SOURCE: Wiggins, Marianne. “The Melting Stomach.” New Statesman 115, no. 2970 (26 February 1988): 23.

In the following review, Wiggins criticizes Ice-Candy-Man, asserting that the novel is a failure in terms of its stereotyped characterization, problematic narrative voice, weak sense of place, and oversimplified representation of the story's political context.

A third of the way through Bapsi Sidhwa's new novel [Ice-Candy-Man], which pretends to be a tale about Independence, Mohandas Gandhi arrives in Lahore. The year is post-World War II, pre-Partition—say 1946. Lahore, then as now, is the intellectual centre of Muslim literature, the site of a great university and the home of Urdu poets. Then it was in India, now it is in Pakistan.

It would be ridiculous to presume that the Mahatma would choose to visit the city that is the heart of Muslim culture at that specific time for anything less than a calculated, political expediency. However, in the hands...