For me Lenny’s polio brought back my conflicted feelings when my younger brother had a bout of what his doctors thought was polio when he was two. He spent a few months with his leg in a cast and got a lot of attention. What I remember most from that time—a stretch of summer—is that other children at the beach were told not to play with me, and I felt quite dreary and lonely. I don’t know if this links to my fantasy a few years later—I must have been six or seven—that I was a wounded soldier in the jungle. The wound was to my leg, and I would get down on the floor in my bedroom and crawl around dragging it behind me. My object was to get to the nursing station—this involved hoisting myself onto my bed—where I would be taken care of.
I had always been ashamed of this fantasy—it seemed so perverse and peculiar. But once I mentioned it to a friend, who said that she, too, as a child had pretended to have a crippled leg and used to limp around for hours at a time. We marveled at this coincidence, but perhaps it’s not so amazing. Special and wounded—isn’t this the sense so many of us have of ourselves?
Cracking India also brilliantly conveys how a child can feel both protected and at risk. Lenny’s world is presented at the outset of the novel as “compressed.” She lives with her mother, father, and younger brother in their well-to-do Parsee household sustained by Hindu and Muslim servants; her aunt and godmother live nearby, and she ventures no further than the neighborhood park where she watches her Ayah, a beautiful young Hindu woman of eighteen, flirt with her suitors—Sikh, Muslim, Pathan, Chinese—and somehow keeps the peace among them.
This is the small realm of Lenny’s childhood—seemingly safe, though with its undercurrents of sexuality that the child does and doesn’t understand. Her male cousin lures her into sexual games; one of Ayah’s Muslim suitors, the character called Ice-Candy-Man, whose name was the novel’s original British title, tries to wiggle his toes under the nubile young woman’s sari. But all this is on the level, if not of innocence, then at least of contained sexual play. Lenny’s world comes dramatically unraveled with the intruding violence of partition, as the Punjab cracks in two and Ayah, abducted, raped, and turned into a prostitute by Ice-Candy-Man, becomes the body on which sectarian violence is written. In the course of the novel Lenny’s mother and Godmother rescue Ayah and return her to her family in Amritsar. What struck me so forcibly in reading and teaching this book is the simultaneous strength and vulnerability of women, the disruptive force of sexuality, and the inevitable end of the idyll of childhood.
My own parallel “compressed world”—one lived on orderly streets within a household sustained by people doing their jobs—included our beloved housekeeper Stella, who walked me to school, my mother’s secretary Adele typing the column in our bookcase-lined den, and the Japanese gardener working shirtless out of doors. To me this world was circumscribed and sheltering, though the potential for disruption was, of course, always there. I could sense it in my mother on the phone scrambling to get material for her columns or in small things that happened: a man, for example, who was staying with us at the beach, getting his penis caught in his zipper and having to be rushed to the hospital, though I didn’t question what he was doing with us in the first place. I think that was the same summer, when I was nine, that I can remember sitting on the sand in the shade of a wooden chair and listening to my mother and her friends talk about Joseph R. McCarthy and their fear of his politics. We were Democrats, but my mother was afraid to put an Adlai Stevenson sticker on our car. None of this touched me, though, until the intrusion of Bow Wow abruptly made the world unsafe.
Of course, I’m not equating my personal trauma of Bow Wow with the tragedy of a whole region torn by sectarian violence. I’m only saying that Bow Wow taught me the destructive power of a sexual predator, so that when Lenny has an epiphany about such power, I understand it well. In one of the book’s most striking and dramatic scenes, Lenny’s Godmother excoriates Ice-Candy-Man for what he has done to Ayah as the child looks on, and Lenny in her role as narrator reflects on the significance of this moment:
The innocence that my parents’ vigilance, the servants care and Godmother’s love sheltered in me, that neither Cousin’s carnal cravings, nor the stories of the violence of the mobs, could quite destroy, was laid waste that evening by the emotional storm that raged round me. The confrontation between Ice-Candy-Man and Godmother opened my eyes to the wisdom of righteous indignation over compassion. To the demands of gratification—and the unscrupulous nature of desire.
To the pitiless face of love.
In the ensuing chapter Lenny goes with her Godmother to visit Ayah in the brothel district where Ice-Candy-Man has been keeping her. Ayah comes into the room teetering on high heels, draped, bejeweled, and bereft of all her former “radiance” and “animation.” Her eyes are vacant. Even her voice has changed to a gruff rasp “as if someone has mutilated her vocal chords.”
This for me is the novel’s most terrible moment, the moment of greatest loss for Lenny—when someone you love has been crushed beyond recognition or recovery. Although Ayah is subsequently rescued, brought to the fallen women’s compound and then repatriated with her family, she cannot be
