It’s strewn with the violence of partition, as is customary of books that are about partition. Birth of a nation, the separation of a nation and the ritual of growing up, all go hand in hand. But then, why did I have a hard time wrapping my head around the seamless, almost desperate nature of going in and out of partition?
Could one even do that at the time?
One remembered partition even after 75 years. Some with the memory of the birth of a nation and some with the memory of the death of relations, so was it possible to move out of it whilst it was happening?
Perhaps, in a few years more it would be a possibility in normal life, for the last generation to have witnessed the partition is well into their 80s. My grandfather is one of them, and dementia makes it hard for him to remember things in general, but when asked to recount the story of fleeing from Sialkot, Pakistan, at the age of about 7, he remembers every little detail including the various cities of Jammu and Amritsar where he had to stay put, before finally settling in Delhi. Business was the reason for the final settlement. Many chose to live in different cities because they had businesses there.
Nevertheless, the violence of it and the personal violence inflicted on a pre-adolescent Lenny, our young and curious protagonist, undercuts the violence around. She grows up amidst the very first and fresh waves of partition. But Lenny’s life seems to go ahead just fine. It is perhaps her Parsee origins that keep her going, but nonetheless, she is not entirely unaffected by it. Her most beloved ayah, and others around her, including the Ice Candy Man are affected deeply and directly by the political happenings around.
Still, how was it that she, at times, was completely cut off from the hazard of it all? It seems that it is quite easily done when one forgets history, but not so much when one takes a look at their present surroundings. As a 7 year old, she perhaps does not dwell on the circumstances of the outside for too long, and forgets, dives straight into the personal violence of growth. But then, how long can one dwell on what is going outside, and cut oneself off from the same? Life, too, presently has been going on, in and out of protests against — and around the world, until meaning is found in them by way of sudden introduction of history.
History works by way of facts, influencing our present every single day, apparent in the choices we make. When we set out to eat in purely vegetarian restaurants, or when we evade certain Delhi areas because they are inhabited by certain ethnic groups and their folkloric maliciousness. Surely some names must have come right into your head, too, while reading, for this is too general a knowledge hidden by the freeness of doing business where we engage socially with every group, sit together, and even become lifelong friends with them.
Interestingly, it was not until two years ago that I heard this quite famous, though unknown to me, expression about Sindhis. Sindhis are people who have origins in Sind, a province of the undivided subcontinent of India, but now located in Pakistan;
“If you see a Sindhi and a snake coming together, go for the Sindhi”
While my lack of knowledge amused me, the obviousness of it diffused my grandfather’s interest in the conversation with him saying, “it is so common, almost a general knowledge fact, you know. Everyone knows it.” And perhaps everyone did.
Religion and culture come together uncannily in Ice Candy Man. Lenny brings out the mythic qualities of the culture in religion wherein when she gets to know, I get to know too, that at noon, Sikhs lose a certain sense of humour. Sikhs are an Indian community with religious origins in Hinduism and Islam, so I need not finish the sentence as it was general knowledge although I didn’t know that it was old or so prevalent!
It was a paradox that it caught me by surprise mostly because this supposed fact is so known. However, seeing it written in concrete and reaching a place (while reading this book) where it gave a sense of an origin, a starting point so to say, meant that it was not just a part of a smaller group, but rather of a large assortment of peoples. For Lenny, as for me, it is precisely the moment when she reads about Sikhs in a book, ponders a little, but eventually accepts it easily.
But, it is not just the folkloric, almost mythic, quality of other religions that Lenny encounters, but her own religion too, so it feels as if she teaches me things. She re-familiarising me with them at the same time for these are also the things that I have known my entire life, and I might have even thought of as highly absurd when accounted to me by my grandparents. One of these other myths, I think of them as myths because closed as people are when it comes to religion and communities, these supposed facts remain a part of something that is never really seen with the other’s eye, was that Parsees leave the dead to be scavenged by the vultures. It’s always seemed a myth of which I never questioned the why, how or where. Thus, religions in cultures remain a myth, for good or for bad, until one encounters them, perhaps like I did in a book, in the knowledge of history that other people share and perhaps write down to point to their new absurdity.
Nevertheless, now I know, and so does Lenny, that the dead are left on towers called “Dungarwals.”
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