August 4, 2002

Bapsi Sidhwa is one of the best known South Asian fiction writers in English. Her outstanding books are The crow eater, The bride, The ice candy man and The American brat.

I AM fortunate. I have been able to address some of my larger concerns — however inadequately — in my writing; concerns that engage my compassion and my sense of justice. And, sometimes, in pitch-black moods, I am struck by a hopeless dread of the injustice that encircles our globe.

As often, though, the mood lifts. As much on the glorious pinions of some crass comedy, a bit of base farce or crude burlesque, as on the lightning shaft of a beam that unexpectedly penetrates us with a notion of the irony that governs our lives. This sense of irony has stood me in good stead: particularly in Cracking India and The crow eaters.

The Pakistani bride, a novel about a young girl married into a Kohistani tribe on the Afghan border, was my first novel and it is a rather chilling story. It took me four years to write, and when it was finally sent to an agent in America by a friend. I found time hanging on my hands and a disconcerting void in my life. Once I started writing The crow eaters, however, the routine of my days fell into place like a deck of shuffled cards coming together.

The crow eaters, self-published in Pakistan in 1978 and published by Jonathan Cape in England in 1980 (a year before Rushdie’s Midnight’s children), is very different from The Pakistani bride. It is a raw comedy with a serious undertow. Whereas in The Pakistani bride I wrote about the harsh lives of a people hidden away in the granite folds of the Karakorams, in The crow eaters, a novel about my own community, the Parsis, I wanted to tell the story of a resourceful and accommodating people tucked away in the forgotten crevices of Indo-Aryan history.

In an attempt to capture the quintessential Parsi ethos while writing it, I tapped into an unexpectedly rich vein of humour. The humour just tumbled out in The crow eaters, barrelling through everything that stood in its path; just as Faredoon Junglewalla, Freddy for short, and his boisterous mother-in-law, Jerbanoo, bulldoze their way through the turbulent novel.

Humour, I find, allows me to reflect my views pleasantly, without sounding preachy or didactic, and humour is also often surprisingly wise. And in these days of the ‘politically correct’, it affords one the opportunity to be truthful, if not satisfyingly blunt. Perhaps the most touching reaction to the humour of The crow eaters came from a woman who travelled from Rawalpindi to Lahore expressly to thank me. Her sister had been ill from cancer and reading aloud her favourite passages from The crow eaters had distracted her from her pain again and again.

This element of joy, this slapstick uproar, has earned the Parsis the label Kagra-khaow (“Crow-eaters”) in Mumbai, where they live in large numbers. In Gujarati, Hindi/Urdu and Punjabi, when a person talks too much he or she is liable to be asked: have you eaten a crow that you are talking non-stop? Going kan-kan like a crow? My community certainly is as raucous as an assembly of crows wherever they might be — in England, India or America.

To a large extent this nutty sense of Parsi humour has also kept the tiny community’s identity ticking, and its Gujarati discourse agile. The linguistic innovations inflicted on the Gujarati language by the Parsis erupted in the wildly popular and bawdy Parsi Natak (Parsi Theatre) performed in Gujarat and Bombay (Mumbai today). Today’s flourishing Indian cinema, in fact, owes its inception to Parsis like Shorab Modi and the venturesome Wadia brothers in Bombay, a city now appropriately called “Bolliwood”.

This quintessentially Parsi comedy also served me well in Ice-Candy-Man. Without it, the horror of what people did to each other during the Partition riots would have been almost intolerable. In Ice-Candy-Man, I stressed a central concern — the evil done in the name of religion by politicians, and located in the ordinariness of the people who so mercilessly preyed on the victims of Partition. Humour, with its arsenal of irony and satire, is an essential tool in this novel.

I have accomplished some of what I set out to do as a writer, and some I never expected to do. Writing for me has become a natural condition of existence and, more often than not, an act of joy. Of course, it can be slow and difficult at times, and painful also; but it will always be a labour of love.

Following is a passage of a conflict between Freddy Junglewalla and his mother-in-law Jerbanoo, from The crow eaters, which conveys an aspect of its humour:

Bullied and blackmailed, Freddy felt himself sink into a muddy vortex.

Once, striking his forehead in exasperation, he remonstrated, “For God’s sake, keep your voice down — must you always bray like an ass? What will the neighbours think?”

The retaliation to this impulsive rebuke was so severe that he never repeated his mistake. “And now my own son-in-law is calling me a donkey!” shrieked Jerbanoo. The frizzy knot at the back of her neck came loose and the braid settled thin and quivering on her shoulder. “And now I’m forbidden even to talk in this house! Oh, Putli, take me back. Oh, my child, take me back to my childhood village,” she cried, flinging her arms around Putli and sobbing on her breast.

Putli glared at Freddy with tight-lipped censure. “How dare you call my mother a donkey. I would like to see anyone try and stop her from speaking in this house!”

“Look, I’m not telling her to stop talking,” explained Freddy wearily. There was a plea of despairing confusion in his eyes. “I’m merely requesting her not to shout so loud.”

“Requesting? Requesting?” snorted Jerbanoo, rearing her head like a cobra from Putli’s bosom. “Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t touch this, don’t touch that. You go on and on until I feel frightened even to open my mouth, even to drink a drop of water in this house!”

Freddy choked with fury. The accusations were absurd and unjust. He was the one condemned to prowl around the house stealthily, not daring to speak for fear of touching off a revolution. “Of course you don’t drink water. A drop of water wouldn’t know where to lodge in your stomach — not with all that port wine and cognac you’ve pumped into it!” Freddy was desperate.

Writer’s E-mail: Bsidhwa@aol.com

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