Cracking India Literary Elements

Ηistorical fiction; novel

The majority of the novel takes place in Lahore between 1943 and 1948. The city is part of British-ruled India when the story begins but then becomes a part of Pakistan when India becomes independent. The main settings are the Sethi household, Warris Road, Godmother’s house, Queen’s Park, and Hira Mandi. There are also sections that take place in the Punjabi countryside, mainly the village of Pir Pindo forty miles outside of Lahore.

The novel is told from Lenny’s first-person point of view. The action is narrated in the present tense. However, at times Lenny also speaks from the perspective of 40 years later. The things she knows are impossible for Lenny to have known as a little girl in the 1940s. The only section not told from Lenny’s perspective is “Ranna’s Story” in Chapter 25. This is also the only part of the book in the past tense.

The novel is told from a child's point of view. It swings between a humorous and anxious tone. The mood is foreboding and dark as the Partition of India slowly approaches and violence begins.

Lenny is the novel's protagonist. The antagonist is Ice-candy-man because he kidnaps Lenny's nanny Ayah.

The novel's major conflict is a historical one: the events leading up to the Partition of India in 1947 and the violence that ensues. Lenny wants her city and her community to stay intact, but historical events push people apart and split her country in two. Ice-candy-man's kidnapping of Ayah is the main event that crystallizes this conflict. It is the violence that breaks out between different religious groups that makes it possible for the Mulsim Ice-candy-man to abduct Hindu Ayah, force her into prostitution, and then marry her.

The novel reaches its climax when the angry mob comes to the Sethi household and kidnaps Ayah with Ice-candy-man's help.

When Cousin shows Lenny the scar on his genitals after his hernia operation, she imagines a “red, scalloped scar running from ear to ear” and calls it a “premonition.” This foreshadows the violence that will occur during Partition.

“Then there is a strange shape of a man entering the house compound. Lenny is nervous until she realizes that it is only Ice-candy-man.” Until this point in Chapter 13, Ice-candy-man has mostly been presented as good character. The uneasiness he causes here foreshadows his turn to violence and eventual abduction of Ayah.

“One betrayal is enough. I, the budding Judas, must live with their heinous secret.” Lenny says this when she decides not to tell Godmother about the petrol cans in Mother’s car. It is an allusion to Jesus’ apostle Judas, who betrayed him to the Romans.

Ayah opens her eyes wide in surprise. Lenny describes them as “[w]ider even than the frightening saucers and dinner plates that describe the watchful orbs of the three dogs who guard the wicked Tinder Box witches’ treasures in underground chambers.” This is an allusion to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Tinderbox,” which describes a soldier with a magical tinderbox that can summon three dogs to fulfill his wishes.

Ayah tells Lenny the story of Sohni and Mahiwal. This is a Punjabi folk tale that tells the story of unfortunate lovers similar to Romeo and Juliet.

Lenny blames herself for the mob discovering Ayah. In particular, she blames her tongue for telling the truth and compares it to a snake. This is an allusion to the snake who brought down Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis by convincing them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

While at the Wrestler’s restaurant after violence has begun in Lahore, Lenny realizes that Ayah's group of friends has 13 members. She describes this as an “uneasy number.” This is an allusion to Jesus and his twelve apostles who sat together at the Last Supper. Judas later betrays Jesus, just as Ayah’s friends betray her.

When Lenny wants to block out a stressful conversation about politics at the restaurant, the narration uses imagery related to colors and scents: “I try not to inhale, but I must; the charged air about our table distills poisonous insights. Blue envy: green avidity: the gray and black stirrings of predators and the incipient distillation of fear in their prey. A slim gray-green balloon forms behind my shut lids. There is something so dangerous about the tangible colors the passions around me have assumed that I blink open my eyes and sit up.” The tensions between communities have become like dangerous perfumes.

The riots in Lahore are described with hellfire imagery: “The hellish fires of Lahore spore monstrous mobs.” These fires are also contrasted to the peaceful fire that Imam Din fans to cook food in the kitchen.

Imagery related to rivers is used to describe the mobs in the city: “The terrible procession, like a sluggish river, flows beneath is. Every short while a group of men, like a whirling eddy, stalls.”

A mob of Sikhs attacking Muslims is described with monster imagery: “A crimson fury blinds me. I want to dive into the bestial creature clawing entrails, plucking eyes, tearing limbs, gouging hearts, smashing brains; but the creature has too many stony hearts, too many sightless eyes, deaf ears, mindless brains and tons of entwined entrails.”

Lenny describes the mob who comes to her house as both individual and a mass at the same time. When they act friendly, “the men are no longer just fragmented parts of a procession: they become individual personalities whose faces I study, seeking friends.” When she thinks someone will help her family, the crowd becomes one single person: “The whole disorderly melee dissolved and consolidated into a single face. The face, amber-eyed, spread before me: hypnotic, reassuring, blotting out the ugly frightening crowd.”

When Lenny learns what Ice-candy-man has done to Ayah, she is seized by anger described with imagery related to explosions: “There is a suffocating explosion within my eyes and head. A blinding blast of pity and disillusion and a savage rage. My sight is disoriented. I see Ice-candy-man float away in a bubble and dwindle to a gray speck in the aftermath of the blast and then come so close that I can see every pore and muddy crease in his skin magnified in dazzling luminosity.”

When the Muslim villagers in Pir Pindo are advised to escape the countryside before violence begins, they respond: “Do you expect us to walk away with our hands and feet? What use will they serve us without our lands? Can you evacuate our land?” The idea of evacuating land the way people are evacuated from a place seems absurd on the surface. However, the villagers’ statement is meaningful because it shows that their land is as important to them as their hands or feed. Without it, they cannot survive.

There is a parallel between the treatment of Ayah and the experiences of many women at the time.

Ranna's wound, "a grisly scar like a brutally gouged and premature bald spot," is a synecdoche for the many wounds, both physical and psychological, that Partition caused for the people of India and Pakistan.

Lenny describes Lahore as "the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Moghul Emperors, bedecked and bejeweled, savaged by marauding hordes." The city is personified as a prostitute and courtesan dressed in jewels and raped by invading armies.