Abstract
The interview engages Bapsi Sidhwa in a discussion on Partition, a central issue in her novel Ice-Candy-Man , which also recurs in her other works. The author's interest in the historical event, beside having auto-biographical origins, demonstrates the tremendous impact it had on ordinary people's lives, the way it shaped their identities and the trauma it caused, which is not yet healed in contemporary India and Pakistan. According to Sidhwa, literature can dig into painful memory and try to make sense of it more successfully than history can. Her adoption (unprecedented in the context of Partition literature) of a marginal point of view — that of a Parsi girl who looks at reality with the immediacy and absence of prejudice typical of childhood — has enabled Sidhwa to tell her story with greater impartiality and to treat the problematic question of women's rape and abduction from a gendered perspective. The interview also explores the relationship between Sidhwa and film director Deepa Mehta, and between novel writing and filmmaking in connection with both Ice-Candy-Man/Earth and Water.