hen a beloved author passes away, media outlets hurriedly churn out fact-driven obituaries. Some are even written in advance. It is challenging for me to adhere to this custom while writing an obituary for novelist Bapsi Sidhwa. My reluctance doesn’t stem from a paucity of information about the author’s multifaceted career and her numerous achievements. Instead, it is steered by a desire to acknowledge her indelible impact on my own creative journey.

Ever since I was a teenager, writing was akin to breathing to me. I would scribble stories into notebooks and then type them into Word documents on a desktop I shared with my siblings. Despite my preoccupation with the written word, the dream of becoming an author seemed little more than a remote possibility. In my juvenile mind, authors weren’t like the ordinary people I came across. Back then, the only South Asian authors we’d been exposed to at school were Vikram Seth and Sujata Bhatt. In middle school, we’d adapted Seth’s ecological poem, The Elephant and the Tragopan, into a play. Bhatt’s poem Muliebrity was part of our O Level English Literature syllabus – possibly the only work by an author of South Asian origin we were taught.

At the time, I laboured under the illusion that authors were elusive beings who wrote about distant ‘English’ landscapes and were unconcerned with my distinctly Pakistani milieu. I hadn’t read too many Pakistani authors at the time, though I’d met and heard of some. When we were in the fourth grade, Kamila Shamsie — the then-celebrated author of two novels — visited our school and read a chapter of Roald Dahl’s James and The Giant Peach to us. Years later, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist had been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. I’d read glowing reviews of the novel and was intrigued to see some crucial facets of my South Asian identity being depicted in the realm of literature.

However, I didn’t dive deep into Hamid or Kamila Shamsie’s oeuvre until much later. Instead, I read Sidhwa’s The Crow Eaters on my mother’s goading. For years, she had praised Sidhwa’s first published novel for its realism and rib-tickling humour. Spurred by maternal advice and a curiosity to read a novel by a Pakistani author, I raced through The Crow Eaters on a summer afternoon. Sidhwa’s funny, wickedly irreverent novel about Faredoon Junglewalla and his eccentric family provided a doorway into her fascinating body of work. Over the span of several weeks, I immersed myself in the haunting yet enchanting world of The Bride, The Ice-Candy Man, An American Brat and the then recently-published Water, which was based on an eponymous film by Deepa Mehta. As I devoured each novel, I was impressed by Sidhwa’s remarkable ability to depict South Asian realities rather than fashioning narratives about predominantly ‘white characters’ set in faraway lands. Sidhwa’s novels were a much-needed stimulus that helped me break free from a spiritual and artistic chrysalis I’d found myself in as a reader and budding writer. Her work gave me the courage I needed to evoke my cultural milieu through the written word.

Her tragic demise last week prodded me to reflect on this creative awakening. In all these years, her books had been stacked on my bookshelf. I’d made a conscious effort to revisit them. Two years ago, I’d reread The Crow Eaters to write an essay about the novel for this newspaper. Since then, other books had monopolised my attention, but I never forgot about Sidhwa’s novels. Through her literary contributions, she had thrown open the portals for writers from Pakistan to obtain some recognition. Were it not for her efforts, young writers like me wouldn’t have gotten the proverbial foot in the door.

One of the first Pakistani Anglophone novelists to garner international recognition and acclaim, Sidhwa had earned copious accolades over the decades. In Hybrid Tapestries, writer and literary critic Muneeza Shamsie credited Sidhwa as “the first to give the home-grown Pakistani novel a clear, contemporary voice.” According to Shamsie, Sidhwa’s prose was “markedly different from any other resident writer.” Her work, Shamsie adds, was seeded with a feminist consciousness and served as an “assertion of minority identity in Pakistan.” In A History of Pakistani Literature in English 1947-1988, Tariq Rehman declared Sidhwa the “most important writer of fiction in the seventies.” He applauded her “unsentimental approach to reality [which is] needed to write good realistic fiction.”

One of the first Pakistani Anglophone novelists to garner international recognition and acclaim, Sidhwa had earned copious accolades over the decades. 

When I revisited her novels to write this obituary, I found myself captivated by Sidhwa’s layered, seemingly objective depiction of the Parsee community in her work. In an interview with Mushtaq Bilal, published in Writing Pakistan: Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction, Sidhwa claims that she was the first to write a fictional narrative about Parsees. “[The Crow Eaters] influenced not only the Parsee writers but even people like Vikram Seth… and others who were then able to write about Parsee characters,” Sidhwa told the interviewer. “Earlier, none of them had dared to write about Parsees. So it was a seminal book.”

Set in colonial India, The Crow Eaters reveals how Faredoon Junglewalla became an influential figure among the Parsee community through the “success of his charming rascality.” Upon closer inspection, Sidhwa’s first published novel comes through a happy prelude to her third and fourth novels – The Ice-Candy Man and An American Brat, respectively. Featuring a precocious, polio-riddled Parsee child as an unbiased narrator, Sidhwa’s third novel dispassionately portrays the complex dimensions of Partition’s countless atrocities.

An American Brat is about a Parsee teenager named Feroza Ginwalla – the great-granddaughter of Faredoon Junglewalla of The Crow Eaters – whose parents send her to the US to escape the climate of oppression and intolerance under Gen Zia. Unlike the optimistic fervour with which Faredoon tackles situations in The Crow Eaters, Feroza’s family grapples with these bleak, bigoted times by encouraging their child to migrate to a foreign land.

While Sidhwa’s other novels aren’t as broad in their scope, they are intensely political. The Bride (which she wrote before The Crow Eaters, even though it was published later) harbours a deep feminist consciousness and acquired relevance amid the women’s movement in Pakistan of the 1980s. In Water, Sidhwa was operating within the constraints of Deepa Mehta’s screenplay, but succeeds in drawing attention to an oppressive social custom.

Every writer’s journey begins as a solitary battle against the blank page. The real measure of a writer’s success is his/ her ability to win the readers’ hearts. Sidhwa’s novels have drawn critical acclaim and become bestsellers across the world. She is even touted as the ‘matriarch’ of Pakistani Anglophone literature – a testament to her undeniable popularity.

However, the life of a writer isn’t always filled with glorious epiphanies on an ink-stained page. At times, authors may encounter fraught moments when creativity lies fallow and inspiration doesn’t strike them as readily as they’d want it to. Straddling these extremes can be a challenging endeavour and is an inescapable part of being a writer. In light of this declaration, we can’t always expect authors to churn out books at an expeditious pace as that could compromise the quality of their prose.

Sidhwa wrote five novels and a collection of stories and edited a multi-author anthology – a substantial oeuvre, by conventional standards. If some ambitious claims are anything to go by, writers would need to publish more books to be deemed prolific. Be that as it may, quantity isn’t an appropriate yardstick to assess the merit of a writer’s oeuvre. Through her seven books, she came through as a perceptive writer. Her narratives were rooted in the soil of her homeland, even if the nature of her stories compelled her to broaden her canvas and search for other homelands for her characters.

Soon after reading The Ice-Candy Man, I convinced myself that all Pakistani writers have a ‘Partition novel’ coiled within their psyche. Driven by this belief, I embarked on the ambitious task of writing my own Partition novel. Fortunately, I wasn’t misguided. I completed the manuscript a few years after reading Sidhwa’s. It was published in 2014. For this reason alone, I owe an immense artistic debt to Bapsi Sidhwa. Through her trailblazing novels, she brightened a dark pathway and inspired many of us who would follow in her footsteps.

The writer is a freelance journalist and the author of No Funeral for Nazia.