Bapsi Sidhwa wrote Ice Candy Man in 1988. Four years later, the book was published in the United States as Cracking India. Deepa Mehta made a film based on the book in 1998, called 1947: Earth. The different titles suggest varied interpretations and responses to the novel’s main theme, which echoes the trauma and chaos of the Partition that accompanied independence in 1947.
Ice Candy Man, Sidhwa’s original title, stands for the man, never named, who depending on the season and his penchant, sells popsicles (summer) and caged birds (winter). He is for a time is also a peon in Lahore’s government house. In the mid-1940s, this last job makes him privy to gossip and information relating to the British government’s intentions about independence and the country’s impending division.
Sidhwa, born in 1936 in Lahore, based much of the book on her early recollections of the period. To the book’s narrator, the four-year-old Lenny who is polio-afflicted (as was Sidhwa), Ice Candy Man is a hero. He often indulges her with popsicles, she is impressed with his bravado when he’s wooing her ayah Shanta-bibi, and his pranks amuse her considerably. He is also a poet of sorts, or rather fond of quoting other poets. This quirk comes to the...
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