Bapsi Sidhwa

Bapsi Sidhwa (1938–2024) was a Pakistani novelist who wrote in English and lived in the United States. Born in Karachi to a Parsi Zoroastrian family and raised in Lahore, she contracted polio at the age of two and lived with its effects all her life. ¹ She is best known for Ice-Candy-Man (1988; published in the United States as Cracking India, 1991), the Partition novel filmed by Deepa Mehta as Earth (1998); Mehta also filmed her novel Water (2006). ¹ She received Pakistan's Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 1991, was inducted into the Zoroastrian Hall of Fame in 2000, and died in Houston on 25 December 2024. ^{1 2}

Sidhwa was born in Karachi on 11 August 1938, the daughter of Peshotan and Tehmina Bhandara, and the family moved to Lahore some three months later. ¹ At two she contracted polio, which required severe surgeries in childhood and left an impact throughout her life; growing up in Lahore, she witnessed scenes of the Partition violence that later entered her fiction. ¹ She took her BA from Kinnaird College in Lahore in 1957, married at nineteen and moved to Bombay; that marriage ended after five years and she returned to Lahore, later marrying Noshir Sidhwa, who was also a Zoroastrian, and raising their children there while she began to write. ¹ After a fellowship at Harvard she taught at Columbia University, then settled in Houston, teaching at the University of St. Thomas and at Rice University's School of Continuing Studies, among other posts. ¹ Sidhwa was herself a Zoroastrian: FEZANA's memorial records her active involvement in the Zoroastrian Association of Houston, and it closed with the Zoroastrian prayer for the dead over her soul. ² She died in Houston, Texas, on 25 December 2024, at the age of 86. ^{1 2}

Her novels draw on the Lahore of her upbringing. The Crow Eaters (1978) is a comic portrait of a Parsi family; The Bride (1982) follows a tribal girl married into the Kohistani mountains; Ice-Candy-Man (1988) tells the Partition through the eyes of Lenny, a Parsi child in Lahore, and An American Brat (1993) sends a Pakistani girl to the United States. ¹ Deepa Mehta filmed Ice-Candy-Man as Earth (1998) and her novel Water (2006) as the film Water (2005). ¹ She also edited City of Sin and Splendour, writings on Lahore (2006), and published Their Language of Love in 2013. ¹ Her honours include the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (1991), the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award (1994) and Italy's Mondello Prize for Water (2007); FEZANA founded a Bapsi Sidhwa Literary Prize in 2022. ^{1 2}

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