There were Hindus and Muslims — but there were also Parsis and Christians when “India cracked” in 1947. Bapsi Sidhwa grew up in Lahore and has spent most of her life in the United States. Her novels — including India Cracked, also published as Ice Candy Man and filmed as Deepa Mehta-directed Earth — and her latest collection of short stories draw heavily on the young Parsi girl’s experiences during the tumultuous days of Partition and its immediate aftermath as well as the South Asian immigrant’s exposure to the United States.

But Sidhwa’s writing is not so much about locations or time — these form the frame and grid within which she paints word pictures that draw deep emotions with the simplest of brush strokes.
Some of the stories in Their Language of Love, Sidhwa’s first collection of short stories published at the age of 75, are seeds of some of her novels, some are bits and pieces that were meant to be parts of novels but were discarded.
There are a couple of absolutely brilliant stories and a couple that are passable. Short stories may not quite be Sidhwa’s strength, she admits as much in an author’s note, but the collection has her trademark skilful, nuanced writing.
My runaway favourite is “Sehra-bai”, a story that hovers around and delves into the complex relations between a mother and daughter. The most poignant story in the collection, “Sehra-bai” unravels family secrets as the daughter troubled by the inaccessibility of her mother through her childhood discovers the reasons for it as she nurses her in the days before her death.
“Ruby’s was a manically isolated and angular adolescence and there was a stage when, prickly with complexes, she resented her mother’s relentless allure.” But it’s a different perspective when middle-aged Ruby lovingly cares for a frail, ailing Sehra-bai.
Ruby talks of Sehra, beautiful in the willowy way of a Boticelli virgin in her marriage photographs, and then again like a Boticelli Madonna in her post-middle age years punctuated by her heyday when she had the “needy, vampy, vulnerable quality that was so achingly captivating in Marilyn Monroe”. The story is about
the mystery behind Sehra-bai’s sudden transformation in her heyday.
“It takes decades, and an illness that causes Sehra-bai to confide the emotional turmoil of her past, before Ruby is at last able to unravel the mystery of her mother’s despair; to decode the preoccupation that appeared to turn her mother cold and remote and absent from her.”
“And now, how does Ruby view her now? From the condescending and bullying perspective of a woman trundling an aged mother in a wheelchair?”
You don’t have to be a Pakistani or an Indian, or even an immigrant in the United States to relate to this story. Or to the feisty, raw yet sophisticated “Breaking it up”.
“Breaking it up” is about a Pakistani Parsi mother’s horror and fears brought on by her daughter’s decision to marry a “non” — a young Jewish American — and the daughter’s heart-aching desire for her mother’s approval of her choice. The intense play of emotional blackmail, the exchange of harsh hurtful words with backs pushed to the wall against the backdrop of an alien culture as the mother visits her daughter in Texas — all quite brilliantly done.
First the emotional blackmail. “Your father and I couldn’t sleep… Your poor grandmother actually fainted… You won’t be allowed to attend her funeral rites, or mine, or your father’s… Do you know how selfish you are… thinking only of yourself?”
Then the mother introduces the little mind bruises — their life would be so dry: “Just husband, wife, and maybe a child — rattling like loose stones in America!” And finally what could be the match-winner — elaborate descriptions to the bewildered young American of what the wedding would be like, what his family would be expected to bring to it — “...we give our daughter-in-laws at least one diamond set” — oh so insidious!
But Sidhwa is always fair and the mother’s emotional turmoil as she finds herself actually liking her daughter’s choice and her conscious attempt to suppress the liking and do her duty are all there, compressed into 24 pages of high emotion.
The rest of the collection, including the title story, “Their language of love”, covers assorted issues. “Defend yourself against me” is about the scars of Partition as sufferers meet in a continent far from that theatre.
“A gentlemanly war” — which I found at times a bit stilted — is about the male ego where men, like they often are across the world, thrill at the prospect of war while women fear violation of their sanctums.
“A gentlemanly war” is about the India-Pakistan conflict soon after Partition when a beloved Lahore is not bombed or ravaged by Indian troops — perhaps because it was a love too for the other side not too far back.
“Their language of love” — the title story — is also about the male ego and the woman’s wily way around it as a young Pakistani immigrant to the United States tries to pompously ease his newly-arrived wife to the ways of their new world.
Two of the stories are about Ruth, an American woman living in Pakistan, and her encounters with hijackers, a former king-turned-minister, oriental mystique and an Afghan. Sidhwa says in her note that these stories were written just a couple of years ago and were based on her memories of friendships with American women who had lived in Lahore from the 1950s to the early 1990s. They stick out like odd ones, these two, and yet are by themselves quite fascinating. One wonders if Sidhwa’s memories could not have churned out a few more of the American experience in Lahore stories for a separate collection.
As one moves from one to story to another, one cannot help wonder if, now in her twilight years, Sidhwa decided to pull out stashed-away bits and pieces — inputs meant for novels or left out of them like bits of crochet for some intended blanket — and stitched them together in this book.
One hopes there will be a few more novels from this gifted writer from our part of the world. As often happens with Sidhwa’s works, as one reads these stories one forgets whether one is in India or Pakistan: the people, the codes, the culture, even the street and streetcorner are familiar as are the strange weave of religions, languages, cultures that make up the fabric of South Asia.
The “Trouble-easers” is a story about the region’s syncretic culture, where a young Parsi girl remembers a mother’s weekly ritual of obeisance to Zoroastrian angels on a particular day with the recitation of a folk ballad, very similar to the weekly prayer of Hindu women dedicated to some God or the other depending on which part of India you are in. But it is only when the little girl is much older that she wonders why the protagonist of her mother’s narrative, a Muslim woodcutter who went to Mecca for Haj, is the star of a paean to the Zoroastrian angels Mushkail-Asaan and Behram-Yazad.
Mother is bewildered when questioned. “That is how my grandmothers and aunts told the prayer and that is how I tell it...” and then her face and eyes acquire a beatific glow: “But that is what happens when one lives cheek by jowl with people of other faiths — saints jump boundaries and the borders of animosity fall.”
Dear Bapsi Sidhwa, we want more, and novels please.