[In the following review, Rahman offers a positive assessment of Ice-Candy-Man, praising the novel's sophisticated and effective narrative techniques.]

Ice-Candy-Man is Bapsi Sidhwa's third novel, following The Crow Eaters (1978) and The Bride (1983; see WLT 58:4, p. 667). As in the first two, the mode of narration is realistic. The quality of this surface realism is a product of acute intelligence, integrity, and imagination, the same qualities which enabled her to portray the life of the Parsi community with unflattering verisimilitude in The Crow Eaters and to which the conflict between the male-dominant values of the tribesmen and the people of the cities owes its power in The Bride. In the new work, however, the emphasis is not on representing phenomenal reality faithfully. The novel is an imaginative response to the traumatic events of the Partition of India in 1947, and Sidhwa has used surrealistic techniques, somewhat like Salman Rushdie, to make it an adequate symbol for the effect of external events on human beings.

The logical narrative which can be abstracted from Ice-Candy-Man involves a love story. The voluptuous and much-wooed Ayah, a Hindu, is abducted by Muslim hoodlums and raped. Somehow she comes into the hands of her admirer, the Ice-Candy-Man, who makes her a dancing girl and marries her. She is discovered by the narrator Lenny's godmother, who arranges her rescue and sends her to India. Ice-Candy-Man “too, disappears across the Wagah border into India” in pursuit of her.

That story is of little significance in Sidhwa's sophisticated, symbolic novel, however. More important are the narrative techniques, for they contribute to the work's total effect. Foremost among them is the first-person, present-tense narration. Lenny, like Saleem Sinai in Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981; see WLT 56:1, p. 181), is—or was—a child when the events described take place, and the events are seen through her consciousness, the present tense providing immediacy and a certain simultaneity between past and present. By the end of both novels the narrator knows much about human perfidy, mainly through the impact of external events. Lenny learns of the perverse nature of amorous human passions from her experiences with her cousin Hamida, who woos her with a determination equaled only by the Ice-Candy-Man's pursuit of Ayah; religious passion's potential for breeding fanatical hatred and violence, as in the killing of the Hindus in Lahore and the Muslims in the Punjab of the Sikhs, is reflected in the story of Lenny's friend Ranna, a harrowing account of the human atrocities that can be perpetrated when all civilized restraints are removed through external events or political propaganda.

Without a word of protestation or preaching and without histrionics, Sidhwa has written one of the most powerful indictments of the riots which occurred during the Partition. Previously there was almost nothing in English on the subject except for several works by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and a few short stories by H. K. Burki and Tabussum. There was of course much that was good in Urdu literature and other languages, but only Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) took up the theme of the Partition. Now there is Ice-Candy-Man, which shows the human personality under stress as a result of that cataclysmic event and depicts a society responding to it in the way societies do react: through sheer indifference, gossip, trivial and malicious activities, making love, and also killing, raping, and going insane. These last aspects of reality are often lost in novels and short stories in which the trivial, the absurd, the obscene is not juxtaposed with the tragic, the sublime, and the momentous. Sidhwa's novel manages to do just that, and to do so with great symbolic significance. I consider it among the best works of Pakistani fiction in English and one of the truly good novels of this century.