Ice Candy Man

Lenny’s mother and Electric-aunt go off on errands just after Lenny’s father goes to the office every day. They do not say what they are doing. Ayah swears Lenny, Adi, and Cousin to secrecy and tells them that the women have a huge stash of petrol. Ayah helps them load and unload the cans into the trunk of the Sethis’ car. Lenny misunderstands and believes that her mother and aunt are the arsonists who set fire to Lahore every night.

Lenny and Hari, now renamed Himat Ali, find Masseur’s dead body on Warris Road inside a gunny sack. He has been hacked to death.

Lahore has completely changed: there are no more Brahmins or Hindus in the streets. They have been replaced with “hordes of Muslim refugees” (187). The Singhs’ house remains empty, but the house behind it, in which a doctor used to live, is now quietly inhabited by a refugee family. The other empty houses on the street will eventually be allotted to families who can prove that they left similar properties behind in India.

Ayah often cries in secret. In her grief for Masseur, she loses some of her good looks. Ayah has no friends left in the city, and she dares not trust anyone. She and Lenny revisit the places where they used to meet Masseur. Ice-candy-man follows them everywhere.

A Muslim mob arrives at the Sethis’ house one night. They ask for the sweeper and his family, but the family has converted to Christianity. They ask for Hari, and his friends convince them that he is now a Muslim. Finally, they ask for Ayah. Everyone vows she is gone.

Ice-candy-man appears out of the crowd. He approaches Lenny, and whispers that he will take care of Ayah. She tells him where Ayah might be hidden. Her whole family is stunned into silence at what she has done. Even Imam Din, a Muslim, tries to lie to these men to stop the search. The men find Ayah and drag her away in a cart. Lenny is haunted by Ayah’s frightened eyes as she is driven away.

Papoo is getting married. She is 12 years old. At first, Lenny believes that the groom is Papoo’s age, because he is short. Later, she sees his face and realizes that he is a middle-aged dwarf, with a cruel and greedy face (199). Papoo has been drugged by her mother so that she cannot object to the marriage or run away. A Christian priest arrives to marry the couple. Papoo’s life is ruined, and her mother, Muccho, is smugly satisfied with herself.

The servant’s quarters next to the Sethis’ house suddenly become occupied with women who are guarded by a giant Sikh. He unlocks the premises to pass baskets of food into the compound. Lenny, Adi, and Cousin climb on the roof of the Sethis’ house to peer into the compound. At first, Lenny assumes that the women have been jailed; but when she sees them helping each other, cooking, and washing their clothes, she is confused. They look pitiful, not criminal.

Lenny’s mother hires one of the women from the “jail” to be Lenny and Adi’s new ayah. They call her Hamida. She is so pathetic, forlorn, and desperate that Lenny cannot bear to tell her mother that she is hiring a criminal. Adi and Lenny call their new ayah by her name, Hamida, because they cannot stomach calling her “Ayah.”

Everyone in the family, including Lenny’s mother and Electric-aunt, and all of the servants in the household, are looking for Ayah. Even Ayah’s rejected suitor, the knife-sharpener Sharbat Khan, cycles off with Imam Din to search for her. Lenny continues to suffer guilt over her betrayal of Ayah.

Ranna, skeletally thin, scarred all over his body, and bearing the remnants of a terrible wound on the back of his head, arrives at the Sethis’ house with his aunt and uncle from another village. The village of Pir Pindo and nearly all of Ranna’s family has been wiped out. Slowly, over time, Lenny learns the story as she stays in the quarters to be near Ranna.

Ranna’s story seems impossible, as Lenny listens. First, Ranna explains that the village was attacked during the day, just as they had received a warning to leave. The Hindus in the village pointed out all of the Muslims, who were then murdered by the Hindu and Sikh police. He saw his father and brothers beheaded. He was attacked and suffered a terrible blow to the back of his head. He lay, waiting to die, in a pile of bodies, with a bloody dead body on top of him.

Some women were being kept in the mosque, and though Ranna knew that it was wrong for Sikh men to be alone in the mosque with Muslim women, he did not understand what was happening to them.

When everything was quiet, he ran away, hiding in the fields and ditches until he arrived in his aunt’s village. Left behind to die in peace, he woke to find his aunt’s village also empty of Muslims and filled with Sikhs looking for people to kill. He hid in a barn, which was searched, and he was stabbed by the spears used to hunt for people inside the hay, but he did not cry out.

He made his way to Amritsar, which was burning, just as Lahore was burning at that time. He found a group of Muslim prisoners, and a Sikh guard let him in. Strangers helped him. They were lucky: the prisoners were taken to a refugee camp. Unbelievably, after several months in the camp, Ranna found his aunt and uncle.