Ice Candy Man

“This is my haven. My refuge from the perplexing unrealities of my home on Warris Road . . .” 

Lenny expresses her view of her Godmother’s home: it is a peaceful and comforting place where Lenny can retreat in her times of trouble, doubt, and fear. She receives unconditional love from her Godmother, and her knowledge of that love gives her emotional security and stability throughout her young life. In contrast, her love for her parents is tainted by insecurity: her father is mercurial and distant, while her mother attends to her needs with a guilt-tinged anxiety mixed with coldness. These are the “unrealities” that Lenny wishes often to escape at her Godmother’s bosom.

“ ‘Daddy has gone to fetch Colonel Bharucha,’ soothes Mother. She carries me round and round the room stroking my back. Finally, pushing past the curtain and the door, she takes me into the sitting room.

My father raises his head from the couch.

The bitter truth sinks in. He never phoned the doctor. He never went to fetch him. And my mother collaborated in the betrayal.” 

The theme of betrayal within the novel begins for Lenny when her parents join forces to calm her post-surgical pain without calling the doctor. This is just the first of the many betrayals Lenny witnesses. She begins here to understand that betrayal is a part of life.

“The intensity of her tenderness and the concentration of her attention are narcotic. I require no one else.” 

Here Lenny describes her Godmother, and her Godmother’s special power and unconditional ability to love and emotionally nurture Lenny. Lenny’s closest relationship is with her Godmother and she absorbs strength and comfort from her Godmother’s presence.

“ ‘No!’ I scream, unable to bear the thought of an able-bodied future. The suspense—although it has given my forehead premature wrinkles of worry—is preferable to the certainty of an altered, laborious and loveless life.” 

Without her deformity, Lenny dreads the future. Because so much attention, worry, and love has spoiled Lenny, she doubts that she will be loved if her deformity is fixed. Lenny’s desire to be spoiled, bribed, and otherwise catered to remains a hallmark of her character. She remains driven by an extreme need for attention and affection throughout the novel.

“I learn also to detect the subtle exchange of signals and some of the complex rites by which Ayah’s admirers coexist. Dusting the grass from their clothes they slip away before dark, leaving the one luck, or the lady, favors . . . I escape into daydreams in which my father turns loquacious and my mother playful. Or to heroics in which I recuse Godmother from the drooling jaws of her cannibalistic brother-in-law who is a doctor and visits from way beyond the perimeter of my familiar world . . . I gain Ayah’s goodwill and complicity by accommodating her need to meet friends and relatives. She takes me to fairs, cheap restaurants and slaughterhouses. I cover up for her and maintain a canny silence about her doings. I learn of human needs, frailties, cruelties and joys."

This description of Ayah and her suitors demonstrates several of the significant themes of the novel: the interplay between reality and fantasy in Lenny’s life; between men and women in sexual pursuits; and among men competing for the affections of a woman. Lenny also learns to be secretive and manipulative, adding this quality to her self-centered desire to demand and to receive attention due to her disability. Her education also includes places and people within different socioeconomic classes, which a typical high-class Parsee girl would never see.

“I visualize a red, scalloped scar running from ear to ear. It is a premonition.” 

Lenny expresses her fears about her cousin’s upcoming tonsillectomy. However, this image foreshadows the many throats cut during the violence to come. Though a child, she senses the violence brewing among the many religious factions of her society, through her exposure to Ayah’s admirers and their political discussions in the Queen’s Park.

“Ever since Colonel Bharucha tugged at my tendon and pressed my heel down in the fire Temple, Mother massages my leg. . . She applies all her fragile strength to stretch the stubborn tendon. Her flesh, like satin, shifts under my foot. I gaze at her. Shaded by the scarf her features acquire sharper definition. . . .The hint of coldness, common to such chiseled beauty, is overwhelmed by the exuberant quality of her innocence. I feel she is beautiful beyond bearing.

Her firm strokes, her healing touch. The mother lines of Mother. It reaches from her bending body and cocoons me. My thighs twitch, relaxed.

Her motherliness. How can I describe it? While it is there it is all-encompassing, voluptuous. Hurt, heartache, and fear vanish. I swim, rise, tumble, float, and bloat with bliss. The world is wonderful, wondrous—and I a perfect fit in it. But it switches off, this motherliness. I open my heart to it. I welcome it. Again. And again. I begin to understand its on-off pattern. It is treacherous.” 

Lenny’s complex relationship with her mother leads her to believe that her mother is a goddess-like creature: fickle and untrustworthy. She adores her mother, but she does not trust her. She saves her trust for her Godmother, who never disappoints her, never fails to place Lenny at the center of her world. The young Lenny cannot understand the complexity of her mother’s life, which causes her to later misunderstand her mother’s mission to help the women ruined by the civil war. Lenny distrusts a motherliness and attention that come and go.

“I am schooled to read between the lines of my father’s face.” 

This quotation exemplifies the fact that Lenny has to learn to “read” the faces, the tones of voice, and the actions of the adults around her. In order to make sense of the events occurring around her, she uses the unspoken body language and facial expressions of the people she encounters, particularly her family. Her parents do not overtly discuss any of the political or societal upheaval around them with her or in front of her. She learns other ways to figure out what is happening.

“I know when you want something very much it gives people power over you.” 

Lenny explains her own reaction to needing other people, particularly her mother’s love and attention, her Godmother’s love, and her passion for Ayah. She knows that her love and need of these people make her weak and give them power over her life, her reactions, and her happiness.

“ ‘Then there is this Hindu-Muslim trouble,’ he says, after a pause. ‘Ugly trouble …It is spreading. Sikh-Muslim trouble also …’

The villagers, Sikh and Muslim, erupt in protest.

‘Brother,’ the Sikh granthi says when the tumult subsides, ‘our villages come from the same racial stock. Muslim or Sikh, we are basically Jats. We are brothers. How can we fight each other?’

‘Barey Mian,’ says the chaudhry, giving Imam Din his due as a respected elder, ‘I’m alert to what’s happening … I have a radio. But our relationships with the Hindus are bound by strong ties. The city folk can afford to fight … we can’t. We are dependent on each other: bound by our toil; by Mandi prices set by the Banyas—they’re our common enemy—those city Hindus. To us villagers, what does it matter if a peasant is a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Sikh?” …

‘If needs be, we’ll protect our Muslim brothers with our lives!’ says Jagjeet Singh.

‘I am prepared to take an oath on the Holy Koran,’ declares the chaudhry, ‘that every man in this village will guard his Sikh brother with no regard for his own life!’

‘We have no need for oaths and such,’ says the mullah in a fragile elderly voice. ‘Brothers don’t require oaths to fulfill their duty.’ ”

Imam Din returns to his village to ensure that his neighbors are not infected by the same violence that has begun to overtake the cities, with Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs all at each other’s throats. He is reassured that his village and the surrounding villages will remain peaceful. Later, however, his village is destroyed, and his great-grandson, Ranna, is one of the few survivors.

“I consider all this talk about enemas and clogged intestines in shocking taste, and I take a dim and bitter view of his concern for my health and welfare. Turning up my nose and looking down severely at this improbably toss-up between a clown and a demon, I am puzzled why he’s so famous—and suddenly his eyes turn to me. My brain, stomach and heart melt. The pure shaft of humor, compassion, tolerance and understanding he directs at me fuses me to everything that is feminine, funny, gentle, loving. He is a man who loves women. And lame children.” 

At first Lenny is shocked to hear this famous person talk about bowels and bowel habits, but later she testifies to his deeper qualities, including his ability to connect with women, and with suspicious children, even Lenny.

“There is much disturbing talk. India is going to be broken. Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is? Or crack it further up on Warris Road? How will I ever get to Godmother’s then? . . .

I ask Ayah.

‘They’ll dig a canal . . .,’ she ventures. ‘This side for Hindustan and this side for Pakistan. If they want two countries, that’s what they’ll have to do—crack India with a long, long canal.” 

The title of the novel is taken from this quotation. It provides context for Lenny’s anxiety and supplies an apt metaphor for Partition. Partition does arbitrarily divide the existing country of India into East Pakistan, West Pakistan, and India. Great Britain’s abrupt departure from governing, after creating these three countries, contributed to the resulting lawlessness and violence. Though the people had elected officials for the new governments, politicians sought advantage for their various ethnic and religious groups rather than focusing on what would happen to the people who were affected by the new divisions in their country.

“One day everybody is themselves—and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah—she is a token. A Hindu. Carried away by a renewed devotional fervor she expends a small fortune in joss-sticks, flowers and sweets on the gods and goddesses in the temples.” 

Here the voice of a grown up Lenny intrudes: the division of people into their religious and ethnic backgrounds separates people from one another, diminishing everyone with limiting thoughts and behaviors.

“While I lead the life of a spoilt little brat with pretensions to diet, forty miles east of Lahore, in a Muslim village, Ranna leads the unspoilt life of a village boy shorn of pretensions. While Ayah shovels spoonfuls of chicken into my mouth as I doodle with Plasticine, Chidda, squatting by the clay hearth feeds her son scraps of chapatti dipped in buttermilk. All day, baked by the sun, Ranna romps in the fields and plays with dung. And—when I close my eyes and I wish to—I see us squatting beneath the buffalo, our mouths open and eyes closed, as Dost Mohammad directs squirts of milk straight from the udder into our mouths—and I can still taste its foddery sweetness.” 

Lenny compares her life in the city, as a wealthy, pampered Parsee child, with the life of Ranna, Imam Din’s great grandson, living in Pir Pindo. Ranna’s life, so close to the earth and to the rhythms of nature and reality, seems superior to Lenny’s life of indulgence and the pampering that keeps reality away from her if she wishes to ignore it. The world cannot touch her unless she lets it in. However, Ranna cannot ignore the reality of his own life.

“Now I know surely. One man’s religion is another man’s poison.” 

Lenny states a truth she learns from the events happening around her. Religious intolerance breeds more division and drives wedges between people and their compassion for one another. Humanity becomes incompatible with religious differences. When Hari walks Lenny home from Godmother’s house, their shadows touch a Brahmin Pandit who is eating his dinner in the park. As he recoils, Lenny realizes that she and Hari are outcasts to this man; they are polluted and untouchable. Religion has made it so.

“ ‘A train from Gurdaspur has just come in,’ he announces, panting. ‘Everyone in it is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead! Only two gunny-bags full of women’s breasts!’ Ice-candy-man’s grip on the handlebars is so tight that his knuckles bulge whitely in the pale light. The kohl lining his eyes has spread, forming hollow, skull-like shadow: and as he raises his arm to wipe the perspiration crawling down his face, his glance one again flits over Sher Singh. ‘I was excepting relatives . . . For three days . . . For twelve hours each day . . . I waited for that train!’ ” 

The nightmare of Partition continues, arriving once again in Lahore with a murdered trainload of Muslims fleeing India. The Ice-candy-man seems to lose all sense of perspective after this event. For him, these murders must be paid for by the suffering of Hindus. Revenge becomes his primary motive and objective.

“There are some things a man cannot look upon without going mad.” 

The gardener sympathizes with the Ice-candy-man, whose relatives and fellow Muslims were massacred on a train. In retaliation, the Ice-candy-man has been terrorizing Hindus and Sikhs all over Lahore. Sorrowfully, the gardener realizes that he and his family will have to leave Lahore. The divisions have grown too deep when even a friend, such as the Ice-candy-man, wants to kill his former friends. The gardener quickly understands facts that others refuse to accept, such as the treachery of mob thinking among former neighbors and friends of different religions.

“He is no boy! He is a dark, middle-aged man with a pockmark-pitted face and small, brash kohl-blackened eyes. He has an insouciant air of insolence about him—as though it is all a tedious business he has been through before. I cannot take my eyes off him as he visualizes the women with assertive, assessing directness. There is a slight cast in the close set of his eyes, and the smirk lurking about his thin, dry lips gives an impression of cruelty.” 

Lenny views Papoo’s groom with horrified understanding of the trick that has been played on her by her own mother. Papoo, who is only 12 years old, has been married off to a middle-aged dwarf. Lenny knows that Papoo’s life will never be the same, her own mother having given her away to a much older, unsuitable man. Most marriages were arranged by the parents of children during this time. However, most parents attempt to find a pleasing match for their children. Muccho’s cruelty to her own daughter never receives an explanation. The reader is left to speculate about her motives, perhaps to surmise that Muccho is simply a hateful woman.

"Embedded in the heart of the Punjab, they had felt secure, inviolate. And to uproot themselves from the soil of their ancestors had seemed to them akin to tearing themselves, like ancient trees, from the Earth." 

This passage illustrates why so many of the people, particularly country people, refused to leave their lands during Partition. In not leaving, they risked everything, and in many cases lost their lives and all of their families, like Ranna. However, the passage shows a very human tendency to revere ancestors and to be tied to the land a person’s ancestors lived upon. Only with great pain could a person leave his native land. This attitude toward the land also explains why violence broke out: every piece of land contains and symbolizes the history of the people who live on it. Land represents that history and that sense of belonging. Everyone wants to keep the land that they believe belongs to them for historical and familial identity and continuity.

“Suddenly the noon light smote their eyes. Dost Mohammad stepped out and walked three paces. There was a sunlit sweep of curved steel. His head was shorn clear off his neck. Turning once in the air, eyes wide open, it tumbled in the dust. His hands jerked up slashing the air above the bleeding stump of his neck.

Ranna saw his uncles beheaded. His older brothers, his cousins. The Sikhs were among them like hairy vengeful demons, wielding bloodied swords, dragging them out as a sprinkling of Hindus, darting about at the fringes, their faces vaguely familiar, pointed out and identified the Mussulmans by name.” 

Ranna tells his story to the gathered friends and family in Imam Din’s quarters in the Sethi’s backyard, including Lenny. He narrates these terrible events dispassionately, calmly. He is on familiar terms with death, and he will never be the same again. At age 8, he has lost nearly all of his family, including his parents, his brothers and sisters, and his village. He also bears a scar where he was scalped that will remain a reminder of these events for the rest of his life. However, the physical scars are only the outward sign of the terror he has survived.

“No one minded the semi-naked specter as he looked in doors with his knowing, wide-set peasant eyes as men copulated with wailing children—old and young women. He saw a naked woman, her light Kashmiri skin bruised with purple splotches and cuts, hanging head down from a ceiling fan. And looked on with a child’s boundless acceptance and curiosity as jeering men set her long hair on fire. He saw babies, snatched from their mothers, smashed against walls and their howling mothers brutally raped and killed.” 

Ranna reaches the city of Amritsar, still in India, and sees more acts of murderous violence and cruel mutilation, highlighted by the rapes and murders of women and children. His story focuses the reader’s attention on the complete breakdown of society and of the norms that keep people’s behavior in check. The mob mentality overtakes the warrior Sikhs, and they become an army of avenging demons in Ranna’s eyes. His entire journey becomes a lesson in the many ways that women, children, and the weak can be wounded, mutilated, and robbed of their dignity and their lives. The merciless heartlessness of human beings becomes reality for Ranna, Lenny, and the reader.

“I’m feeling despondent. When something upsets me this much I find it impossible to talk. It used not to be so. I wonder: am I growing up? At least I’ve stopped babbling all my thoughts.

This idiocy of bottled-up emotions can’t be a symptom of growing up, surely! More likely I’m reverting to infancy the way old people do. I feel so sorry for myself—and for Cousin—and for all the senile, lame and hurt people and fallen women—and the condition of the world—in which countries can be broken, people slaughtered and cities burned—that I burst into tears. I feel I will never stop crying.” 

Lenny grows up. Despite her misgivings about what is happening to her, it is clear to the reader that Lenny’s compassion for others has blossomed, leaving her with a more mature understanding of the world and the pain within it. Her empathy for others marks a turning point in the novel, and in Lenny’s maturing sensibility. For the first time, she understands the terrible things in the world as something that happens to others, not just to herself.

“The innocence that my parents’ vigilance, the servants’ care and Godmother’s love sheltered in me, that neither Cousin’s carnal cravings, nor the stories of the violence of the mobs, could quite destroy, was laid waste that evening by the emotional storm that raged round me. The confrontation between Ice-candy-man and Godmother opened my eyes to the wisdom of righteous indignation over compassion. To the demands of gratification—and the unscrupulous nature of desire.

To the pitiless face of love.”

In the aftermath of Godmother’s confrontation with and destruction of the Ice-candy-man’s pretentions of love and care for Ayah, Lenny learns that love and desire can make people do terrible things to the ones they love, in the name of their own need for that person. However, she also learns that true evil can co-exist with love. This duality explains the Ice-candy-man’s dilemma: he imprisons a woman who does not love him but his desire tells him that he must possess her, at any cost.