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ICE CANDY MAN Mother Earth A decade after the novel, Bapsi Sidhwa gets her due thanks to the movie. By Arthur J Pais Bapsi Sidhwa has many crackling stories about how she learnt novelists should let directors work in peace. The following is a favourite. "Maybe I shouldn't have written it down," she laughs, "but it is funny and true." Deepa Mehta is shooting a key scene in 1947 -- Earth, based on Sidhwa's novel Cracking India. The writer, who is visiting Delhi from her Houston home to watch the shooting, wonders if a scene could be changed to be true to her book. When the raffish ice candy man (Aamir Khan) hands over a cache of stolen gold coins to the ayah (Nandita Das), Sidhwa feels he should not close her hands. Let her palms be open, as in the book, when she tells him she won't have the gold. Mehta hears of Sidhwa's suggestion and wants to talk to her. "As she approaches," Sidhwa wrote in The New York Times, "black hair spread, eyes ablaze in the night light, she resembles the Hindu goddess Kali. I quake. Deepa brings her hands together in a loud clap and holds them before her bowed head in the posture of an angry supplicant: a very angry one. 'Please don't ever do this to me again There is only one director on the set'." When she saw the completed film, Sidhwa says she loved the scene -- and various changes made from the book. "It took me some time to realise that Deepa could not have had all the characters I have in my book. Then it would not be a film but a mini-series," says Sidhwa. "I gave away my baby to her in full trust. And she has made an honest, beautiful, splendid and touching film." The story is told through the eyes of eight-year-old polio-stricken Lenny, who not only witnesses hatred and violence during Partition but also ends up unwittingly betraying the ayah she loves dearly. Though Sidhwa's eight-year-old book, which was published as Ice Candy Man in India and the United Kingdom, was a critical success, it is with the film's release that she feels it is getting wider recognition. In the past month, Sidhwa has given over two dozen interviews, including one to The Houston Chronicle in her hometown. Many interviewers ask her how much of herself is in Lenny. Sidhwa, who still has a slight limp owing to the polio she fought as a child in Lahore, answers the question carefully in her softly resolute voice that has not been affected by a Texan accent though she has lived in the Lone Star state for nearly two decades. "Although as a writer I have given Lenny many incidents from my life, Lenny is not me," the 63-year-old writer says. "I was not an astute or observant child. In fact, even now I am not observant, but my unconscious or my intuition picks up the details I am not aware of." Sidhwa's most recent novel, An American Brat, is a funny and life-affirming book about a young immigrant woman. Feroza of An American Brat is an amalgam of the writer's own experiences and those of three children who arrived in the US for studies before Sidhwa and her husband joined them. Sidhwa says she became a writer accidentally. While visiting a remote part of Pakistan with her husband, she heard the story of a young girl from the plains who had been brought to the mountains by an old tribal as a bride for his nephew. When she ran away unable to endure the loneliness and hard life, the tribal honour was at stake. The result was The Bride. Then came The Crow Eaters, a saga of her own community. The Parsis in Bombay are nicknamed crow eaters because of their ability to talk incessantly, she points out, laughing loud and adding, "I learnt long ago not to speak non-stop." Her Bombay experiences are the result of living there for nearly a decade in the late 1950s and first half of the '60s with her first husband; when the marriage ended she sought out another Parsi and moved back to Lahore. "Living in Bombay, I became my own person," she says. "Life was much better for women in Bombay than in Pakistan." Sidhwa's next project is a collection of stories, many of them dealing with the south Asian immigrant experience in America. "Some of the characters from my novels are demanding that they be made full characters in short stories," she says, "and I want to please them." She'll please more than just them. THE REFLECTIONS OF A HEN IN HER LAST HOUR Stories from the south spiced with earthy wit and satire. By Malati Mathur THE REFLECTIONS OF A HEN IN HER LAST HOUR This collection serves to remind us, if reminders are actually needed, of the vibrancy imbued in our regional literature. The stories are redolent of the earthy, sensual aspects of experience and expression. The tongue-in-cheek humour, the self-reflexive irony, the sharp satire are typical of the wit found south of the Vindhyas and has been brought out superbly in the translation. "Till You See The Looking Glass" takes off from Biblical times and myth as it explores the human psyche of the Son of God. "A Day's Work" foregrounds the reality of Gulf-migrated Malayalees and is an ironic look at the predicament of the elderly left behind on native shores. Other stories like "The End of Third-rate Literature" and mischievous and irreverent. While one takes potshots at angst-ridden poseurs of literature, the other knocks down the pomposity of theology. In "Salary Under the Table", the writer focuses on the soul-destroying corruption and man's inhumanity towards man. Some stories like "Some Mechanical Inventions for the Benefit of Mankind" and "A Complain About the Public Library at Yesupuram", though funny, read more like essays. At other times the story, which seems to be leading towards a climatic denouement, trails away tamely without offering a conclusive finis. What grips one's attention is the extraordinary power of language and the yoking together of diverse perceptions like "darkness smeared with the fragrance of coffee blossoms". The eclectic quality of the author's scholarship is evident in the numerous references to religious thought and philosophy while the secular nature of his mindset is exhibited in the manner in which he trains his arrows of satire on all the ills that plague our society irrespective of political or religious affiliations.
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