SOURCE: Couto, Maria. “In Divided Times.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4435 (1 April 1988): 363.

In the following excerpt, Couto comments that, while Sidhwa's storytelling talents are impressive, Ice-Candy-Man is ultimately flawed due to the author's problematic rendering of narrative voice.

Bapsi Sidhwa's new novel—whose very title, Ice-Candy-Man, and the popsicles the eponymous trader sells, belong to a scene far removed from the subcontinent where we know the ubiquitous icecreamwalla—is an attempt to deal with the facts of history and the traumas of Partition. Sidhwa, a Pakistani now resident in America, is quite firm in her resolve to subvert what she sees as the Indian version: “And today, forty years later, in films of Gandhi's and Mountbatten's lives, in books by British and Indian scholars, Jinnah, who for a decade was known as ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’ is caricatured, and portrayed as a monster.” The carping turns vicious when Mahatma...