Ice Candy Man

Ice-Candy-Man describes the harrowing tale of Partition days when the lofty ideal of nationalism was suddenly bartered for communal thinking, resulting in unprecedented devasta¬tion, political absurdities and deranged social sensibilities. Sid-hwa has sensitively portrayed the political anxiety and social in¬security which was shared by all the divided people during the Partition days.

The days preceding the largest forced migration of population in human history, and the demographic dislocation it entailed, had their own complexities. People who have sur¬vived this holocaust, or witnessed it from a distance try to exor¬cise this past through memories. Imaginative and literary recrea-tion helps people to recover "some of the lost density of life. Perhaps this is the reason that prominent literary figures in India andPakistan have constantly taken up themes related with Parti¬tion and try to.replicate their memories in all details. Chaman Nahal's Azadi, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Manohar Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges, B. Raj an's The Dark Dancer, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines are expressions of different sensi¬tivities about Partition.

However, Ice-Candy-Man is different from these works as it presents the turbulent upheaval of Parti¬tion from the viewpoint of a handicapped Parsi girl child. Stressing the vulnerability of human lives, and maintaining a fine balance between laughter and despair, Sidhwa presents various nuances and complexities related with a decision of political pragmatism through Lenny, a child narrator and chronicler. Lenny looks at characters belonging to different communities through the prism of her own Parsi sensitivity. Shorn of biases the child's narration also imparts an authentic credibility to the novel. Like most of the other novels, Ice-Candy-Man also pres¬ents the horrifying details of cruelty, human loss and dislocation, but it does so with a subtle irony, witty banter and parody, forc¬ing the readers to desist from maudlinly sensitive reactions, and to concentrate more on the inscrutability of human behaviour. It also describes a society which has lost its courage, and therefore only crumbles away. It not only presents the barbaric details of atrocities perpetrated by one community over other, but also de¬lineates various manifestations of pettiness and degenerated val¬ues which, like termite, had hollowed the inner structural strength of the society.

Ice-Candy-Man narrates a society which has deflated chivalrous attitudes, encourages petty self-serving tendencies and indifferent tolerance of pogroms so long the self stays alive with a whole skin; a society which was given what it deserved--a sanguine and blood-curdling mindset, which made Partition of India a grim reality. The characters and events of the novel suggest that "vanity, hypocrisy and self-deception . . . somehow constitute a truer reality than altruism, self-sacrifice