Ice Candy Man

“When our friends confess they want to kill us, we have to go...“
This beautiful piece of fiction is presented as from the memories of a child. Thinly veiled with humor and peppered with feminism throughout, it's quite a engaging read.
I was surprised that being an Indian and having read many Holocaust novels, I missed this.
[I don't think this book can have spoilers, everybody knows what it is about. Still I have not included important plot points]
The only time we think of Gandhiji is on Oct 2. This book is set in an era when Nehru and Mountbatten were street-talk and gossip. It changed the one-dimensional view I had of Gandhiji.
“He's a politician yaar, it's his business to suit his tongue to the moment”
The innocent and sometimes idiotic eloquence of the common people, the author's words are at times so cozy, I feel like curling up into them.
“The motherliness of Mother.., while it is there it is all-encompassing, voluptous. Hurt, heartache and fear vanish. I swim, rise, tumble, float, and bloat with bliss”
Her choice a words, and poetic alliteration.
“....with affected affection, purposefully purposeless, massaging Masseur”, beautiful imagery - of the phulka swelling with trapped air, the marching british soldiers as giant caterpiller, the mob as a bestial creature, Sharbat Khan cycling down the drive like a mountain receding, comparing toddler Adi to mercury (that's so apt, why hasn't anybody done that before? It's slick and swift, that is escapes grasp, yet so satisfying and beautiful to watch)

This is written as if from memories of a child, but the memory and what the child felt is so intact that, we don't feel, that it is retrospective. We feel as if we are travelling forward with her, most of the time.
“The next morning Ayah wakes me up ‘when it's still night'.”

The naivety of thinking the lion would eat her, but the sense to know that, the thin man with the thin leash cannot control the lion.

Lenny's foray to rural India, to religious differences - religious jokes and Ayah's selective humor sense to them. Suddenly everything around her is labelled and classified.
Along the way somebody says “It's their fight..if need be we'll protect our Muslim brothers with our lives!” It doesn't take long before they start killing each other.
Subtle changes in behaviour, the discrimination long before the exodus actually marked the beginning of partition.
Once, men smoking hookah stood outside the Gurudwar, waiting for the rest...

Lenny notices the differences, the changed world, how the complexion of the evening changes after a few words are exchanged.
“I close my eyes. I can't bear to open them: they will open on a suddenly changed world.”
Did the ICM transform, or was his character just revealed?
The violence - slowly and all at once descended on Lahore. Lenny compares the mobs and fires to the procession and fire in her kitchen, because she has nothing else to compare it to.
Ranna's story is the most horrible part.
“A boy wakes up from a dark room filled with dead bodies, he wiggles out of them to land in a knee-deep viscous fluid. The dead bodies blocking the entrance had created a pool of blood. He sticks to the shadows of the mud walls, steps over mangled everday faces, go the the kitchen next door, finds stale bread that he crams into his mouth....”
It's a wonder 10 years later a generation of psychotic serial killers weren't born.

The horrors, the dead bodies on the road side in gunnybags, trains with all passengers killed and breasts cut off, and the child marriages on the background going on as usual, cresecent shaped scar on Ranna's head, the Bias full of dead bodies, villagers plan to fight the mob is to get women inside huts, and give them kerosene to burn themselves, and men keeping away the mob until they have time for that.

This is not a book about the exodus (which is explained as Ranna's story briefly). It is about Lenny's experience, the changes around her, and her change of the view of the world, brought on by the partition.

God-mother's character and ICM are worth writing an essay on.

This book would be a good investment of your time. Don't skip it.