Across the first month of 2020, Sophie Baggott is sharing her thirty favourite books by women from across the world. Find out more about her project to read women writers from every country worldwide here.
Also published as Ice Candy Man, this is a remarkable novel set against the 1947 Partition of India, written by Bapsi Sidhwa – a Pakistani American novelist of Gujarati Parsi descent who writes in English.
a nutshell: a Parsee girl, Lenny, candidly narrates her 1940s Lahore childhood as it mutates from a life of carefree mischief & chatter among miscellaneous friends to Partition-provoked horrors & heartache
a line: “Don’t hog God!”
an image: a colonel retells the story of the Parsis’ migration to India from Persia during the Arab invasion in 600s AD, evoking how the Indian Prince noted their arrival with a full glass of milk as a polite signal of his aversion to outsiders & their potentially disturbing alien ways; the Parsee forefathers returned the milk with a teaspoon of sugar stirred in – an indication that they’d be absorbed harmoniously into the country and sweeten the lives of his subjects
a thought: privy to adults’ tense discussions of the inevitable split, Lenny begins to notice that everyone she knows suddenly goes from being just themselves to being ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Sikh’, or ‘Christian’; tribalism is forced onto them – as the country breaks, so too does her own community fracture
a fact: the book served as the basis for the 1998 film Earth
want to read Cracking India (aka Ice Candy Man)? visit here
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 
Hi, a friend bought me a copy of this book under its original name when I was in India last November. He was selecting “must reads” of Indian lit. But please note that the downing of the jet you link to above happened a year ago on February 27. I was there at the time and given the current state of protest and pockets of unrest in India and Kashmir you had me concerned it was happening again. If this an old post, please update.
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Hello, I’m so sorry for that – you’re right that it was an old post and I had forgotten it was a time-sensitive one. I’ve edited it, thank you for alerting me!
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