Months after her son’s Indian passport was secured, Bapsi Sidhwa, a writer living in post-partition Lahore, went to the Wagah border hoping to find him. His life was one of being torn apart by partition.
Border restrictions forced Sidhwa to leave his son in Bombay after ending his marriage with his father. She returned to her childhood city of Lahore, where she contracted polio at age 8, was home-schooled for 14, married at 19 and cultivated ambitions to become a writer.
“Whenever there was a bridge game, I would hide and write,” she said in a 1991 interview with The New York Times.
He died on Wednesday in Houston, Texas. She was 86 years old. She survives through novels known for their comedy, tragedy and seamless fusion of the political and the personal.
She didn’t start writing until she was 40, on her second marriage.
“… I want to share how the partition affected every life. It affected my life with my son and it put me through a period of grief for years! You don’t forget it,” she said in a 2013 interview with Stanford University.
Eventually, her son returned to her through the Wagah border. Partition will always be a favorite topic.
Her first novel, The Crow Eaters (1978), published to much acclaim in Pakistan, was about a Parsi businessman, an abbot of his community, who cannot stand his mother-in-law. The book tracks his fortunes and failures as he uproots his family life in central India and moves to Lahore.
In a 2012 interview with Dawn, she said, “It was the first novel written about Parsis, and the community was not used to seeing itself fictionalized or made fun of.”
It was her third novel, Ice-Candy Man (1988), in which she tackled a more national subject, the story of a Parsi family growing up in Lahore (much like her own), surrounded by an eccentric working-class cast. Characters who join the teenage ex-polio-sufferer protagonist (much like himself).
The novel was reprinted for its American publication – Cracking India – for a change. was named which were not always fans.
“The American title…suggests another Midnight’s Children, which it isn’t; the simplicity of her original title…is true to the scale of her portrayal. The story isn’t about division, though division looms large in its pages. It’s…a little girl…who 8 has arrived when one does not feel like celebrating a birthday and who worries as much about the freedom (and fear) of midnight,’ wrote Shashi Tharoor in a 1991 review of the novel.
A key childhood memory that led to the Ice-Candy Man was Sidhwa walking with his gardener as a child and seeing a corpse inside a fence sack, an event that deeply affected him.
A similar sense of the personal pervades many of his other works: the arrival of Zoroastrians from Persia fleeing Islamic persecution on the coast of Gujarat;
In an attempt to dissuade them, the local king sent a jug of milk to their ship, indicating that there was no place for them in his land. They added sugar to it and sent it back, indicating that their community would sweeten anything they mixed with it.
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