Globalization and Gender(continued)

Bapsi Sidhwa’s  third novel Ice Candy Man and also known as Cracking India in the U.S, was written in 1988 and  focuses on the Partition of India. Sidhwa is technically Pakistani, although, now an American citizen. Sidhwa belongs to the Parsee community of India/Pakistan, the Zorastrian  Parsis having arrived to India  from Iran or Persia  in the 7^th and 8^th centuries A.D., in order to escape forced conversion to Islam. Ice Candy Man, focalized through the child narrator Lenny, an eight year old child stricken with polio, weaves the personal and the political, family events and national catastrophe  with insight, sympathy, pain and humour. Set in Lahore, one of the great cities of undivided India, but now belonging to Pakistan because of its Muslim majority, the story centers around Lenny’s Hindu ayah or maid who was the object of adoration of various men hailing from the various small trades of Indian society at that time—Sharbat Khan(Muslim) the knife sharpener, Masseur( Muslim), the Ice Candy Man (Muslim), Hari, the gardener who later turns Muslim in order to survive and the Sikh, Sher Singh, the zoo keeper:

I lie on the grass, my head on Ayah’s lap basking in—and intercepting –the warm flood of stares  directed at  Ayah by her circle of admirers. The Falletis Hottel cook, the Government House gardener, a sleek and arrogant butcher and the zoo attendant, Sher Singh, sit with us. (88)