The document provides an overview of Pakistani literature in English during the 1970s. It summarizes the political context, including the imposition of martial law by General Yahya Khan, the rise of Sheikh Mujeeb-ur-Rahman and the Awami League in East Pakistan, and the eventual declaration of an independent Bangladesh in 1971 after military conflict. It then profiles two writers of short stories during this period - Raja Tridiv Roy and Bilal Ahmad Jeddy. For Roy, it summarizes his two collections of short stories and notes his use of humor and Buddhist themes. For Jeddy, it analyzes several of his stories in The White Tiger of Viringa collection, noting their themes

1. The Nineteen Seventies
Pakistani Literature in English:

2. THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES
 The nineteen seventies began with the martial law regime ol General
Mohammad Yahya Khan in power. In 1968 Ayur Khan had started what the
government called the ’Decade o:’ Reforms’. Paradoxically, this brought out
the students anc other dissident forces against him. These forces gradually
came under the main control of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a politician from Sindh
and the ex-Foreign Minister of Ayub. The political situation deteriorated so
much that in March 196’ the Commander-in-Chief of the army, General Yahya,
got the opportunity to impose martial law. Ayub Khan resigned and the new
government clamped down upon all political activities for some time,

3.  However, political activities were permitted again and Sheikh Mujeeb-ur-
Rahman emerged as the leading politic;:! leader from Bangladesh, then called
East Pakistan. Tlu people of East Pakistan resented not having been given as
much representation in the government as their larger nurrbers warranted.
They also resented the snobbery of the offcers of the Civil Service of Pakistan
and military officers from the Western Wing. Mujeeb played upon the East
Patistani intelligentsia’s consciousness of having been exploited and
demanded provincial autonomy through his famous SK points. In December
1970 elections were held in Pakistan. Mujeeb’s Awami League got the
maximum votes with Bhutto’s Pakistan’s People’s Party following. However,
the polling had been on provincial lines and Mujeeb’s voters were mainly from
the Eastern Wing while Bhutto’s weie from the West.

4.  Yahya’s government, knowing that Mujeeb was not acceptable to the West,
refused to allow him to form the government in the Centre. The government
further ajgrava ted the situation by refusing to concede Sheikh Mujeeb’s Six
Points. In March 1971 the Awami League declared Bangladesh to be an
independent state and Yahya ordered the army to take military action to
suppress the rebellion. Mujeeb’s followers, who had formed a military force
of their own and were being given military training in India, fought with
determination and Bangladesh became a battlefield. In 1971 November the
Mukti Bahini, Mujeeb’s armed force, helped by the Indian army fought and
defeated the Pakistan Army and forced it to surrender. Yahya had to resign
and Bhutto formed his government in Pakistan.1

5.  Bhutto ruled till July 1977. He was accused of having rigged the national
elections of 1977 by the opposition parties who started demonstrating against
his government. In July 1977 General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the chief of the
army staff, overthrew the government and imposed martial law. Bhutto was
subsequently convicted on a charge of murder and hanged in April 1979. Zia-
ul-Haq ruled Pakistan throughout the late seventies as an authoritarian
martial law administrator. He encouraged religious fundamentalism, right-
wing politicians and made the army more powerful. Because of Zia’s rightist
policies the seventies were characterised with the rise of an intolerant kind
of nationalism. One aspect of this nationalistic spirit was to denounce the
continued ascendancy of the English language. However, the middle class had
expanded and had become even more affluent than it was in Ayub Khan’s
days. This class was sceptical of government propaganda and insisted on
teaching English to its children.

6.  This too was a result of the government’s ambivalence towards English. For,
though English was denounced publicly, the Government was aware of the
rising importance of English in the world and did not really seem sincere
about replacing it by Urdu. This resulted in the reversal of schooling policies
and English remained the language of prestige and higher education as well as
the language of administration. Creative work in English remained, however,
as less in demand as ever and not much of it was produced within the
country.2 Zulfikar Ghose, as we have seen, continued to write abroad and
those who wrote in Pakistan remained obscure.

7. Raja Tridiv Roy
 The first creative writer we must consider now is Raja Tridiv Roy. He was born
in Rangmati on 14th of May, 1933. Actually he was the ruler (Raja) of the
Chakma tribe which lived in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. In 1951 he went to
qualify for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn but his father’s death brought him back to
his tribe in 1953 as the new chief. He was one of the few Bengalis to have
chosen to stay back in Pakistan after the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. In
Pakistan Tridiv Roy was made the Minister of Minorities’ Affairs (being a
Buddhist himself) in Bhutto’s government. He also held the portfolio of
tourism and, when Zia come into power, he was retained as an ambassador.

8.  Raja Tridiv Roy has published two collections of short stories: The Windswept
Wahini and They Simply Belong, both in 1972. The former contains thirteen
and the latter eighteen prose items not all of which can be defined as short
stories. Some are descriptive essays, sketches and anecdotes while others are
folk tales. Still others are Buddhist myths or stories and anecdotes based upon
Buddhist ideas. The short stories dealing with contemporary life are generally
love stories. Associated with these are stories featuring a playboy who
indulges in smart, frivolous conversation with women and is quite heartless
without being any the less charming. These stories have a scintillating humour
of their own which lies in the witty remarks of the narrator or the playboy
hero.

9.  In They Simply Belong the following prose items fall into the category of
descriptions: ’Bud of Love’; ’Nepalese Vignettes’; ’March hare’s Quest’;
’Echoes of the Past’ and ’The Call of the Sea’. Among the Buddhist myths and
stories based on Buddhist values there is much of interest. First of all the
stories are interesting in themselves and secondly they illustrate values which
belong to a very high order of morality. What lends them more charm is that
Tridiv Roy, a Buddhist himself, neither preaches nor turns propagandist. He
affirms the values of peace, gentleness and detachment through the actions
of characters without intrusive proselytizing and without invidious comments
about other people’s beliefs.

10.  Raja Tridiv Roy has not written deeply serious or first rate fiction. However,
he has created in his playboys Khoka, Kahey and Lalhahadur characters who
are interesting to read about. He is a master of the English language and
creates humour in narration and dialogues through this master)’. In sheer
invention he is refreshingly original and gives much pleasure, which, of
course, is one of the main purposes of literature, a purpose which the
increasingly utilitarian and puritanical reading public of Pakistan finds
subversive. It is a pity, however, that Tridiv Roy’s theme of unrequited love,
hackneyed in any case, should have been repeated in every short story. One
wishes the gift of humour would have been combined with different plots if
not with the creation of a new fictional world like that of Wodehouse.

11. Bilal Ahmad Jeddy
 The WJiite Tiger of Viringa (1976), a collection of short stories by Bilal Ahmad
Jeddy, who writes for the Dawn newspaper even now, is not very well known.
Perhaps one reason for the lack of attention is that short stories in English,
however good, are not paid much attention in Pakistan anyway. And another is
that Jeddy’s choice of title is inappropriate. When one reads about tigers and
sees an irate tiger, a smoking tank, a huge killer shark, and a man and woman
embracing passionately on a maroon and green cover, one assumes that the
book is about hunting, romantic adventure and adolescent thrill. To confirm
this impression the jacket of the book promises the reader ’Adventure,
Fighting, Sport’ and, after quoting some scenes from the book, goes on to say:
Tense situations like this are guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your
chair and turning the pages as fast as you can read. Moreover a review of the
book, one of the two to be published, is indiscriminating and praises the book
for being adventurous.3

12.  In view of all this it is easy to underestimate Jeddy’s short fiction. In fact,
behind the straightforward raciness of the narration, is a concern not so much
with the linear progression of events hut with values. The exterior is obviously
that of a boys’ adventure or a thriller but the stories do take us to the
complex realm of the unknown in behaviour. This interest in the unknown is
not merely Gothic or frivolous and this constitutes the strength of the fiction.
 There are only eight stories in this collection. Out of these two are about
incidents of unusual bravery in war; two are about man-eating beasts which
are eventually killed; one is about a mother and her son’s abortive attempt to
escape to Pakistan from the Indian Kashmir, and the others are on disparate
themes.

13.  Ostensibly the two stories about bravery in battle, ’The Switch’ and The
Miracle’, are the usual stories about heroism one finds so often in Pakistani
popular fiction in the wake of the 1965 war. Such an interpretation seems
inescapable in the light of the following remarks in the ’Preface’.
 The two stories depicting the courage and superiority of the Pakistan Army
personnel over its traditional enemy may seem somewhat incongruous in the
light of the result of the 1971 war.
 But he goes on to assert, with the conviction of faith, that the Pakistan army
was defeated in 1971 only because of foreign intervention and ’quislings and
fifth columnists’. Yet, inspite of the disappointingly commonplace views
expressed here, Jeddy has produced work which transcends narrow
chauvinism as, surprisingly indeed, the author himself apparently does not.

14.  In The Switch’ the protagonist, Captain Ata, is left wounded in no man’s land
temporarily occupied by the enemy. He puts on an Indian NCO’s uniform and
shoots those who man the machine guns in an Indian platoon which is waiting
to ambush his own men.

15.  Baksh works for two months in Karachi to feed a destitute woman. He does
not go to Arabia but when his village friends come back they claim to have
seen him performing his pilgrimage in Mecca. It is only fair to add that such
anecdotes are in common circulation in Pakistan.
 ’The White Tiger of Viringa’ and The Marine Man Eater of Mauri’ are the
principal short stories of this volume. At one level they are stories about
shooting (shikar) of the kind for which Jim Corbett has become famous. In
both a man-eater is stalked and killed by desperate men. In the former the
man-eater is a tiger who has robbed his killer of his wife and child. In the
latter it is a shark which has eaten many villagers and the narrator kills it
because of the love of a sensual girl. Both the man-eaters are freaks: the
tiger is white, its body is disproportionally long and its paws are much too
small. The shark can remain still in deep water whereas other sharks have to
move about to avoid suffocation. It is of diabolical cunning too.

16.  But, whereas the stories are interesting even as tales of adventure, their real
significance seems to be different. They are about man’s confrontation with the
unusual. The unusual happens to be evil in this case and both the tiger and the
shark become symbols of iniquity like Ahab’s white whale in Moby Dick (1951). The
element of the unusual is pronounced in both the stories but in the ’White Tiger’ it
has an element of the Gothic, the preternatural also. The tiger is born after the
death of an English captain who is averse to the feline family in all forms. This
captain kills a Sadhu’s tiger and is, presumably, born as a tiger himself. The
element of the unusual keeps the reader curious. It has another purpose too: that
of taking the reader into the world of the unknown. In this extra-rational world
the human spirit is in conflict with the world of evil. At this metaphysical level,
the story is rewarding. In the ’Day of the Kestrel’, the same conflict is reduced to
an amoral attempt at existence. The kestrel, keen on hunting other birds, is
brought down by hunters. In his world everyone is killed if one does not kill and
Shikra struggles against this fact of life.

17.  Nina is not the pseudo-heroic figure Pakistani middle class literature presents.
She dies defying conventional morality and never repents of fornication and
drinking. However, Nina is not heartless. She would have married the young
man vho commits suicide out of a sentimental desire to impress her. She is
not like that young man. She believes that the universe is absurd .md this
robs her of the desire to continue to exist. Her heroism is anti-heroic: it
merely consists in asserting the will to exist as long as pleasurable existence
is possible in a meaningless and indifferent universe.

18.  The short stories with a Pakistani background have sociological themes. In
’The Devil’s Choice’ the problems of refugees from India are depicted with
striking realism. An young man who does not get a job finally accepts an
illegal one out of desperation. In ’God Be With You My Darling’ the theme is
the tyranny of feudal chiefs on which a number of popular T.V. plays - ’Varris”
and ’Dahliz’5 -- were also shown in the late seventies and early eighties. In
this story the chief of a tribe gets a man’s daughter abducted but the man
kills her before she is taken away. A journalist who has seen all this happening
writes a story about it but the editor, intimidated by the chief, refuses to
print the story. The story is slight and much better stories on this theme are
available in Urdu.

19.  ’Death By Hanging’ is the story of a man who assassinates a political leader
who is a toady of the British government. This would not have made a good
short story but, because the author shows the conflict between values in the
English judge’s mind, the story rises to a higher level. In the end, however,
the judge hangs the accused and the ’beginning of the end of His Britannic
Majesty’s Government had surely started’ (p. 143).
 ’A Friendly Foreigner’ is a commonplace short story of a wife who is about to
get seduced away from her husband. ’Elaine’ and ’Insomnia’ are introspective
pieces of a modernist kind. However, they do not seem to read as authentic
pieces of interior dialogue or the flashback technique. ’Fidgety’ is, on the
other hand, a hilarious story of a car which sees the narrator’s one
dependable and numerous undependable girl friends. The car has been
endowed with human characteristics and the humour is not irksome.

20.  It is surprising that the writers of English fiction have not shown any reaction to
the politics of Pakistan in these eventful years. The 1971 war, for instance, is a
major event on which almost nothing significant has been written. Mehr Nigar
Masroor in her novel Shadows of Time has, however, touched upon it. Among short
story writers the author wrote a story entitled ’Bingo’ which was published in the
late eighties in Pakistan (The Frontier Post) and abroad (Short Story International,
New York).6 As the author’s short stories, of which over seventy have been
published, have not been published in the form of a collection they cannot be
noticed in this history.
 However, this story may be mentioned as an exception because it is radically
different from the ordinary Pakistani response to the 1971 war. To bring out the
difference of outlook between this story and most Pakistani’s outlook it would be
best to quote from the ’Preface’ of The White Tiger of Viringa in which Jeddy
voices the ordinary man and the Pakistani intellectuals’ opinion about the war.

21.  But to anyone capable of some thought, it cannot but be obvious that the
traumatic events of 1970-71; the brain-numbing barrage of false propaganda: the
flooding of the country with quislings and fifth columnists to mislead-a part in
revolt, the unprovoked attack with the help of the limitless and highly
sophisticated weaponry of a super power, and castiron guarantees by it of
intervention should the attack run into difficulties could not have been resisted by
even the world’s best armies.
 In ’Bingo’ the political opinion expressed is that West Pakistani officers, mostly of
the armed forces and the administrative services (especially the C.S.P), had been
treating the people of Bengal with contempt and had been insensitive to the
hatred build up as a result of this neo-colonial attitude. Thus, the people of East
Bengal could not be blamed for trying to declare their determination for more
autonomy. Since this struggle for autonomy was not dealt with suitably, the
Bengali separatists won over many people to their side and Bangladesh was
declared independent. All this political background is not given in the story but is
necessary to understand it.

22.  The story begins in the Pakistan Military Academy where two cadets, Safeer who is from West
Pakistan, and Tajussur, an East Pakistani, are under training to become commissioned officers
in the army. The narrator is Safeer and he is obtuse, jealous of Tajussur and contemptible of
all Bengalis. To make fun of his Bengali companion he calls him ’Bingo’. The youths get their
commission and are posted to East Pakistan. Soon they are sent on military operations,
ostensibly to discover the hiding places of the Mukti Bahini guerrillas, but actually to kill
anyone who might be suspected of being, in Pakistani terms, a rebel. Safeer, being blinded by
propaganda and insensitive because of his military training, believes that all those Bengalis
who hate the West Pakistanis are guilty of treason and should not be shown any mercy. He
kills several Bengalis and rapes their girls. But one day, while killing Bengalis, he is taken
prisoner and a major from the Bangladesh army passes the sentence of death on him. He
undergoes a psychological crisis and understands that the Bengalis too were fighting for what
they considered worth preserving. At this juncture he is taken out of the prison and taken
home by Tajussur, who is now an officer in the Bangladesh army. At Tajussur’s home Safeer
understands the essential humanity of the Bengalis, falls in love with Taiussur’s sister, and
becomes more understanding. However, a captain of the Special Services Group breaks into
the house and kills Tajussur’s sister and Tajussur They go back but by this time Bangladesh is
free and the Pakistan Army has surrendered.

23.  In this story the author has expressed his sympathy with the cause of the Bangladeshis
through irony. The narrator, Safeer, is an army officer who is meant to be condemned as the
dupe of West Pakistani propaganda and whose msensitivity is revealed by his contempt for
Tajussur. The language used reflects the narrator’s mental condition. In the beginning the
prose is abrupt, blunt, unimaginative and obtuse. It appears that the man who is uttering the
words is unable to communicate, nor is he able to feel, the softer emotions oi life The
narrator is alienated from Tajussur, who is a friendly, quintessential^ human person, and is
also alienated from his essential humanity. After the crisis Safeers language changes. It
becomes more expressive, more colourful and more flowing. This change symbolises Safeer s
newly born capacity to ”establish contact with the reality outside him and with the best part
of himself. Now Safeer is no longer alienated from his own essential humanity, he can
sympathise with the Bengalis and does not look down upon them and Tajussur. In fact his love
for Tajussur’s sister is a metaphor for his own fondness for Tajussur which he has not
understood or expressed so far. But, political systems being based on force and hatred, the
end .s full ot violence and disillusionment. . ,
 This story is radically critical of West Pakistan, attitudes as well as official policy in the 1971
crisis. Most other people, while they were critical of the government, based their criticism on
the fact that the government was not efficient, in this story the point of view is that
Bangladesh should have been granted autonomy if most of its people wanted thai122 This
conclusion is radical and this story has been mentioned for that reason.

24.  Akhtar Tufail is another writer whose collection of short stories The Vale of Tears
was published in the seventies. Unfortunately his language is full of solecisms and
his stories are not well written. They are, however, unusual in so far that the
protagonists are either blasphemous or have stopped believing in orthodox Islam.
This is rather unusual for Pakistani fiction though it has hardly been used for
artistic effect. It just seems to be the result of the writer’s own rebellious scoffing
at religion. Sajjad Sheikh, one of the teachers of the writer in Gordon College,
Rawalpindi, sums up the main features of Tufail’s short stories in his preface to the
book as follows:
 Irrespective of the class or position, his characters endeavour to solve the enigma
of life; they question the validity of hitherto accepted norms of society, meet with
frustrations and consequently philosophize and suffer. Very often they do not
understand themselves, and even, at times, fail to express their feelings and
thoughts in a diction distinct from the writer’s.
 The faults of the stories are however so grave that the writer’s rebellious
individualism, forceful though it is, cannot redeem the stories which do not come
up to even the modest standards of Pakistani short fiction written in English.

25. Mrs. Bapsi Sidhwa
 The best writer of fiction in the seventies, however, was Mrs. Bapsi Sidhwa.
She continues to produce novels and they are so good that she deserves a
chapter to herself.

26.  Mrs. Bapsi Sidhwa is a Parsi. The Parsis came from Iran when the Muslims
conquered that country and Islam replaced Zoroastrianism as the dominant
religion. The Parsis live in secluded communities of their own and believe in
Zoroastrianism. They settled down mostly in Bombay and Karachi and moved
to Lahore and other major cities of the subcontinent. They are generally
businessmen and little is known of what goes on within Parsi communities by
most Pakistanis and Indians. Mrs. Sidhwa has brought us close to this unknown
community in the novel The Crow Eaters (1978).
 In the eighties she wrote two more novels: The Bride and The Ice-Candy-Man,
both available in Pakistan and abroad as very few other Pakistani novels are.
Mrs. Sidhwa, who was born in Karachi and lived later in Lahore, is now writing
fiction and teaching at Harward. She has three children and is a social worker
in addition to being a novelist.

27.  The Crow Eaters and The Bride are good examples of realistic fiction in Pakistan.
Her novels suggest that she possesses the perception, the moral courage and the
unsentimental approach to reality which makes it possible for anyone to write
good realistic fiction. In The Crow Eaters, for instance, she could have
sentimentalized her own religious community, the Parsis. She tells us about
Fareedoon Junglewalla (Freddy), a Parsi businessman who carves out a financial
empire for himself in the Indian city of Lahore. The other characters, Freddy’s
wife Putli, his mother-in-law jerbanoo, his friends the Aliens, his children, and
several other minor characters are drawn with considerable skill. Freddy, with his
business acumen, his unscrupulousness, and worldly tact is ably brought to life.
The narrator portrays his characters not through direct description but through
their interaction with other people. And the protagonist has been given human
dimensions in all their complexity in the same manner. Jerbanoo, the most
outrageously hilarious character in the novel too has never been described from
the outside. Her behaviour and conversation reveal her character. For instance:

28.  Jerbanoo is sketched with a Dickensian energy and quality of looking at the world. She
actually defecates on the carpet of the Aliens to spite them and her son-in-law even thinks of
murdering her. She is larger than life but does not become a caricature or abstraction. This is
true for the other characters too. Freddy is probably the most rumbustious character in any
Pakistani work of fiction with the exception of some of Ghose’s characters. But even Ghose’s
protagonists in the Brazilian trilogy are less convincingly real than the disreputable Freddy. It
would not be excessive to claim that Bapsi Sidhwa’s character portrayal is the best among
Pakistani novelists.
 The novel is comparable in some ways with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Get Ready for Battle
(1962) and Esmond in India (1958). As in Jhabvala’s novels the pursuit of wealth brings out
the worse in people, especially when they are in domestic conflict. So in The Crow Eaters
Jerbanoo is selfish, cantankerous and malicious and Freddy, whom she opposes, is equally
selfish, hard and even cruel. This kind of conflict among worldly characters is a part of
Jhabvala’s novels. But in many works of Jhabvala there is a person with unworldly, almost
saintly qualities. In Get Ready For Battle it is Sarla Devi and in Esmond it is Ram Nath and his
son. In the Crow Eaters such a person is Yazdi, one of the sons of Freddy

29.  He too renounces the world of middle class comfort and hecomes a wandering
philanthropist. But Yazdi does not have the inclination towards the life of
monastic poverty which Jhabvala’s characters have. He leaves the kind of life
he associates with his father because hi^ father has hurt him deeply by
fornicating with his beloved Rosy Watson, an Anglo Indian girl whom he wants
to marry. Thus Yazdi’s vow of poverty is at best a romantic gesture and is a
measure of the beastliness of Freddy’s methods rather than an expression of
the desire to renounce the world.

30.  Bapsi Skiliwii brings her gift of irony to support the theme that worldly
success, for whatever it may be worth, can be won by worldly people. In fact
those who are great by worldly standards, as Freddy is in the end, are almost
certainly devoid of those qualities which go to the making of saints. It is
because they are not really saintly that they rise in the world and go to the
pinnacle of earthly success. In this novel Freddy, his other son Billy, and
Jerbanoo are all strong personalities and achieve success in their various
ways. All of them dominate people, manipulate them and, in one way or the
other, control the events of the daily lives of the people around them. Putli
(puppet in Urdu) is manipulated by her husband and mother; Yazdi is broken
up because he is refractory and Billy, imbibing his father’s values, becomes a
domestic tyrant. But in spite of the grimness of the theme it is presented with
humour. Sometimes this humour is created by the surface irony of statement:

31.  Although Mrs. Sidhwa has had the rare courage and honesty to have written
about the Parsi community m this unflattering way, the community stands
symbolically tor any ffoup of people of any belief. It is really about human
nature as it is expressed in certain social contexts. And this gives it huln
Sntficance. However, she has successfully evoked the life of Lahore in the
early part of this century as Alamg Hashmi, in his excellent review of the
novel, points out as follows:
 Bapsi Sidhwa writes from a deep historical consciousness. Her evocation of a
part of Lahore lite as lived in the first half of this century is convincing and
charming to me as a Lahorite myself. She herselt grew up in Lahore and
makes her home there; tne first-hand knowledge of it certainly lends
credence to the irony, as it arises out of a deep understanding 01 the place
and people and their ways.

32.  All this underlines the fact that Bapsi Sidhwa has the observation and the
knowledge which is necessary for creating a work in the realistic mode of
writing. But, as I said earlier, it is her honesty and intelligence which makes
her work realistic. For without honesty one falsifies facts out of a desire to
support some theory. Generally people falsify reality for the sake of their
creed, their community or their social group. If Bapsi had not been so
stringently honest she would have presented only the best aspects of the Parsi
community thus creating a propagandist work and falsifying reality. Also one
needs acute intelligence otherwise one simply does not understand the truth
and falsifies reality only because of lack of perception. Bapsi does have the
intelligence which makes her transcend propaganda and romantic myths to go
to the core of events and phenomena. And it is this creative quality which she
uses in her second novel The Bride.

33.  The Bride is a story of conflict of values in one particular area of Pakistan. A
conflict which serves as a metaphor of a similar conflict in the rest of
Pakistani society as well. Qasim, the protagonist, is from the tribes of the
Northern Areas of Pakistan. He adopts Zaitoon when her parents are killed in
the Partition. When she grows up he marries her off to Sakhi, a youth from his
own tribe whose values are very different from his city-bred wife’s. When the
girl is being brought to Sakhi’s tribe by her father, the old man stops for one
night in an army camp in which Major Mushtaq’s orderly falls in love with the
girl. Sakhi sees her being helped in the way by the orderly and starts
suspecting his wife from the very beginning. He is inordinately jealous, as is
everyone else in his tribe, and keeps a close watch on her. She runs away, is
raped in the way, and would certainly have been killed by Sakhi and his
friends if major Mushtaq had not saved her life.

34.  The most recent novel, The Ice-Candy-Man (1988), is perhaps even better
than The Crow Eaters. In this novel the emphasis is not on representing
phenomenal reality though the narrative technique remains, as far as the
progression of chronological events is concerned, predominantly realistic. The
work is a response to the traumatic events of the partition of India in 1947
and Bapsi Sidhwa has also used surrealistic techniques.

35.  In this way, without a word of protestation or preaching and without histrionics,
Bapsi Sidhwa has written one of the most powerful indictments of the riots during
the Partition. Before this novel there was almost nothing in English except some
works of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and some short stories of H.K. Burki and Tabussum
about these riots. There was, of course, much that was good in Urdu literature2
and other languages but in English there was only Khushwant Singh’s Train to
Pakistan (1956) about the Partition. Now there is this novel which shows the
human personality in stress as a result of the Partition and shows a society
responding to such a catastrophic event in the way societies do react: through
sheer indifference, gossiping, engaging in the trivial and the malicious, making
love and, as if through magic, killing, raping and going insane. This aspect of
reality is often lost in novels which deal only with surface reality. Thus, through
her deviation from the methods of traditional realism, Bapsi Sidhwa has written a
truly authentic, multi-dimensional, novel about the Partition. This is one of the
best works of Pakistani fiction and one of the good novels of this century. Bapsi
Sidhwa is still writing and it is hoped that she will produce fiction which will make
Pakistani fiction in English compare with the rest of good Third World fiction in
this language.