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W's Reviews > Ice Candy Man
Ice Candy Man
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Also published as Cracking India,this powerful,raw and haunting book is Bapsi Sidhwa's masterpiece.
I was born decades after Partition,but just reading about the slaughter taking place at the time is blood curdling.
Bapsi Sidhwa is herself a Parsi,so her account is fairly neutral.She was a young girl herself at the time,living in Lahore.Likewise,the narrator is a young Parsi girl Lennie.She is polio stricken like Sidhwa herself was.
The most powerful part of the book deals with the killing spree that went on at the time,as Hindus,Muslims and Sikhs slaughtered each other as the British finally prepared to leave India at the end of World War II.
Mobs were on the rampage,innumerable killings were taking place,women were being raped,entire neighbourhoods were being destroyed and a mass exodus of refugees was underway in either direction.Many of them would not make it to the other side.
Sidhwa masterfully depicts the chaos.She also narrates the story of a boy whose entire family was slaughtered in cold blood in a Punjab village.
My parents were certainly lucky that their village in the Punjab was a fairly long way from the border,and they didn't have to be uprooted.But Lahore and villages on the border had become battlegrounds.
As for Ice Candy Man himself and his wickedness,I didn't like the character.This part of the story didn't interest me much.The book works far better as a depiction of the broad sweep of events.
It was interesting to find that this book has even been taught in schools in the US,and that a petition was made to ban it for pornographic content.That's rather amusing,Sidhwa does not shy away from bawdy humour and rather graphic situations.But how many books are banned because of that ?
The book was also adapted as a film in India,Earth.Out of curiosity,I watched it on youtube.There is no comparison with the book,the movie is fairly ordinary.Bollywood superstar Amir Khan plays Ice Candy Man,and looks thoroughly odious.
Sidhwa has written other books,but those are just not comparable to this,easily her best effort.
I was born decades after Partition,but just reading about the slaughter taking place at the time is blood curdling.
Bapsi Sidhwa is herself a Parsi,so her account is fairly neutral.She was a young girl herself at the time,living in Lahore.Likewise,the narrator is a young Parsi girl Lennie.She is polio stricken like Sidhwa herself was.
The most powerful part of the book deals with the killing spree that went on at the time,as Hindus,Muslims and Sikhs slaughtered each other as the British finally prepared to leave India at the end of World War II.
Mobs were on the rampage,innumerable killings were taking place,women were being raped,entire neighbourhoods were being destroyed and a mass exodus of refugees was underway in either direction.Many of them would not make it to the other side.
Sidhwa masterfully depicts the chaos.She also narrates the story of a boy whose entire family was slaughtered in cold blood in a Punjab village.
My parents were certainly lucky that their village in the Punjab was a fairly long way from the border,and they didn't have to be uprooted.But Lahore and villages on the border had become battlegrounds.
As for Ice Candy Man himself and his wickedness,I didn't like the character.This part of the story didn't interest me much.The book works far better as a depiction of the broad sweep of events.
It was interesting to find that this book has even been taught in schools in the US,and that a petition was made to ban it for pornographic content.That's rather amusing,Sidhwa does not shy away from bawdy humour and rather graphic situations.But how many books are banned because of that ?
The book was also adapted as a film in India,Earth.Out of curiosity,I watched it on youtube.There is no comparison with the book,the movie is fairly ordinary.Bollywood superstar Amir Khan plays Ice Candy Man,and looks thoroughly odious.
Sidhwa has written other books,but those are just not comparable to this,easily her best effort.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
November 25, 2015
– Shelved
October 16, 2017
– Shelved as:
pakistani-fiction
April 15, 2020
– Shelved as:
seen-as-movies
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Saima
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rated it 5 stars
Aug 10, 2020 02:16AM
I find that reading about massacres of partition always hit me hard for some reason. Even if my family wasn't involved or that I wasn't there. The familiarity of and connection with the names of people, places and experiences is altogether too real as compared to reading about tragedies elsewhere. I recently read a book on Jerusalem and that is a city that has had one blood bath after another over its 3000 year history but I was a dispassionate reader for some reason- right after that I read a short story on partition and that was an emotional gut punch.
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Quite right,it all happened right here,it resonates with me too.
