at dawn by Ice-candy-man. The courtyard of the Recovered Women’s Camp too is strewn with petals; and sometimes with the added glitter of cheap candy wrapped in cellophane. And after Himat Ali sweeps up the red roses crushed by the sun, and the camp women the petals scattered near the tin gates in their courtyard as if they were no more than goat droppings, Ice-candy-man’s voice rises in sweet and clear song to shower Ayah with poems.
“Bewitching faces don’t remain buried
They reappear in the shapes of flowers.”
Until, one morning, when I sniff the air and miss the fragrance, and run in consternation to the kitchen, I am told that Ayah, at last, has gone to her family in Amritsar.
... And Ice-candy-man, too, disappears across the Wagah border into India.
Acknowledgments
I thank Rana Khan for sharing with me his childhood experiences at the time of Partition. He still bears the deep crescent-shaped scar on the back of his head and innumerable other scars.
I would also like to acknowledge my friend Nergis Sobani for typing my manuscripts; Phillip Lopate and Rosellen Brown for their good cheer and support; Ali Asani and Noman Haq for assisting me with the selection of the Urdu poems; the late Venketash Kulkarni whose literary enthusiasm I miss, and Reetika Vazirini, my flatmate, who so tragically passed away. I thank the Bunting Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts for providing me with the time and means to complete this novel and Inprint, in Houston, for the encouragement it gives all writers.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Urdu Literature edited by D. J. Matthews, C. Shackle, and Shahrukh Husain.
I thank Deepa Mehta for transforming Cracking India into the warm and poetic film Earth, and my friend Nasreen Rehman for her superb translation of the script into Urdu.
As always I thank my husband, Noshir, my brothers Minnoo and Feroze, and my children Mohur, Koko, Baku, and Parizad for their support and encouragement.
And finally I thank Emilie Buchwald, Hilary Reeves and all at Milkweed, and the friends of Milkweed, for their dedication to the cause of literature and quality publishing.
About the Author
Born in Karachi and raised in Lahore, Bapsi Sidhwa has been widely acclaimed as Pakistan’s finest contemporary novelist. She is the author of four novels: An American Brat, Cracking India, The Bride, and The Crow Eaters. Her work has been published in translation all over the world.
Sidhwa served on the advisory committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on issues of women’s development, and her novel Cracking India has been made into the film Earth by Indian director Deepa Mehta.
Sidhwa has taught at Columbia University, the University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College, Brandeis University, and Southampton University in the United Kingdom. She has also been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them a NEA Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and the Sitara-I-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest honor in the arts. She lives in Houston.
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Growing up in Pakistan in the 1970s, Feroza Ginwalla is precocious, impetuous, and deeply affected by a rising
tide of religious fundamentalism. When her family decides to send her to America for an extended holiday, a chain of amusing events and encounters ensues. She enrolls at a conservative Mormon college in Idaho, falls in love with a young man who is clearly not Parsee, and experiences her new country as only an immigrant can, even while her family worries that she is straying too far.
“Sidwha’s writing is brisk and funny, her characters painted so vividly you can almost hear them bickering.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Affecting, amusing, and profoundly enjoyable.”
—Washington Post Book World
“An exceptional novel.”
—Los Angeles Times
Loading his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and widowed mother-in-law into a bullock cart, Faredoon Junglewalla—Freddy for short--leaves his ancestral village in the forests of central India, bound for the bustling city of Lahore. Despite the nagging of his unbearable mother-in-law, Freddy’s business and family flourish, and he soon becomes a patriarchal figure in the thriving Parsee community. Through a series of comical yet illuminating events, this enduring family saga provides a vibrant window onto life in India under British colonial rule. And as the novel comes to a close, it is clear that this world stands on the threshold of historic transformation.
“A rollicking comic tale.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A delightful and perceptive view of a Parsee family’s rise from rags to riches.... A most intelligent and enjoyable novel.”
—Seattle Times
“[Bapsi Sidhwa’s] roguish hero is a genuine charmer, and her book is as warm and vital as it is funny.”
—Miami Herald
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Interior design by R. W. Scholes.
Typeset in Trajanus Roman
by The Typeworks.
Printed on acid-free EB Natural recycled paper
by Edwards Brothers.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
© 1991, Text by Bapsi Sidhwa
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be
reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011
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eISBN : 978-1-571-31827-5
Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges support from Anonymous: Emilie and Henry Buchwald; Bush Foundation; Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; Cargill Value Investment; Timothy and Tara Clark Family Charitable Fund; Dougherty Family Foundation; Ecolab Foundation; General Mills Foundation; Kathleen Jones; D. K. Light; McKnight Foundation; a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders; Sheila C. Morgan; Laura Jane Musser Fund; an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art; Navarre Corporation; Debbie Reynolds; Cynthia and Stephen Snyder; St. Paul Travelers Foundation; Ellen and Sheldon Sturgis; Surdna Foundation; Target Foundation; Gertrude Sexton Thompson Charitable Trust (George R. A. Johnson, Trustee); James R. Thorpe Foundation; Toro Foundation; Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation; and Xcel Energy Foundation.
Sidhwa, Bapsi.
[Ice-candy-man]
Cracking India : a novel / Bapsi Sidhwa. p. cm.
Previously published as: Ice-candy-man.
1. India—History—1947—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9540.9.S53I34 1991
823-dc20 91-12967
This book is printed on acid-free paper.