Remembering Bapsi Sidhwa by Dr Maryam Mirza
Wasafiri remembers Bapsi Sidhwa, one of the most important writers of South Asian historical and feminist fiction, in this tribute by Dr Maryam Mirza. Born in Pakistan, Sidhwa wrote the novels Ice-Candy Man and The Crow Eaters, among others, covering themes of colonialism, violence against women, and Partition.
Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1988 Partition novel, Ice-Candy Man, quite understandably, is likely to remain her most widely read book. Despite the existence of other works of fiction, such as Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story ‘Khol Do’ (1948), and the two-part Hindi novel, Jhoota Sach (1958;1960) by Yashpal, when Sidhwa’s novel was first published, the multilayered violence that women experienced at the time of Partition was still shrouded in silence. Her subtle portrayal of Ayah, a young Hindu woman living and working in the Muslim-majority city of Lahore – which would later become part of Pakistan – and her decision to narrate Ayah’s tragic story through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl with disabilities makes the novel a truly remarkable literary exercise in feminist historiography. Her novels, The Pakistani Bride (first published in 1983 under the title The Bride), which is set primarily in what was then known as the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and Water (2006), which is a literary adaptation of Deepa Mehta’s film of the same name, focusing on the plight of Hindu widows in pre-Partition India, are also deeply concerned with gendered oppression and female unfreedom.
Given their subject matter, however, these novels afford us only a few glimpses into Sidhwa’s comic genius; in Ice-Candy Man, this is mostly in the form of the eponymous character’s shenanigans before his sisters are brutally murdered. In Chapter 4, for instance, we see Ice-Candy Man masquerading as a ‘birdman’. Carrying gigantic cages full of birds, he parks himself either behind the Lahore Gymkhana tennis lawns or outside the Punjab Club, which are both frequented by memsahibs, and ‘at strategic moments’, pretends to ready himself to cut said birds’ throats with a barber’s razor as punishment for doing ‘too much chi chi’. The prospect of cruelty to animals predictably earns him the ire of the ‘tender-hearted Englishwomen’, who take it upon themselves to rescue the birds from Ice-Candy Man’s evil clutches by purchasing them by the dozen. Soon afterwards, he transforms himself into ‘Allah’s telephone’. Donning a shift dress, ‘thumping a five-foot iron trident with bells tied near its base’, and his arms covered with bangles, Ice-Candy Man gleefully dupes gullible bystanders into paying him to convey their pleas to Allah by creating a direct connection with the divine being using a copper wire and an invisible dial.
But it is in Sidhwa’s first, originally self-published novel, The Crow Eaters (1978), that her comedic talents and skills as a satirist are on full and glorious display. (While The Bride was written before The Crow Eaters, it was published later.) The Crow Eaters was also the first novel of hers that I read as a teenager in Lahore, during a year in which most of my English-language reading had been centred on authors like Daphne du Maurier, D. H. Lawrence, and John Wyndham. I had never heard of Sidhwa and caught sight of the spine of her novel on the school library shelves purely by accident; it was her only book available in the library that day. Intrigued by her name, the title of the book and, eventually, by the brief author biography and Sidhwa’s Lahori roots, I hastened to borrow the novel and devoured it in one greedy gulp later that evening. Sidhwa’s abiding connection with Lahore, despite her later relocating to Houston, Texas, is evident not only in her decision to set most of her novels, including The Crow Eaters and An American Brat (1993), either wholly or partly in this city, but also in the anthology, City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore, that she edited in 2005, with her introduction to the book entitled ‘City Beloved’.
Bawdy and irreverent, The Crow Eaters charts the unscrupulous rise of Faredoon/Freddy Junglewalla, a Parsee businessman, in early twentieth-century Lahore. Propelled by an irrepressible appetite for success and a dogged resolve to further his and his community’s economic interests, he happily lives by the dictum that the sun rises and sets ‘in the Englishman’s arse’. To achieve his ends (which do not preclude building schools, hospitals, and orphanages), Freddy cynically curries favour with the British rulers and does not hesitate from committing arson. Sidhwa’s characterisation of Freddy turns distinctly disturbing at times, not least when he attempts to kill Jerbanoo, his formidable mother-in-law, in the same fire that wins him a life-changing insurance payout. Freddy also treats Rosy – an Anglo-Indian girl who his son Yazdi is in love with and who has been forced into sex work – with ruthless brutality.
Much of the novel is devoted to Freddy’s hate-hate relationship with Jerbanoo. Award-worthy actors both, Freddy and Jerbanoo lie, manipulate, and strategise in a decades-long struggle for dominance in the domestic sphere. But it is Jerbanoo and her antics that make us laugh out loud. She is possibly the worst houseguest to be found in literary fiction: on a visit to London with her daughter and Freddy, having been castigated for making their British host’s life miserable by bullying her incessantly and having been told to remain in her room on the first floor, she defecates on the landing in the middle of the night to make her feelings clear. This episode compels Freddy to move the family into a hotel for the remainder of their visit to the imperial capital where, hampered by the long queues for the shared bathing facilities and by Freddy’s orders to bathe no more than once every three days, Jerbanoo takes matters into her own hands to ensure that she is not deprived from bathing twice daily, as is her wont. She fills a small tub with water and carries it to the balcony of the hotel room; then ‘squatting in her mid-thigh drawers and homespun bodice’, she begins washing herself ‘to her heart’s content’. Jerbanoo’s ‘happy splashing’ sessions are interrupted when an English couple move into the room below hers a few days later and find themselves drenched. Baffled, they ask her ‘where on earth all this water was coming from’, only to watch her point ‘a prophetic hand at the cloudless sky’ and blame the non-existent rain. When the Englishman shows up at her door, demanding a more credible explanation, she instructs him to not ‘poke his nose into her’ and then threatens to have him arrested. When this fails to deter him, she informs him that she was washing her bottom as she is not like the ‘dirty Englishmen’ who ‘dry-clean’ their behinds, causing the irate Englishman to crumple visibly and flee the hotel.
If Ice-Candy Man leaves us in no doubt as to Bapsi Sidhwa’s status as one of the most important writers of South Asian historical and feminist fiction, re-reading The Crow Eaters, following her sad demise last December, once more brought home to me the wonderful alchemy that informs Sidhwa’s craft, where humour, compassion, social critique, and a profound understanding of the workings of the human head and heart come together in unique harmony. It reminded me also just how entertaining and full of fun postcolonial fiction can be.
Works Cited
City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore, edited by Bapsi Sidhwa. Penguin India, 2005.
Manto, Sa’adat Hasan. 'Open It!' Translated by Muhammad Umar Memon. Annual of Urdu Studies no. 27, 2012, pp. 74–76.
Sidhwa, Bapsi. The Crow Eaters. Daunt Books, 2015 (1978).
Sidhwa, Bapsi. Ice-Candy Man. Penguin India, 1989 (1988).
Sidhwa, Bapsi. The Pakistani Bride. Milkweed Editions, 2008 (1983).
Sidhwa, Bapsi. An American Brat. Milkweed Editions, 1995 (1993).
Sidhwa, Bapsi. Water. Milkweed Editions, 2006.
Yashpal. This is Not that Dawn. Translated by Anand. Penguin Books, 2010.
Photo by Dr Muhammad Amer on Unsplash
