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Laughter Is a Serious Business For Sidhwa

Radhika Shankar

Born in Karachi and brought up in Lahore, 61-year-old Bapsi Sidhwa's arrival into the world of writing is rather adventurous.

Inflicted with polio at a very early age prevented Sidhwa from being actively involved in many ways like going to school. But the novelist believes that the isolation created a voracious reading appetite.

"I still spend three to four hours a day reading and I still remember how Little Women, my first novel, opened up a new world to me."

By the age of 13, the home-tutored Sidhwa graduated from high school but was too young for college. She earned a bachelor's degree in Punjabi from Kinnaird College in Lahore and was married by the time she was 19.

"I lived in Bombay and had two children, Mohur and Koko." During this time she had her first piece of writing published. "I had never considered myself a writer and only did a humorous piece for Femina about the birth of my son."

When her marriage ended, Sidhwa moved back to Lahore with her young children. In 1965 she married a businessman. It was during her honeymoon to Kohistan that she heard the story of a young Punjabi bride who ran away from her husband's tribe.

"I was deeply moved by the mystic quality of the rugged breed of people hidden way in the mountains and I desperately wanted to tell this girl's story." In six years, what started out as a short story became her first novel, by the time she had her third child.

Between running a home and raising her children she had little time to deal with publishers. "I kept getting rejection slips. Ironically, all the publisher liked my style and told me to keep writing."

Sidhwa soon had her second novel, The Crow Eaters and decided to publish them herself. "This was an exhausting task with multiple proofing and self-distribution," she recalls.

Things began looking up when Jonathan Cape published The Crow Eaters and The Bride in the UK.

"I started to regain confidence and began writing Ice Candy Man."

While Sidhwa's novels tackle traumatic themes, she considers herself a serious humorist. "Being a Parsi, you naturally learn to laugh at yourself and the world," she said in an interview. Two years ago she taught a course, Humor in Novels, at Mount Holyoake College.

Her own novels reflect, she says, "my natural inclination to see the strong element of humor even in tragedies." She focuses on her characters' universal foibles and follies because it helps her to make the effects of large-scale social, political, and economic upheaval personal and poignant.

"Laughter does so many things for us," she told a Mount Holyoake publication. "It has the quality of exposing wrongs and gets rid of anger and resentments."

"As a Parsi I can see things objectively. I see all the common people suffering while politicians on either side have all the fun."

Following her husband's wanderlust, Sidhwa packed her bags for the United States. They traveled through seven states before deciding to settle in Houston, Texas.

Sidhwa soon began teaching at the St Thomas University at Houston. "I was nervous teaching at first because I was neither trained for it nor did I know what subject I could teach." She has since then taught English, creative writing and autobiographical writing in many educational institutions like Columbia University, the University of Houston and Brandeis University.

"I have written whenever I have had the opportunity. Even if I miss a few months of writing the novel is growing in my head," Sidhwa said. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and also on a dramatization of An American Brat.

Though she admits that she feels most at home in Mumbai (which is the home for the majority of India's tiny Parsi community), with her children and grandchild settled in the United States, Sidhwa says she will be happy to travel back and forth for the next few years.

Arthur J Pais contributed to the story

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