SOURCE: Singh, Jagdev. “Ice-Candy-Man: A Parsi Perception on the Partition of India.” Literary Criterion 27, no. 3 (1992): 23-35.

In the following essay, Singh examines Ice-Candy-Man as a novel about the Partition of India told from the unique perspective of a sensitive Parsi girl. Singh comments that the story focuses on the effect of the Partition on the Parsi community as a whole.

The Partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 is one of the great tragedies, the magnitude, ambit and savagery of which compels one to search for the larger meaning of events, and to come to terms with the lethal energies that set off such vast conflagrations. There have been a number of novels written on the horrors of the Partition holocaust on both sides of the Radcliff line: Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), Attia Hossain's Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Chaman Nahal's Azadi (1975) present the Indian perception of...