Much is written and spoken now about Pakistani authors, but if you were a bookish teenager in the 1990s, thrashing out miniature epics in your English essay class, you had cut your teeth on many ‘White People’ books.

If you were precocious, you’d have dabbled in the Russians, and regardless read Shakespeare and Flaubert, knew Plath backwards and forwards and read legal thrillers and Regency romances for fun.

Even Archie comics, the lowest rung of readership, were all about white Americans in high school.

And if you were me, in 1996, you would have come upon Ice Candy Man in your school library and had everything you knew about English literature turned neatly on its head.

I was thirteen and had never before read anything in the present tense. I’d read R.K Narayan’s Malgudi books, but I had never read anything set in Lahore, mine and Bapsi Sidhwa’s hometown. I had not, I daresay, read a Pakistani woman’s work before —Kamila Shamsie’s first novel, In the City by the Sea, came out in 1998 and I didn’t discover Attia Hosain until much later in life.

Ice Candy Man, set in Lahore on the brink of Partition, told from the perspective of little Lenny Sethi, was a watershed moment in the imaginative life of a generation of Pakistani writers, myself very much included.

What Bapsi Sidhwa did was show us how to translate our lives into the language we associated with the rest of the world; a roadmap for how to reconcile the heat, smells and hyperbole of relatives, of upper middle class drawing rooms and playing with the house help’s children on the page. She distilled what it meant to be Pakistani with an observant eye and fabulous ear for dialogue at a time where nobody was a Pakistani novelist writing in English.

Bapsi Sidhwa’s childhood home on The Mall happens to be across the road from my father’s childhood home. I grew up running up and down the stairs and flying kites on its many roofs, so I think I can claim the building as my childhood home too. One Basant, I had been reading The Crow Eaters and excitedly told my father about this hilarious novel, where the Junglewallahs lived on Mall Road.

Abbu pointed across the chatt – “that’s where the Bapsi lived”, he said. The thrill of a novel being so close to home was electric. So much is written about Karachi by its novelists, and Lahore often remains the convivial cousin who likes to eat. When Beloved City, Sidhwa’s love letter to Lahore, was published, she ended up giving me another gift: articulating that deep sense of love and belonging to a city, from fellow Lahoris.

She may have written only four novels, but Bapsi Sidhwa’s legacy is tremendous. I had the honour of meeting her once, and excitedly telling her about how much her work has shaped mine. She smiled, and patted my back. I impulsively gave her a little side hug – she was very small, almost birdlike – and if she minded, she didn’t let on.

Every time I find my fiction writing slipping into present tense, I think of her. The ayah in my novel has an echo of Lenny’s Ayah. The Pakistani writers of my generation are the product of our literary ancestors, and for us, Sidhwa was our irreverent, trailblazing matriarch. Our creative practice is all the richer for her work. Garothman Behest to Bapsi’s Ruvan.

The author is a writer and poet, based in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2024