Bapsi Sidhwa

During the 1947 Partition of India, young Lenny Sethi suffers from polio and spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, who exposes her to the differences among the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, but when Ayah is kidnapped, Lenny's world erupts into religious, ethnic, and radical violence. Reprint.

A Novel

Cracking India

Ice Candy Man

Feroza Ginwalla, a young Pakistani, is sent by her parents to America in order to broaden her horizons after living under the martial law of Pakistan. Reprint.

An American Brat

Water follows the life of eight-year-old Chuyia, a child-bride who is abandoned at a widows ashram after the demise of her fifty-year-old husband. There, she is forced to live out a life of penitence until death.

A Novel Based on the Film by Deepa Mehta

Water

Moving from their ancestral village to the bustling city of Lahore, Faredoon Jungewalla and his family must learn how to thrive under British rule while keeping peace with his Hindu and Muslim neighbors. Reprint.

The Crow Eaters

A Pakistani teenager is trapped by tradition in this tale by “Pakistan’s finest English-language novelist” (New York Times). Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place, particularly for women. Traveling alone from the isolated mountain village where he was born, Qasim, a tribal man, takes Zaitoon, an orphaned girl, for his daughter and brings her to the glittering city of Lahore. Amid the pungent bazaars and crowded streets, he makes his fortune and a home for the two of them. Yet as the years pass, Qasim grows nostalgic for his life in the mountains, and fifteen-year-old Zaitoon envisions a romantic landscape, filled with tall men who roam the mountains like gods. Impulsively, Qasim promises Zaitoon in marriage to a man of his tribe. But once she arrives in the mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting her fate as the bride of an inscrutable husband impossible. Unfortunately, the only escape is one from which there is no return. Prescient and provocative in its assessment of the plight of women in a tribal society in Pakistan, the first of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels is a story of marriage and commitment, of the conflict between adherence to tradition and indomitable force of a woman’s spirit. Praise for The Pakistani Bride “At a breathless pace [Sidhwa] weaves her exotic cliffhanger from passion, power, lust, sensuality, cruelty and murder.” —Financial Times (UK) “Bapsi Sidhwa is a powerful and dramatic novelist who knows how to flesh out a story.” —London Times (UK) “Sidhwa writes with the same vivacity that made the author’s first novel, The Crow Eaters so memorable.” —Telegraph (UK)

The Pakistani Bride

In this brand-new collection of stories, Bapsi Sidhwa returns to chronicling the lives and loves of those on both sides of the Indo-Pak border. A wife worries for her family’s survival during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. A mother is horrified when she learns that her daughter wants to marry her American boyfriend. An American housewife living in Lahore has a tempestuous affair with a Pakistani minister. An aged matriarch travels to the USA to discover she must confront a traumatic memory from her past. Finely nuanced, and laced with Sidhwa’s sharply comic observations, this is a stellar collection of tales from one of the subcontinent’s most important and beloved writers.

Their Language of Love

Ditte Bandini

Roman

Ice candy man

Ice-Candy-Man

Pakistani Bride

"Made into the film Earth-1947 by Canadian director Deepa Mehta, Bapsi Sidhwa's book takes the readers back to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 as narrated by Lenny, the polio-stricken daughter of an affluent Parsee family in Lahore. Lenny sees Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Parsees and Sikhs fight for their land and their lives and is an unwilling witness to the trauma that bears the crux of the Partition tale becoming, like many others, the victim of her religion. Bapsi Sidhwa, Pakistan's most gifted yet down-to-earth novelist, resurrects the story of Partition, which is also relevant today as a tool of history and a chilling reminder of the ethnic hatred that still stalks the subcontinent." --

Ice-candy Man

'The ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Mughal emperors', the 'Paris of the East', Lahore is more than the grandeur of Mughal forts and gardens, mosques and mausoleums; the jewel colours of everlasting spring. It is also the city of poets, the city of love, longing, sin and splendour. This anthology brings together verse and prose: essays, stories, chronicles and profiles by people who have shared a relationship with Lahore. From the mystical poems of Madho Lal Hussain and Bulleh Shah to Iqbal's ode and Faiz's lament, from Maclagan and Aijazuddin's historical treatises and Kipling's 'chronicles' to Samina Quraeshi's intricate portraits of the Old City and Irfan Husain's delightful account of Lahori cuisine, City of Sin and Splendour is a marriage of the sacred and profane. While Pran Nevile paints a vivid sketch of Lahore's Hira Mandi, Shahnaz Kureshy brings alive the legend of Anarkali and Khalid Hasan pays a tribute to the late 'melody queen' Nur Jehan. Mohsin Hamid's essay on exile, Bina Shah's account of the Karachi vs Lahore debate and Emma Duncan's piece on elections are essential to the understanding of modern-day Lahore. But the city is also about Lahore remembered. Ved Mehta and Krishen Khanna write about 'going back' as Khushwant Singh writes about his pre-Partition years in Lahore. Sara Suleri's memories of her hometown, the landscapes of Bapsi Sidhwa's fiction, Khaled Ahmed's homage to Intezar Hussain and Urvashi Butalia's Ranamama are tributes to memory as much as they are tributes to remarkable lives and unforgettable places. Including fiction old and new—from Manto and Chughtai to Ashfaq Ahmed and Zulfikar Ghose; Saad Ashraf and Sorayya Khan to Mohsin Hamid and Rukhsana Ahmad,City of Sin and Splendour is a sumptuous collection that reflects the city it celebrates.

Writings on Lahore

City of Sin and Splendour

Faredoon (Freddie) Junglewalla Is Either The Jewel Of The Parsi Community Or A Murdering Scoundrel. Freddie S Mother-In-Law, Jerbanoo, Thinks He Is Planning To Do Away With Her, But Freddie Has Always Been A Pragmatist: If The Old Woman Were To Die (Be Murdered?) The Body Would Have To Be Placed On The Open-Roofed Towers Of Silence, In Keeping With Custom, And That Would Never Do. Insurance Fraud And Arson, However, Are Well Within Freddie s Repertoire-In Fact He Thinks He Has Invented The Idea, So Advanced Is It For India, In 1901. As His Skills Grow He Becomes A Man Of Consequence Among The Parsis, With People Travelling Thousands Of Miles To See Him In Lahore, Especially If They Wish To Escape Tight Spots They Have Got Themselves Into. In This Wickedly Comic Novel, The Celebrated Author Of Ice-Candy Man Takes Us Into The Heart Of The Parsi Community, Portraying Its Varied Customs And Traits With Contagious Humour.

The ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Mughal emperors’, the ‘Paris of the East’, Lahore is more than the grandeur of Mughal forts and gardens, mosques and mausoleums; the jewel colours of everlasting spring. It is also the city of poets, the city of love, longing, sin and splendour. This anthology brings together verse and prose: essays, stories, chronicles and profiles by people who have shared a relationship with Lahore. From the mystical poems of Madho Lal Hussain and Bulleh Shah to Iqbal’s ode and Faiz’s lament, from Maclagan and Aijazuddin’s historical treatises and Kipling’s ‘chronicles’ to Samina Quraeshi’s intricate portraits of the Old City and Irfan Husain’s delightful account of Lahori cuisine, City of Sin and Splendour is a marriage of the sacred and profane. While Pran Nevile paints a vivid sketch of Lahore’s Hira Mandi, Shahnaz Kureshy brings alive the legend of Anarkali and Khalid Hasan pays a tribute to the late ‘melody queen’ Nur Jehan. Mohsin Hamid’s essay on exile, Bina Shah’s account of the Karachi vs Lahore debate and Emma Duncan’s piece on elections are essential to the understanding of modern-day Lahore. But the city is also about Lahore remembered. Ved Mehta and Krishen Khanna write about ‘going back’ as Khushwant Singh writes about his pre-Partition years in Lahore. Sara Suleri’s memories of her hometown, the landscapes of Bapsi Sidhwa’s fiction, Khaled Ahmed’s homage to Intezar Hussain and Urvashi Butalia’s Ranamama are tributes to memory as much as they are tributes to remarkable lives and unforgettable places. Including fiction old and new—from Manto and Chughtai to Ashfaq Ahmed and Zulfikar Ghose; Saad Ashraf and Sorayya Khan to Mohsin Hamid and Rukhsana Ahmad, City of Sin and Splendour is a sumptuous collection that reflects the city it celebrates.

Forced to become the bride of an inscrutable man from her former village, Zaitoon rebels against tradition and searches for new meaning in her life

The Bride

A sheltered Pakistani girl is sent to America by her parents, with unexpected results: “Entertaining, often hilarious . . . Not just another immigrant’s tale.” —Publishers Weekly Feroza Ginwalla, a pampered, protected sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl, is sent to America by her parents, who are alarmed by the fundamentalism overtaking Pakistan—and influencing their daughter. Hoping that a few months with her uncle, an MIT grad student, will soften the girl’s rigid thinking, they get more than they bargained for: Feroza, enthralled by American culture and her new freedom, insists on staying. A bargain is struck, allowing Feroza to attend college with the understanding that she will return home and marry well. As a student in a small western town, Feroza finds her perceptions of America, her homeland, and herself beginning to alter. When she falls in love with a Jewish American, her family is aghast. Feroza realizes just how far she has come—and wonders how much further she can go—in a delightful, remarkably funny coming-of-age novel that offers an acute portrayal of America as seen through the eyes of a perceptive young immigrant. “Humorous and affecting.” —Library Journal “Exceptional.” —Los Angeles Times “Her characters [are] painted so vividly you can almost hear them bickering.” —The New York Times

Now Filmed as 1947, a motion picture by Deepa Mehta Few novels have caught the turmoil of the Indian subcontinent during Partition with such immediacy, such wit and tragic power.

Bapsi Sidhwa

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