Betrayal of Innocence. Review on Ice Candy Man - Bapsi Sidhwa

In Ice-Candy Man, Lenny, the daughter of a well-to-do jobholder is the narrative persona. Her narration starts in her fifth year and ends after her eighth birthday. . Rahel and Estha and Lenny, who are precocious, the ''sensitiveness of a snail.'' Lenny of Ice-Candy Man recalls her first conscious memory of her Ayah thus: ''She passes pushing my pram with the unconcern of the Hindu goddess she worships'' (p.3). She also remembers her house on Warris Road in Lahore and how she used to find refuge in her godmother's ''one- and-a-half room abode'' and succeeded in getting away from the ''gloom'' and the ''perplexing unrealities'' of home. These perplexities include her own polio affliction, which she uses as an armor against a ''pretentious world,'' her mother's extravagance, her father's dislike of it, her strain to fill up the ''infernal silence'' during her father's ''mute meals'' by ''offering laughter and lengthier chatter'' (''Is that when I learnt to tell tales?''). These perplexities also invlve the household staff. It includes her very dear Ayah, an eighteen year old dusky beauty, Shantha, Imam Din, the genial-faced cook of the Sethi household, Hari, the high-caste Hindu, Moti, the outcaste gardener, Mucho, his shrew of a wife, Papoo, his much abused child, -- and the Ice-Candy-Man, a raconteur and a ''born gossip'' who never stops touching Ayah with his ''tentative toes'' -- and masseur, a sensitive man who loves Ayah and is loved by her much to the chagrin of ice candy man and last but certainly impressive Ranna, the boy whom Lenny befriends when she visits his village with Imamdin and numerous others.

The book looks at Partition through the experiences of Lenny (around the same age Sidhwa was at the time, and similarly polio-afflicted), whose own family isn’t directly affected by the riots but who has an emotional compact with some of the people who are -- like her beloved Ayah, and the local ice-candy man. I read the book around 1999 (when Deepa Mehta’s film version Earth was released) and was impressed by the way it glided, almost imperceptibly, from the commonplace to the horrific: from the quotidian details of Lenny’s family life to the spectre of Partition violence and the emotional betrayal at the book’s core