Cracking India

“‘The goddamn English!’ I think, infected by Colonel Bharucha’s startling ferocity. […] And notwithstanding the compatible and sanguine nature of my relationship with my disease, I feel it is my first personal involvement with Indian politics: the Quit-India sentiment that has fired the imagination of a subject people and will soon sweep away the Raj.” 

The Quit India movement was a massive series of protests staged by Gandhi in 1942. Their goal was to eject the British Raj from India in response to Britain unilaterally forcing India to enter World War II in 1939. After hearing Colonel Bharucha blame the English for bringing polio to India, Lenny has her first political thought. Although she is happy with her disability, she catches a bit of the enthusiasm for Indian independence and anger at the English. 

“I learn of human needs, frailties, cruelties and joys. I also learn from her the tyranny magnets exercise over metals.” 

Lenny is endlessly curious, learning by watching those around her. Ayah is sexually attractive and surrounded by men who want her. Since the novel is largely about women’s lack of power in India and Pakistan during this period, Lenny learns from Ayah one of the few levers women could press—using sexuality and sexual attractiveness. 

“If we want India back we must take pride in our customs, our clothes, our languages… and not go mouthing the got-pit sot-pit of the English!” 

Ice-candy-man brings up one of the problems with colonization: The invading culture compromises the native culture. The class structure of colonization creates a hierarchy that favors the colonizers and devalues indigenous culture. In the act of taking India back, they must not only eject the English but also their language and culture. 

“All the same I am swept by a sense of relief so unburdening that I realize I was born with an awareness of the war: and I recall the dim, faraway fear of bombs that tinged with bitterness my mother’s milk. No wonder I was a colicky baby.”

Lenny is a very young child who ought to be unaware of major world events. But this realization demonstrates the way war—in this case, World War II—pervades a culture, even when fought on foreign soil. This highlights the damage done by England when they made the unilateral decision that India would enter World War II.

“No doubt the men in jail are acquiring political glory… but this shortcut to fame and fortune is not for us. It is no longer just a struggle for Home Rule. It is a struggle for power.” 

As the Parsees celebrate the end of the war, Colonel Bharucha is urging them to consider the larger picture of decolonization and what will happen in India after the English leave. The Parsees are a minority religion and will be at the mercy of whichever religious group wins power. Bharucha begs them not to take sides.

“I feel annoyed. I am not privy to information that is rapidly being revealed as my birthright.” 

Because Lenny is a girl, her family uses her disability as an excuse to deny her traditional schooling. At five years old, Lenny realizes that she has a right to learn after Bharucha tells the story of her people’s entrance into India. Lenny starts to understand that as a woman she will have to fight to get what she deserves.

“What’s it to us if Jinnah, Nehru and Patel fight? They are not fighting our fight.” 

For much of the novel, Ayah is a politically neutral figure. She is Hindu, but suitors of all religions gather around her. As Sharbat Khan tells her about the political struggles, Ayah suggests that these issues have nothing to do with her daily life, only growing concerned when Sharbat Khan tells her about young men who have been murdered.

“The path to virtue is strewn with broken people and shattered china.” 

Lenny is angry that she is unable to lie. At age three, Mother praised her for confessing to breaking a plate, and she has been compulsively truthful ever since. Her truthfulness allows her to see the brutal reality of revolution and social change, foreshadowing the incredible violence and destruction that will occur on the path to a settled India.

“There is much disturbing talk. India is going to be broken. Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is?” 

Because Lenny is a child, she can only think of the idea of India “breaking” literally. But ultimately, her misunderstanding reveals a deeper truth. India is broken into two countries. The line between them divides friends and families and causes many to suffer and die.

“Now I know surely. One man’s religion is another man’s poison.” 

When the Hindu man throws his food away because Lenny and Yousaf cast a shadow on it, Lenny feels the full weight of his disgust. It makes her feel as if she is disgusting. This clarifies that the fighting among the religions isn’t about violence and retribution. Instead, the fighting is about a fundamental disgust that each religion has for the others.

“But in my memory it is branded over an inordinate length of time: memory demands poetic license.” 

Lenny’s narration is through the eyes of a small child. Therefore, it is more about her impressions than facts. Time is slippery in the novel, with only mentions of historical events or the rare mention of Lenny’s actual age to tether us to the timeline. The sight of Lahore burning is monumental, so Lenny, through her trauma, remembers the fire as lasting for months. 

“She’s like me. There are some things she will not hold.”

Ice-candy-man has brought Ayah a gold coin he stole from a Hindu moneylender. Ayah, who is also Hindu, refuses to take it. She doesn’t explain why, but we sense her discomfort with Ice-candy-man’s hatred of the moneylender for being Hindu and his supposed love for Ayah. Ayah hides her hands when Ice-candy-man tries to get her to keep the coin. Earlier, Cousin attempted to give Lenny a pressed butterfly, which she also refuses to hold in her hands. Lenny also doesn’t explain why, but she is just as immovable as Ayah.

“There are some things a man cannot look upon without going mad.” 

Ice-candy-man becomes a different person after he saw the trainload of mutilated Muslims. He starts to take pleasure in violence. Before the train, in what he saw as a lighthearted joke, he exposed himself to Muslims to help his Sikh friend. After, he not only exposed himself to his Sikh friend’s family, but also physically and sexually assaulted them. When his friends point out his hypocrisy, Ice-candy-man reminds them that some experiences change a person entirely.

“People spell out the letters thinking Ayah will not understand the alphabet. This occurs so frequently that she’d have to be a real nitwit not to catch on.” 

Lenny has witnessed many spell out words in front of Ayah because they assume a Hindu domestic worker must be illiterate. Ayah endures this condescension regularly without complaint—a mark of her resilience.

“If they do something we don’t understand, they have good reason for it!” 

Ayah has just revealed that Lenny’s mother and aunt are transporting gasoline. Although Lenny, Adi, and Cousin are horrified when they misconstrue this to mean that their mothers have been burning the city, Ayah insists that they must blindly trust Mother instead of asking what she is doing. Conversely, as Lenny matures, she learns to question what she doesn’t understand instead of simply accepting it.

“He has been reduced to a body. A thing. One side of his handsome face already buried in the dusty sidewalk.” 

Lenny’s first face-to-face experience with the violence and massacres is finding the masseur’s dismembered body—now a horrifyingly dehumanized piece of flesh rather than a person. She does her best to re-personalize him in her mind, calling his face “handsome” to prevent it from only appearing as an object robbed of personhood.

“Calculating men, whose ideals and passions have cooled to ice.”

Lenny watches the angry mob charge up her driveway. Now that most of the Sikhs and Hindus have relocated, the Muslim mob is a bloodthirsty mass, looking to systematically eradicate people who are harmless but hold different religious beliefs.

“And then the men are no longer just fragmented parts of a procession: they become individual personalities whose faces I study, seeking friends.” 

Lenny recognizes a member of the mob and observes the dehumanizing effect of mob violence. Together, they are one mass without individual responsibility. But ever-hopeful Lenny still sees them as individuals and hopes that some of them will remember having a personal connection with her.

“The villagers appear visibly to shrink—as if the loss of hope is a physical thing.” 

When the villagers of Pir Pindo learn that the police are also against them, they break down, almost becoming physically smaller as they realize that they have no chance of surviving an attack by a large, angry, and well-armed force. 

“How soon he had become accustomed to thinking of people he had known all his life as bodies.” 

Ranna watches his family and loved ones die. He grows desensitized to the sight of death and gore. Just as Lenny saw how the masseur’s death turns him into an object, Ranna sees the murdered bodies around him as objects with no pretension of dignity or respect. Ranna will carry this trauma with him even if he recovers in the convent.

“So…one gets used to anything…if one must. The small bitternesses and grudges I tend to nurse make me feel ashamed of myself. Ranna’s ready ability to forgive a past none of us could control keeps him whole.” 

Lenny is surprised to see how well Ranna adapts to life in the convent. She can’t really understand Ranna’s massive trauma—she has only ever experienced “small bitternesses and grudges”—but admires Ranna’s ability to forgive and forget. 

“In any case we are growing apart. It is inevitable. The social worlds we inhabit are too different; our interests divergent.” 

Ranna’s weekly visits cease when he realizes that she is in love with her cousin, suggesting that Ranna was perhaps in love with Lenny. Lenny’s observation shows the way social divisions creep into every aspect of their lives. Even if they were close as children, Lenny knows social pressures could never allow them to marry.

“The innocence that my parents’ vigilance, the servants’ care and Godmother’s love sheltered in me, that neither Cousin’s carnal cravings, nor the stories of violence in the mobs, could quite destroy, was laid waste that evening by the emotional storm that raged around me.” 

Lenny, sheltered and privileged, has never registered the degree to which men oppress women in her culture—despite the fact that her supposedly loving father beat her mother, or despite Papoo drugged and forced to marry against her will. Only seeing Ayah, once full of life and Lenny’s role model for free will, reduced to an object of Ice-candy-man’s aggression, abuse, and terror, shows Lenny that the patriarchal culture that surrounds her permits men almost anything.