Expatriate Experience in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man

Abstract

The Creative fecundity of Bapsi Sidhwa, the much-acclaimed English novelist of Pakistan brings forth excellent novels which lay bare the existential plights and the precarious position of her immigrant community. Sidhwa belongs to a microscopic minority community called Parisis/Zoroastrian which is nearing its extinction as a result of its rigid doctrines and intense exclusivity. In the post-colonial India and Pakistan they had a lose their hegemony over business, Politics and education and inculcated a feeling of insecurity and fear following the unprecented socio-political happenings and the increasing communal violence. Accentuated by the external threats and the plights of the dwindling community, standing on the verge of extinction, contemporary Parsi writers like Boman Desai, Farrukh Dhondy, Rohinton Mistry and Bapsi Sidhwa vociferously assert their ethnic identity and earnestly attempt to reconstruct their racial history in their writings. Sidhwa is the author of four internationally acclaimed novels. Her third novel Ice-Candy-Man was published in 1988.