THE first English fiction writer from Pakistan who produced fiction of significance in a considerable amount was Bapsi Sidhwa. She was preceded by Ahmed Ali, but he was a writer who started his career from united India.

Bapsi had shifted to the US in 1983 and had been living there since, teaching creative writing at universities. She breathed her last on Christmas Day in Houston, Texas.

Bapsi is survived by her daughters Mohur, Parizad and son Khudadad (Koko). Speaking to Dawn from her home in Sugarland, Houston, her youngest daughter Parizad said Bapsi had been bed-ridden for the past two years and her memory was also affected.

Despite her old age, though, she would still recall her old house on Mozang’s Waris Road and her neighbours.

Sharing some of her mother’s memories, Parizad said when she was a little child in Lahore, her mother would make up interesting stories of her own to narrate to her. “[At the time], I took them for granted. But later, when I got older, I realised how lucky I was.”

She has memories of their home near Main Market, Gulberg, where Bapsi moved after her second marriage. Later, she lived on Munir Road, in the Cantt area.

Bapsi Sidhwa’s younger brother, Feroze Bhandara, spoke about her early life, saying that their grandfather was a rich man who used to stay at Marder’s Palace Hotel in Karachi.

“Our mother went to Karachi to have her first baby. That’s when Bapsi was born”. He said Bapsi’s Ayah wanted to go to her village on leave, and their mother suggested she take Bapsi along with her. That’s where she contracted polio.

Due to her affliction, Bapsi was home-schooled in Lahore, in her own words, played a major part in turning her on to books, as she had no friends and no school to go to, only books to read. The watershed moment in her childhood came when she was gifted Little Women by a tutor.

She was the author of four novels, The Bride, The Crow Eaters, The Ice-Candy Man and The American Brat. She fictionalised Deepa Mehta’s film Water and turned it into a novel, publishing it under the same title. She also edited Lahore: City of Sin and Splendour, consisting of writings on Lahore.

Speaking to Dawn, one of Bapsi’s contemporaries, Moneeza Hashmi said that it was always a great pleasure to meet her at her Cantt home. In one such meeting, she told her that Faiz Sahib had come to her house and she had mentioned that she had given him the manuscript of her first novel, The Bride.

“She said he (Faiz Sahib) liked it very much and that she must get it published. She said he was the first person who encouraged her to keep writing.”

“I visited her in Houston three years ago. She was not well, but she was all there and happy to see me.”

Moneeza said that she found Bapsi to be the most lovable person; with a voice just like tinkling bells, it was so soft. She was always so kind and so sweet and never gave the impression that she was a literary icon.

Muneeza Shamsie, the author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English, also has similar views about Bapsi, saying she was always kind and easy to talk to.

“Her own experiences were a part of her fiction. What fascinated me most was how she became a writer, writing her first two books secretly and she never dared tell anybody for a long time. Despite her earlier health challenges, it’s so remarkable that she wrote her books and got publishers despite all odds.”

Shamsie reveals she is compiling an anthology, for which Bapsi wrote an article, describing the difference between fiction and film in the context of the filming of Ice-Candy Man, which was turned into a film by Deepa Mehta.

“I found Water very interesting because it was turned into a novel from a film, and Bapsi had added extra details in the novel.”

Shamsie said her achievement was that until her, Pakistani English writers did not have the right structure. She was a pioneer in using bawdy humour in her writings (such as The Crow Eaters) as she was the first to do it in the whole of South Asia.

The real Bride

Based on a true story, The Bride was Bapsi’s first piece of writing that made her a novelist.

She was on a tour to the Karakoram region with her second husband, on the invitation of Maj Safdar Butt (who later became a general), while the Karakoram Highway was being constructed. There, she heard the story of a girl, brought to the tribal area by a man who married her to his nephew.

The girl ran away from the suppressive and conservative society and was found by her husband when she was about to cross the Indus River via the only rope bridge and was killed for honour.

In multiple interviews, Bapsi told the true story behind the novel. She said wanted to tell the story of the girl and had been inspired by the mountainous region to write about her. Before embarking on the novel, she had written an article about the area in the Civil and Military Gazette.

In a PTV interview, she told Moneeza Hashmi that when she came back to Lahore, she wanted to tell the story of the girl, and describe the hill tribesmen, the gorgeous Indus and the mountains.

“I thought I would write a short story and without my knowing, it became a long story,” she said. However, she changed the ending of the novel and let the protagonist, Zaitoon, live.

Though The Bride was the first novel that she wrote, The Crow Eaters (1979) was her first published work. She found an agent in the US but received rejections from most publishers. She could not find a publisher for it in Pakistan, which did not have many publishers of English fiction.

“When I wrote The Crow Eaters, there were no publishers here and I self-published it, which was very humiliating.” American publishers told her that they loved her work but “Pakistan is too remote in time and space and it won’t be commercially viable.” The book was eventually picked up by a UK publisher.

The Crow Eaters and repercussions

Her seminal novel, The Crow Eaters, gives an insight into the life of a Parsi family, their customs and idiosyncrasies in their interaction with the British colonial forces. Full of humour and candid depiction of facets of Parsi life, the novel was not well received by the Parsi community, with many being unhappy with their depiction.

Bapsi told Feroza Jussawallah, who is professor emerita at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, that Parsis thought she just set out to make fun of them.

“They were furious. The book launch at the Intercontinental Hotel ( Lahore) and the ceremony had to be aborted halfway through because there was a bomb threat.” The threat, unsurprisingly, came from a member of the Parsi community.

Bapsi was surprised at the reaction, which was very severe. “The irony is that I wrote The Crow Eaters with genuine affection for a community that can be termed an endangered species, and I wanted to record something about them,” she said.

She tried to rationalise the reaction, saying that The Crow Eaters was one of the first books that dealt with Parsi characters.

“Parsis are not accustomed to seeing themselves fictionalised. There have been a lot of books about Parsis, by the Parsis, but these tend to be books like all small communities do have, flattering themselves, patting their backs. They are not accustomed to being portrayed with their vices and their weaknesses also on display.”

She said the book is not so much a satire but a humorous vehicle for the story she wanted to tell.

The Ice-Candy Man, autobiography and Partition

Many readers consider The Ice-Candy Man, which was turned into the film Earth by Deepa Mehta, an autobiographical novel, which also captured the essence of Partition, keeping Lahore at its centre.

It was later published in the US as Cracking India. In an interview with Sunil Sethi, published in his book, Conversations with 30 Famous Writers, Bapsi says that the title was changed on the suggestion of the American publisher who said that “ice candy man” was American slang for a bootlegger and it could give the wrong impression, as there was nothing about drugs in the novel.

The novel, told in first-person through the eyes of Lenny, a Parsi girl suffering from polio, had many parallels with Bapsi’s own life experience. The climax and ending of the novel are also inspired by two stories: one was based on the visit of a Muslim mob to Bapsi’s home when they mistook it for a Hindu residence.

Bapsi, her mother and brother saw the mob approaching their veranda when they were confronted by the cook, Imam Din, who told them it was a Parsi household, forcing the mob to retreat.

Then, at the end of the book, the Ice Candy Man who had kidnapped Ayah and sent her to Hira Mandi eventually crossed the border and followed Ayah, who was recovered by the authorities.

In Bapsi’s own words: “In fact, this again is based on a true story, except it was played out by a Sikh man and a kidnapped Muslim woman. The story was reported in the newspapers.

“After kidnapping her, the Sikh did marry her but then when the people went around recovering Muslim women from that part of the world, she said she wanted to go Pakistan. She did not want to live with her abductor, but he followed her and pitched a tent in front of her house.

“Her family soon arranged her marriage to somebody else, and the figure I based Ice-Candy Man on lay down on the train tracks and committed suicide.”

But when asked about the autobiographical elements in the novel, Bapsi noted that Lenny was very distinct from the way she was. “The incidents in her life are often taken from my life but Lenny is much more astute child than I was … every incident taken from my life, or the life of the people I knew immediately, has been embroidered to create the larger reality of fiction.”

Strong feministic consciousness

Women characters and their issues are central to the writing of Bapsi Sidhwa. The Bride is centred on a girl who becomes the target of an honour killing; The Ice Candy Man’s narrator is a crippled girl, while Ayah becomes a target of mob during the violence of Partition. The Crow Eaters’ narrative, too, would remain incomplete without Putli and her Jerbanoo.

“Sidhwa’s entire oeuvre is permeated with a strong feministic consciousness, which portrays how the lives of women are circumscribed by social attitudes and ancient rules, regardless of class, country and religion,” writes Muneeza Shamsie in Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English.

She tells Dawn, “[Bapsi] told me how she became a feminist while writing The Bride. It coincided with the struggle of Women Action Forum (WAF) and [she] became a part of it during the Gen Zia regime.”

Despite having these women-centric stories, Bapsi had something to share about feminism. “I do hate preaching about feminism, although I am a very ardent feminist and Western feminist literature has influenced me greatly. In this case, as is the case of my other books, I have let the events speak for themselves,” she told Ms Jussawalla.

But Bapsi always wanted to be known as a Pakistani writer. “I would hope when anybody wants to know about Parsis, they would say, “Oh, read the book, The Crow Eaters, it’s entertaining and it tells you a lot about the community.

If somebody wants to know about Pakistan, I hope The Bride would be pointed out as a novel that displays its culture. Again, Ice-Candy Man is a story of India and Pakistan and it deals exhaustively [with] the Partition. And I would like to be known for these books,“ she said in an interview.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2024