Throughout history, fanatics as well as ideologues, pushed to the emotional brink of daring their lives, have taken the plunge, which has triggered off a chain reaction of rigid mental fixations and attitudes. Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice-Candy-Man examines the inexorable logic of Partition as an off¬shoot of fundamentalism sparked by hardening communal atti¬tudes.

First published in 1988 in London, this novel is set in pre-Partition Indiain Lahore. It belongs to the genre of the Partition novel like Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964), Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (1975), and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956). However in English fiction it is the sec¬ond novel on Partition by a woman author from sub-continent. The other novel is Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) by Attia Hussain. Both these sensitive women writers share similar perspectives on the ca¬lamities of Partition. The denouement of both novels is quite similar. Both stress a similar vulnerability of human under-standing and life, caused by the throes of Partition which relent-lessly divided friends, families, lovers and neighbours.

Ice-Candy-Man is a novel of upheaval which includes a cast of characters from all communities. There are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis, so a multiple perspective of Parti¬tion emerges as viewed by all the affected communities. Bapsi Sidhwa uses a narrator to tell the tale. A precocious Parsi girl, eight years old with a handicapped foot, narrates the story of her changing world with sophistication and wonder. Lenny is like the persona that Chaucer adopts in his Prologue toThe Canter¬bury Tales, rendering credibility by being almost a part of the reader’s consciousness. With the wonder of a child, she observes social change and human behaviour, noting interesting side¬lights, seeking and listening to opinions and occasionally making judgements. Her childish innocence is like the seeming naive display of Chaucer’s persona, a source of sharp