[In the following excerpt, Couto comments that, while Sidhwa's storytelling talents are impressive, Ice-Candy-Man is ultimately flawed due to the author's problematic rendering of narrative voice.]

Bapsi Sidhwa's new novel—whose very title, Ice-Candy-Man, and the popsicles the eponymous trader sells, belong to a scene far removed from the subcontinent where we know the ubiquitous icecreamwalla—is an attempt to deal with the facts of history and the traumas of Partition. Sidhwa, a Pakistani now resident in America, is quite firm in her resolve to subvert what she sees as the Indian version: “And today, forty years later, in films of Gandhi's and Mountbatten's lives, in books by British and Indian scholars, Jinnah, who for a decade was known as ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’ is caricatured, and portrayed as a monster.” The carping turns vicious when Mahatma Gandhi is involved:

He is a man who loves women. And lame children. And the untouchable sweeper—so he will love the untouchable sweeper's constipated girl-child best … ice lurks deep beneath the hypnotic and dynamic femininity of Gandhi's non-violent exterior.

Such testimony, most of it seen through the eyes of eight-year-old Lenny—who is firmly established as a truthful witness, unlike, say, Saleem Sinai, the unreliable narrator of Midnight's Children, who is often confused about his recall of events—disregards the fact that Mahatma Gandhi refused to participate in the government of the new nation because he opposed Partition.

Lenny tells her story—or, more accurately, her Hindu ayah's story—within the framework of her Parsi household. Ayah is warm, vibrant, earthy; equally evocative are the frolics of her many admirers. The most persistent of them is the Muslim ice-candy-man with his “stinking cigarette clenched in his fist, his flashy scarves and reek of jasmine attar”, selling popsicles or parakeets, inventing a higher status for himself in Pakistan as poet or bastard prince. Sidhwa's sometimes gifted storytelling is marred, though, by her device of the child's voice mouthing adult perceptions and anachronisms. Surely it is inappropriate to call the Sikhs at that time “Akalis … a bloody bunch of murdering fanatics”.