Asghar Abbas's Reviews > Ice Candy Man

Sidhwa is definitely one of my favorite, favorite Pakistani writers. She is an inspiration, truly. But this is a harrowing and very grim novel. Though it is arguably one of the best, if not the best work, on this theme, it is still bitter to read despite its excellence, or maybe because of it. It reveals all the raw wounds that are still fresh, without reflecting much on the healing part, but how do you heal from the wounds you inflicted yourself? The hand that had cut your skin and sliced your limbs was unsurprisingly your own. No balm for that.

Maybe that's the whole point, this book serves as a mirror, a witness. It is almost nonfictional in its unbiased, bleak, unsentimental, unrestrained accounting of that brutal time. I feel people outside the subcontinent can marvel at the sublime writing here more, can appreciate it more as they should, I mean that part of history is still very much hard and painful to read about. It didn't show us what the occupying outside force but what we did to each other. The British didn't divide and conquer us, they only conquered us; we were already divided and we still are. People as a whole are divided, in any place even within the same place.

Its companion piece movie Earth is visually stunning and the finest film ever made on this subject, a true motion picture. The movie highlighted a period often ignored and not looked into much deeper, but it is a fascinating piece of history that continues to teach us more about ourselves than we'd care to admit.