Ice-Candy-Man by Bapsi Sidhwa (Summary)

 

Ice-Candy-Man

by Bapsi Sidhwa

(Summary) 

Bapsi Sidhwa is an internationally renowned diasporic writer who was born in Pakistan in 1938. She is a Parsee who, as a young girl, witnessed and lived through the bloody Partition of India in 1947. An attack of polio in early childhood resulted in surgery and she was tutored at home till the age of fifteen. Due to her disability and lack of an extended family, Bapsi spent much time with the domestics in her household. To allay a lonely childhood, she took to voraciously reading whatever she could lay her hands on. At the age of thirteen, she appeared at her Matriculation examination as a private candidate. After that, she went on to do her graduation from Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore.

At the age of nineteen Bapsi got married in Bombay. This marriage took her away from the stern, orthodox atmosphere of her home in Pakistan and exposed her to the liberal, fun-loving Parsee community of Bombay. After five years of living in Bombay, Bapsi went through a divorce. She returned to Pakistan and later remarried. Her second marriage was to Noshir Sidhwa, a Parsee businessman of Lahore. In an interview, the writer describes herself as a “Punjabi-Pakistani-Parsee” woman because all three societies have exerted great influence on her life and imagination. This medley of identities is often reflected in her works. The strongest undercurrents in her works, however, are those which reflect her Parsee / Zoroastrian roots.

Bapsi Sidhwa acquired US citizenship in 1992. International recognition has frequently come Sidhwa’s way. She represented Pakistan in the Asian Women’s Congress of 1975. In 1991, she was awarded Pakistan’s highest honour in the arts, the Sitara-e Imtiaz. In 1993, she received the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award which has a $100,000 grant for literary pursuit. In 1994, she was also given the US National Endowment for the Arts grant. In 2002, Bapsi Sidhwa was inducted into the Zoroastrian Hall of Fame during the Millennium Celebrations. She has been a Writer-in-Residence and professor of English at a number of places in the US.

Some of Bapsi Sidhwa’s well-known novels besides Ice-Candy-Man are The Bride (also published as The Pakistani Bride), The Crow Eaters, and An American Brat (1993). Sidhwa heard the story of a young Pakistani girl who ran away from an intolerable marriage and was killed in the Hindukush Mountains by her tribal husband. Sidhwa’s obsession with this story grew into her first novel, The Bride. The Crow Eaters is a comedy named after a derogatory slang reference to the loud and continuous chatter that Parsees are seen to indulge in. It is a comedy that tells of the life of a Parsee family in Lahore. An American Brat (1994) is a novel of cultural clashes, adjustments and compromises required of a young Pakistani Parsee woman who decides to settle in the US. Many of her works have been translated into Russian, French and German.

Summary

Lenny Sethi is a four-year old polio-ridden child when the novel opens. She lives on the “affluent fringes” of pre-Partition Lahore with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sethi. Near Lenny’s home live her energetic Electric-aunt and her adenoidal son, Cousin, her Godmother and Godmother’s docile spouse, old husband, and Godmother’s youngest sibling, Silvester. The novel starts with Lenny and her Ayah encountering an Englishman who insists that the child walk on her own feet instead of being pushed in a pram by Ayah. Ayah, we are told, has a magnetic charm that attracts beggars, holy men, hawkers, cart-drivers, cooks, coolies, cyclists, soldiers alike. She is chocolate-brown, short, eighteen years old, has full-blown cheeks, a pouting mouth, smooth forehead, and a bouncy walk which never fails to draw the attention of any man in her vicinity.

Mayo Hospital’s Colonel Bharucha is Lenny’s physician. After Lenny’s surgery, Lahore’s small Parsee community descends on the Sethi household to enquire about Lenny’s condition. Lenny’s Mother nurtures a constant guilt for having left her daughter at the mercy of ayahs whose carelessness resulted in the child contracting polio. A month after surgery, Ayah takes Lenny in a stroller to visit the zoo where the caged lion terrifies the child while Ayah is entertained by Sher Singh, the zoo attendant.

Lenny’s parents share a warm marital relationship and she thrives emotionally in its security. Lenny’s household has a surfeit of domestics which underlines the affluence and social superiority of the master and the mistress. Adult conversations make Lenny understand that “the Parsees have been careful to adopt a discreet and politically naïve profile.” These perceptions have been fired by Col. Bharucha’s assertion that the Parsees “must hunt with the hounds and run with the hare” in the complex run-up to the Partition. Lenny remembers these words as her “first personal involvement with Indian politics: the Quit India sentiment that has fired the imagination of a subject people and will soon sweep away the Raj!”

Ayah and Lenny watch a march-past outside Godmother’s gate. It represents all the pomp and ceremony that has symbolized the might of the British Empire. Lenny is taken to the park opposite the Assembly Chambers by Ayah. This is Ayah’s favorite haunt and space for socializing and here congregate her various admirers. This park is a metaphorical arena in which a “little” India gathers—that is, conversations here mirror the diverse opinions of the common masses whose destiny is decided in the portals of power elsewhere. Ayah’s admirers include the Falettis Hotel cook, the Government house gardener, the elegant, muscled Masseur, and the lanky Ice-candy-man selling popsicles. Under cover of twilight, and when circumstance allows, Ayah is vigorously wooed by Masseur and Ice-candy-man. Masseur’s caressing is welcomed by her while Ice-candy-man’s overtures are pushed away with impartial nonchalance.

Having witnessed wooing, Lenny is initiated into an awareness of sexuality that belies her young age. As the child readily accommodates Ayah’s social circle, she is also taken along to places that Ayah’s admirers take Ayah to—fairs, restaurants, slaughter-houses. Lenny “learns about human needs, frailties, cruelties, and joys. Another source of Lenny’s sexual awareness is her cousin. At this juncture in her life, Lenny has frightening nightmares which sensitize her and help her connect with the pain of others.

We are introduced to Lenny’s younger brother Adi, a year and a half younger than her. He is fair and angelic, and Ayah likes to show him off as a specimen of babyhood so unlike the vapid British children playing in the exclusive Lawrence Gardens of Lahore. During winters, when Ice-candy-man’s popsicles do not sell and his fortunes plummet, he transforms himself into a seller of birds and goes about with cages overcrowded with sparrows and parrots. It’s the season when he adopts a selling strategy that reveals a bloodcurdling side to his nature. The strategy is to accuse his captive birds of creating an intolerable babble of noise and flourish a barber’s razor, threatening to dismember their throats. Ayah, Adi and Lenny loudly spur him on and all this invariably ends with the gullible Englishwomen buying all his birds and releasing them from their cages. With such quick, lucrative sales, Ice-candy-man often treats his three accomplices at Ayah’s favorite wayside restaurant in the Mozang Chungi locality. The only price that he extracts is from Ayah, who has to heroically struggle with Ice-candy-man’s exploring toe as she eats in the restaurant. Each time Ice-candy-man is faced with the inevitability of bidding goodbye, he plays his trump card. Being an “absorbing gossip and raconteur,” he comes out with a flow of news and gossip that the poor maid cannot resist, and he usually succeeds in stealing a few extra moments with Ayah. Significant occurrences outside the cocooned world of Ayah and Lenny are often revealed by Ice-candy-man—the German v-bomb that would turn the British to powdered ash; the drifting of Subas Chandra Bose, a Hindu, to the side of Japan; quotations from Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah.

It is 1944. While on a holiday in the Murree Hills, news come that the War is over, that victory lies with the Allies, that the “defector” Bose and the Japanese have been routed. The family holiday is cut short as Lenny’s family returns to Lahore to join a “Jashan” prayer celebrating the British victory. The event has been organized by the Parsees of Lahore. In the searing summer heat within the Fire Temple, tempers soar as Col. Bharucha addresses the gathering after the prayers. The dilemmas of a minority community—in this case, the Parsees—are brought to the forefront by the voices that express and seek to answer their dilemmas in the post-War scenario. They remember their ancestors’ arrival in India centuries back and try to evolve a way of adapting to the new realities that seem to be emerging in the undivided India of 1944. It is a lengthy discourse within the community that the Colonel presides over and manages to convince—Parsee safety lies in abiding by the rules of the land in which they choose to live.

Lenny’s feelings are overwhelmed by Mother’s chiselled beauty, her innocence, her motherliness but there also lurks a jealousy within Lenny as “Mother’s motherliness has a universal reach” which cannot be shared with any other. This chapter also provides comic relief after the starkness and plain-speaking of Col. Bharucha in the preceding one. We are introduced to the newly-married Shankars who have come to live as tenants in the rear portion of Lenny’s house, and their aura of night-long ecstasies are “very like the dark fragrance of Masseur’s skillful fingers beneath Ayah’s sari.” In lighter vein, the author also describes the favorite game of the domestics in Lenny’s house which consists of playfully trying to pull away the gardener, Hari’s dhoti. The only discordant note in the “good natured romp” is set by Muchho, the sweeper’s wife, who cannot abide her daughter, Pappoo, enjoying the spectacle and fells her to the ground.

Through Lenny’s eyes, we get a glimpse into the life and persona of the cook, Imam Din. Three times widowed and four times wed, Imam Din is a sixty-five years old man whose roving fingers get him the appellation “Catcher-in-the-kitchen.” Lenny, with able assistance from Ayah, is able to prevail upon Imam Din to take them to his village of Pir Pindo where his grandson, Dost Mohammad, lives. Pir Pindo introduces Lenny to rural Punjab and the issues that disturb village folk in the wake of the hostilities of World War II.

Lenny runs wild and free in the village, striking camaraderie with Ranna, Imam Din’s grandson. Pir Pindo’s inhabitants “dwell close to the earth” rooted, as they are, to the soil on which they toil and attuned, as they are, to the ground realities that are fast changing. In the evening, when bearded Sikh peasants from the neighbouring village of Dera Tek Singh visit Pir Pindo, there is talk of “trouble in the cities” which the Sarkar or British government cannot contain. It is a gathering of rustics—Muslims and Sikhs—who try to sound an optimistic note by reiterating their bonds of brotherhood which cannot be broken by the murderous violence that threatens to engulf the cities. Though the Muslim hosts and their Sikh guests swear to protect each other, their interaction prophesies the future when a whirlwind of violence shall overtake the region as a reaction to India’s Partition.

A tableau of perspectives and perceptions on the Raj is given through the ambience of a dinner hosted by Lenny’s parents. Each of the guests represent a segment of society as well as a slice of opinion that points to the contradictions inherent in the scheme to partition India along lines of religion. There is Mr. Singh, a turbaned and bearded Sikh, his American wife, “green-eyed, very white, placid and otherworldly,” Inspector General of Police Rogers, “tall, colourless, hefty-moustached, pale-eyebrowed,” his wife, Mrs. Rogers, “soft, plump, pretty and submissive.” Hidden beneath the table are Adi and Lenny who enjoy the suspense of their precarious hideout. What starts off as a mundane meal suddenly turns into an arena of conflicting opinions and insidious conflict that reflects a microcosm of perceptions which contributed to the bloodbath and destruction in the 1947 Partition. Mr. Singh’s opinions reflect not only the divergent aspirations and compulsions of the Indian Congress and the Muslim League of undivided India but also point to the rifts and differences between faiths and communities that eventually led to the massacres of the Partition. Lenny also remembers it as the time when her family acquired a Morris Minor car.

This chapter describes a mosaic of Lenny’s memories. She remembers the compound wall which served as the neighbourhood children’s rendezvous point where they gathered to “discuss world affairs [and] human relationships,” passing on to each other their perceptions of the adult world and its behaviour. She also remembers it as the time when Ayah acquired two new admirers—a Chinaman and the Pathan, Sharbat Khan. This was a period inscribed in Lenny’s memory as one in which Sharbat Khan brought news of the Hindu-Muslim “trouble,” the Congress-Muslim League dichotomies, and the Jinnah-Nehru differences. It is a chapter that underlines the passage of time, especially in the context of Lenny— “as the years advance, my sense of inadequacy and unworth advance.”

Lenny’s sense of inadequacy and unworth intensify as she is sent to the boredom of Mrs. Pen’s school and gets to hear relatives making snide comparisons with Adi— “It’s a pity Adi’s fair and Lenny so dark. He’s a boy. Anyone will marry him.” Lenny seeks refuge in telling tales and stealing. The small glass jars she steals from the Singh household are discovered by Slavesister. Lenny is made to acknowledge her misdemeanor by Godmother who says, “I’m afraid a life of crime is not for you….you are not suited to it.”

Lenny is taken by Mother to meet Gandhiji who is on a visit to Lahore. The child is overwhelmed by his aura—“The pure shaft of humour, compassion, tolerance, and understanding he directs at me fuses me to everything that is feminine, funny, gentle, loving. He is a man who loves women. And lame children. And the untouchable sweeper.” This encounter marks the rebirth of Lenny who emerges with greater self-confidence and assertion.

It’s a warm April as Ayah takes Lenny to the jam-packed Queen’s Park. Both Ice-candy-man and Masseur are raking in profits at their respective trades. Ayah’s admirers immediately throng around her. The conversation inevitably turns to the political situation and the storm clouds gathering on that front. That the break-up of India is imminent is reflected in the way Sidhwa describes the times—“One day everybody is themselves – and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols.” The Jumha (Friday) prayers set aside the Muslims; the caste marks “dehumanize” the Hindus; the white Englishmen look down upon the Anglo-Indians who look down upon Indian-Christians who, in turn, look down upon all non- Christians; and the Parsees are “reduced to irrelevant nomenclatures.” The now seven-years old Lenny is able to see through the hearts and minds of people but “their exteriors superimpose a new set of distracting impressions.” Ice-candy-man appears in a frightening new avatar, a “noisy and lunatic holy man – in striking attire,” which reinforce his image as a man given to trickery and deceit. Even humour has been partitioned along religious lines.

It is April again. Lenny and her playmates become aware of a black box that is mysteriously found and then, just as mysteriously, disappears from her parent’s bathroom. The children’s speculations about it underline the uncertainty and fears that beset the adult world.

Lenny once again visits Pir Pindo with Imam Din but finds its environment remarkably changed from the last visit. She is taken to Dera Tek Singh where fear and suspicion stalk the air even though it is the festival of Baisakhi which marks the birth of Sikhism, the winter wheat harvest, and the season’s fair. Sidhwa writes of a “chill spread by the presence of strangers: their unexpected faces harsh and cold.” These are the blue-turbaned Akalis whom even the old Sikh granthi or priest looks upon with suspicion as they perform the Ghadka or martial dance with staves and swords. The Sikhs of the Dera escort back their Muslim guests halfway to Pir Pindo.

In the evening, everyone crowds round the only radio in Pir Pindo and hears warnings issued both by Congress and Muslim League asking people not to pay heed to mischievous rumours. On their return to Lahore, news filters in of attacks on Muslims in Amritsar and Jullunder. The accounts are so brutal and bizarre that few lend them credence, and they are dismissed as Akali propaganda.

A fortnight after Lenny’s return, an army truck disgorges a family of villagers outside the gates of her home. She recognizes them as faces from Pir Pindo and learns that these are indeed landless, poor people from there who have chosen to be evacuated as nothing binds them to Pir Pindo. The other inhabitants of this village have chosen to stay behind as their land, their harvest, and their cattle cannot be evacuated. This is the first pointer in the novel to the tortuous dilemma in the minds of people and the mass migration of religious communities that took place in the wake of the subcontinent’s Partition.

It is winter again and Inspector General Roger’s murdered, mutilated body is discovered in a gutter. It presages the violence that shall spare no one. The young Lenny is overcome by horrific visions when she hears the news of the murder along with Slavesister’s comments on the British role in creating an impossible

situation. As the desultory conversation gets derailed and proceeds to the final rites of passage as practiced by people of different faiths, it is Godmother’s common sense that restores Lenny’s equanimity. Even the good natured romp that once had all the domestics trying to whip away Hari’s dhoti turns into a sinister game that falls flat and ends when Ice-candy-man emerges from the shadows and walks on to the lawn.

Lenny’s known world is expanding as she is taken by Ayah to various places at which the latter meets her admirers—Emperor Jahangir’s tomb, Shahjahan’s Shalimar Gardens, the slaughter house and the banks of the Ravi in low flood. Ayah is also seeing more of Masseur; it is his signature tune that is frequently on her lips. Sidhwa writes of and uncomfortable love triangle that is emerging— “Where Masseur is, Ayah is. And where Ayah is, is Ice-candy-man.” It is matters of the heart that have brought Ayah and Masseur close; it is Ayah’s penchant for gossip that that brings Ice-candy-man to her. When the gossip turns to the Bhagwandas, the tailor, running off with the Mission padre’s wife, Ice-candyman’s pent up jealousy surfaces with all its venom, and he castigates all masseurs “with their cunning fingers taking liberties.”

The periphery of Lenny’s world expands further. As the British prepare to leave, Lenny, Ayah and her band of admirers and acquaintances relocate to the Wrestler’s restaurant. Everybody seems to be in a combative mood as they boisterously quarrel. Ayah’s motley band that once shared a close camaraderie in the public gardens of Lahore, is falling apart. The heated conversation in the restaurant points once again to the seething agitation and anger within the common masses regarding the politics and the breakup of the land along religious lines. Lenny’s instinct makes her count the voices at the table. There are thirteen—Ice-candy-man, Masseur, the Government House gardener, butcher, Sher Singh, the sepoy from the barracks, the wrestler, the Falettis Hotel cook, Yousaf, Hari, Adi, Ayah, and Lenny herself. It’s a symbolic pointer to Christ’s Last Supper before Judas Iscariot betrayed him to the Romans for thirty pieces of silver. Lenny’s sense of unease is exacerbated by the echo of sirens and the chant of slogans that reverberate in the Lahore at this time.

The politician appears as the rabble-rouser—Master Tara Singh makes an appearance outside the Assembly Chambers. In the midst of a milling crowd, his oratory—“We will see how the Muslim swine get Pakistan!”—inspires only hatred and revenge as the Muslim crowd roars —“We’ll play Holi with their blood!” The battle-lines, which had long ago been drawn between people of different religious persuasions, give way to pitched battles and brutality. Lenny and Ayah witness it all when they are taken by Ice-candy-man to his tenement in Lahore’s Bhatti Gate area. They see a mob waving a speared child like a flag, a banya or tradesperson being run over by a vehicle, To the shaken Ayah and the whimpering Lenny, Ice-candy-man has only stark advice and macabre comment to offer—“You must make your hearts stout….The fucking bastards! They thought they’d drive us out of Bhatti! We’ve shown them!” The orgy of violence in the adult world is transferred to Lenny’s consciousness and later she rips apart one of her dolls with Adi’s assistance. In Lahore, the cycle of hellish fires and monstrous mobs remains unbroken as the Shankars and the Daulatrams flee from the city.

The Partition of India has been has become a reality. With ironic impersonality, Sidhwa describes the scenario—“Playing British gods … the Radcliffe Commission deals out Indian cities like a pack of cards. Lahore is dealt to Pakistan, Amritsar to India. Sialkot to Pakistan, Pathankot to India”—and sudden awareness dawns on Lenny—“I am a Pakistani. In a snap. Just like that.” Lenny’s eighth birthday falls on the day of Pakistan’s creation.

At Godmother’s, preparations are on for the arrival of Dr Manek Mody who is married to Godmother’s middle sister. Slavesister ironically remarks that a celebration is also due for another “new arrival” as “We’ve all produced a new baby…We’ve given birth to new nation. Pakistan!” On the radio comes Jinnah’s voice, “You are free. You are free to go your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in the state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of state…” In a masterstroke, these words of Jinnah sweep away religion, the very basis of Pakistan’s creation, to the periphery.

Things have “become topsy-turvy.” The Hindus have quietly fled from Lahore— the Shankars and the Daulatrams have been followed by the Mehtas, the Malhotras, and the Guptas. Old relationships and camaraderie have been shaken to such an extent that there is “dissension in the ranks” of Ayah’s admirers. Their gatherings in the Queen’s Gardens have stopped altogether; in twos, or threes, or singly, they come to the rear patch of lawn in Lenny’s house. These men now talk of the “uncontrollable butchering in Gurdaspur” and agree that they live in the age of “Kali-yuga,” the worst of times. Sharbat Khan does brisk business as the entire Lahore seems to have taken out its knives, choppers, daggers, axes, staves and scythes for him to sharpen. It’s only the sharp edge of fear that makes folks sharpen their weapons. Ice-candy-man brings the terrible news that “A train from Gurdaspur has just come in. Everyone in it is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim.” He has been shaken to the core as his relatives were on that train.

The mysterious black box makes a return. This time it is found in the bathroom of the Shankars’ empty rooms. When Lenny and Adi prise it open, they are aghast to find that it contains a double-barrel gun. Father catches the two red-handed with the weapon, which just as mysteriously and quickly disappears. Ice-candy-man is a changed person, having “acquired an unpleasant swagger and a strange way of looking at Hari and Moti,” the two Hindu domestics in the Sethi household. Presenting Ayah a golden guinea, he reveals it is one of the nine hundred that he extracted from a Hindu moneylender’s hiding place. He also narrates how Sher Singh got a dose of his own medicine when his former tenants turned up and misbehaved with the women in Sher Singh’s family. One of Sher Singh’s brother-in-law even died in the scuffle that followed. Lenny perceives a terrible change in the Ice-candy-man after the Gurdaspur train massacre—he seems to have lost his senses and is ready to kill for revenge. Non-Muslims in Lahore either think of leaving—as the Government House gardener and Ayah, who speaks of going to relatives in Amritsar—or adopt another faith— as Moti is planning to do by becoming a Christian. While Masseur reassures Ayah about her safety, Lenny sobs bitterly at the thought of her beloved Ayah going away.

In this section of the novel, Sidhwa allows historical facts and assessment to creep into her narrative.

Familiar faces in Lahore have gone. They have been replaced by Muslim refugees flooding into the city. On one hand, she refers to the mass migration of twelve million people between India and Pakistan; she talks of “the Hindus being favoured over the Muslims by the remnants of the Raj” which chooses to grant Nehru Kashmir as he was Kashmiri; she contrasts Nehru—with his “aura of power and presence … presumed to be Lady Mountbatten’s lover”—with Jinnah—being “past the prime of his elegant manhood … sallow, uncompromising.” On the other hand, Sidhwa weaves into her narrative the largely unknown threads of Jinnah’s life—that he married an eighteen-year old Parsee girl who was twenty-two years younger than him, and died at the age of twenty-nine; that he is “caricatured and portrayed as a monster” by British and Indian scholars when the poetess Sarojini Naidu, the “nightingale of India,” perceived behind his hauteur “a naïve and eager humanity, an intuition as quick and tender as a woman, a humour gay and winning as a child.”

Change is the byword in the newly-created Pakistan. Hari has become a Muslim—Himat Ali—shaved the bodhi on his head, been circumcised, and replaced his dhoti with a draw-string shalwar. The innocent Lenny gets a peep into male sexuality without really understanding what Cousin was doing while masturbating before her. The light-hearted banter and leg pulling at Godmother’s tea party for four students of the King Edward Medical College provides comic relief after the tautness of the narrative that described the traumatic events of Partition.

An air of “busy secrecy” makes Mother preoccupied and remote. Cousin, Adi and Lenny are all mystified by her and Electric-aunt’s comings and goings in the Morris Minor. It is Ayah who reveals that petrol is brought in the car for storage in the go down next to her quarters. This leaves the children aghast as they know that petrol is being rationed and it is an offence to store it. They are horrified by Ayah’s revelation and convinced that these adults are arsonists “setting fire to Lahore!” There is yet another climactic incident. As Lenny is escorted by Himat Ali to her school, they find a foul smell emanating from a bursting sack lying on the way. A closer inspection of it has Masseur’s mutilated body falling out of it. Ayah’s heartthrob “has been reduced to a body, a thing,” which has lost all its vitality and become only a numerical statistic in post-Partition killings.

Killings are followed by the looting and plunder of the palatial bungalows left behind by the Hindus who have fled to India. These homes resemble empty shells, “pining” for their inhabitants, “haunted” by their past. Some are occupied by refugees from India who are learning to “cope with grief over dead kin and kidnapped womenfolk.” They are metaphors for Ayah’s empty shell of existence, pining and haunted as she is by the memories of Masseur. She has stopped receiving any visitors and nurses “a great empty ache” within her. She takes to revisiting their trysting places and hums his favourite lines. While Masseur’s voice haunts Ayah, Ice-candy-man takes to following Ayah and Lenny wherever they go. Lenny is now old enough and sensitive enough to understand Ayah’s suffering by comparing her own future with that of the older woman’s—“I know at least that my lover lives somewhere in the distant and possible future: I have hope.” Ayah is dragged away from Lenny’s home by a fanatical crowd after Lenny truthfully reveals her hiding place to Ice-candy-man. As he “uncoils his lank frame into an upright position,” the young girl knows that she has betrayed her beloved Ayah. Lenny realizes that Ice-candy-man played on her innocence to extract information about Ayah and then exact retribution on a woman who spurned his advances in favour of another. A terrified Ayah simply disappears in the tumult of a Muslim crowd that takes her away despite all efforts by Mother and the household domestics to protect her.

Lenny is stricken by the terrible guilt of giving Ayah away to her persecutors. This guilt makes her resort to acts of self-inflicted torture to purge herself. Amidst the despair of Ayah’s disappearance, the wedding of Papoo comes up. It is a rather subdued affair as Lenny realizes that a drugged eleven-years old Papoo is to marry a dark, middle-aged, pockmarked dwarf who has an air of cruelty about him. Lenny can only be shocked when imagining the “grotesque possibilities” that await the bride in her marital life.

In Lenny’s neighbourhood, the Hindu doctor’s vacant house is getting filled with mysterious female inhabitants. A fierce, burly Sikh stands guard outside. Cousin, Adi and Lenny are all agog and imagine that it is a women’s jail that has sprung up. The “eerie desolation of their pallid faces” stands testimony to the suffering of these women. One of these women—Hamida—is brought to Mother as a possible replacement for Ayah, for whom everyone is the lookout—Mother, Electric-aunt, Himat Ali, Sharbat Khan, Imam Din, Yousaf, and Lenny herself.

Then come Imam Din’s “guests” from Pir Pindo—his kin who have survived, by the skin of their teeth, the massacres perpetrated by the Sikhs and Hindus. Despite granthi Jagjeet Singh’s advice, most of Pir Pindo’s Muslim villagers were not able to get away in time and met a grisly end trying to remain on their ancestral lands. One survivor who makes it to Lahore is Ranna and he has a horrific tale to tell of his escapade. He is the only survivor from the “brutally altered” Pir Pindo; his family tragically “has ceased to exist.” Ranna’s tale is the sub-plot of the novel.

Cousin’s cook hints that Ayah is in Lahore. Lenny becomes aware of Godmother’s “network” which gives the old lady random knowledge and immense power; it helps get Ranna a place as a boarder in Convent of Jesus and Mary, and convinces Lenny that Godmother is on Ayah’s track.

In the meantime, the mystery of women housed in the Hindu doctor’s vacant premises deepens—their wails and cries verge on the inhuman. The restrained voices of Lenny’s parents fighting it out in the bedroom add to the young girl’s unease. It is Hamida who clears the mystery of the wailing women. They are there in a camp for “fallen” women who were kidnapped and taken away from their families which will not take them back as the men “can’t stand their women being touched by other men.” Lenny’s world, however, is “athrob” with men as she is entering teenage and she imagines being swept off her feet by all kinds of daring admirers.

Lenny and Hamida take to observing these wretched women from the servant quarters’ roof. Lenny prays that their husbands and families take them back. Hamida, as one of the fallen sisterhood, can only curse her kismet in the hands of which she is a puppet. To prove her faith in destiny, she narrates to Lenny a depressing story in which a sixteen-years old prince is eaten alive by a tiger despite all the care and protection that his father’s soldiers could provide. Lenny’s response—that the story is not as unreal as it is unfair—reveals the sensitivity of the girl. Lenny is sad as the hunt for Ayah seems to have been called off.

Cousin has taken to avoiding Lenny who becomes more and more frustrated at his indifference. The more distant he is, the more she thinks about him. But all is forgotten when Cousin rushes into her room and, bolting the door, announces that he has seen Ayah, all made up, in a taxi at Charing Cross. Knowing that the news will soften Lenny, he tries to feel her body but a new confident Lenny violently pushes him away. We see a mature Lenny making him understand that his advances are unwelcome, and they should wait to see how they feel about each other after a few years before indulging in physical intimacies.

Lenny herself catches a glimpse of Ayah in a taxi, squashed between two thin poets. That evening, Mother announces that Godmother wants Adi and Lenny to spend the night with her. When Hamida and Lenny go to Queens Garden that evening, they find it a changed place. Beneath the marble canopy, the Queen’s bust has gone and the place has “depressingly altered.” Muslim families now

monopolise the garden and the world seems to have changed forever. When Lenny breaks the news to Godmother that she has seen Ayah, the old lady speaks to Lenny as one would to an adult. She reveals that Mother and Electricaunt have been involved in rescuing kidnapped women, either sending them back to their families or arranging for them to be housed in the Recovered Women’s Camps. They have also been smuggling rationed petrol to help their Hindu and Sikh friends escape from the frenzy of Muslim mobs in Pakistan. One of the women, Mother arranged for, was Ayah, who was sent back to her relatives in Amritsar. But Cousin’s news contradicts Godmother’s claims. He reveals to Lenny that Ayah is going around all made up as “she has converted her profession” and become a dancing-girl at Hira Mandi, Lahore’s red-light district.

Godmother then confirms that Ayah is indeed in Lahore, that she is a married woman, not a dancing-girl, and that her husband is coming to visit Godmother that evening. Time drags till evening when Ayah’s husband makes an appearance. A surprised Lenny realizes that the husband is Ice-candy-man who “has changed from chest-thrusting paan-spitting and strutting goonda into a spitless poet…. His stream of brash talk has been replaced by a canny silence.” Ice-candy-man reveals that he lives in Hira Mandi as he is descended from the dancing-girls of the kotha. He talks of Ayah, now his wife, as one who has been accepted by his people, who has “the voice of an angel and the grace and rhythm of a goddess,” that he is her slave who worships her. Ice-candy-man’s assertions infuriate Godmother into lashing out at him—“You permit her to be raped by butchers, drunks, and goondas and say she has come to no harm? … She was lifted in February and you married her in May? What were you doing all that time?” His silence only reiterates the torture Ayah was made to go through so as to ensure that no man would claim her and she could then be possessed by Ice-candy-man. Godmother’s severe castigation of Ice-candy-man marks the end of Lenny’s age of innocence and her transition into experience. Lenny’s innocence is “laid waste that evening by the emotional storm that raged. The confrontation between Ice-candy-man and Godmother opened her eyes “to the wisdom of righteous indignation over compassion.”

Lenny considers Godmother as a ministering angel in a person’s hour of need. The old lady decides to visit Ayah in Hira Mandi as “as she (Ayah) is ashamed to face us.” Lenny can now understand Ayah’s pain—“I know Ayah is deeply, irrevocably shamed. They have shamed her. Not the men in the carts … but Sharbat Khan and Ice-candy-man and Imam Din and Cousin’s cook and the butcher and the other men she counted among her friends and admirers.” When Godmother and Lenny set their eyes on Ayah in her Hira Mandi house, she is dressed as a “rouged and lipsticked” bride with lowered eyes. It is only when she raises her eyes that her tragedy is writ large on her face—the “radiance and animation has gone … the soul has been extracted from its living body.” She has been given a new name—Mumtaz, the name of a Moghul queen—and she is desperate to go back to her own people in Amritsar. Though Godmother tries to impress upon her that her family might not want to take her back and enquires whether Ice-candy-man mistreats her, Ayah is clear that she can never forget what happened and wants to get away from her husband. Seeing that Ayah has become a shadow of her former self, Lenny perceives that “Ayah is haunted by her past … she must get away from the monster who has killed her spirit and mutilated her ‘angel’s’ voice.” Lenny comes to understand that Hira Mandi is both the cultural pulse as well as forbidden fruit of Lahore; it simultaneously evokes disguised interest and veiled contempt.

The German Dr Selzer has replaced Col. Bharucha as the Sethis’ family physician. As he and the Phailbuses socialize with Mother on the veranda, there is a sudden commotion in the neighbouring compound. As everyone rushes to the scene of commotion, they find the burly Sikh guard wrestling with someone and bellowing abuses. When the two men are pulled apart, it is found that it is Ice-candy-man who was in the fray with the Sikh. It turns out that Godmother has used her resources and had Ayah spirited away from Hira Mandi by the police. Ayah is brought to the Women’s Camp to be registered by the Ministry for the Rehabilitation of Recovered Women before being sent across the border to Amritsar. When pleading and threats could not hold her back, Ice-candy-man and his cronies appeared in three galloping carts and tried to take her away but the Sikh guard’s fierce resistance foiled this attempt.

With his arm broken, Ice-candy-man has taken to haunting Warris Road where Ayah lives in the Recovered Women’s Camp. He often recites romantic verses and has acquired “a new aspect – that of a moonstruck fakir who has renounced the world for his beloved.” The Sikh guard’s aggression has given way to tolerance as far as Ice-candy-man is concerned. Whenever Ayah has to be taken to Mr. Phailbus for homeopathic treatment, Ice-candy-man tries to waylay her and recite poetry to her. But for Ayah he is invisible and inaudible. Each day, he flings fragrant petals over Lenny’s garden wall and the courtyard of the Recovered Women’s Camp; each day they are swept aside as if they were “goat droppings.” Then one day there are no petals. Lenny is told that Ayah has at last gone to her family in Amritsar and Ice-candy-man has also disappeared across the Wagah border into India.