Summary
Cracking India begins with a quotation from the famous Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal. The short epigraph from his poem “Complaint to God” describes a person who is suffering but has no outlet. He decides to bring his complaint to God, whom he accuses of sometimes being as petty as human beings.
Then the novel begins from the perspective of its young heroine Lenny, a four-year-old girl who has polio. Lenny lives in the city of Lahore, then a city in British-ruled India. “My world is compressed,” Lenny explains. She goes onto describe her small corner of the city, the “affluent fringes” with its “wide, clean, orderly streets” on Warris Road between Queens Road and Jail Road. Her home, and the house of her godmother, aunt, and cousin are all in the same area. Her world is small and defined by clear boundaries: after Jail Road there is a canal and beyond it the bazaars.
After the description of the city, Lenny describes walking with her “ayah” (the local word for “nanny”) through these streets. An old Englishman “wagging a leathery finger,” confronts them because he thinks Lenny is too old to be sitting in a stroller. Lenny raises her pant leg to show that she is wearing leather straps and steel braces on her right foot because she has polio. The Englishman insists that she should be walking anyway.
Lenny’s narration continues with a description of her ayah. Ayah is 18 years old, “chocolate-brown and short.” She is pretty and wears her hair tied tightly in a knot. From shopkeepers to beggars, everyone stares at her. Even holy men “ogle her with lust.”
Lenny and Ayah then go to her godmother’s compound. Lenny gets teased by the other kids there, who call her “Lame Lenny” and make up nursery rhymes about her. Yet she enjoys this attention. Lenny has a close relationship with her godmother. She is constantly kissing and hugging her. Lenny thinks that they are especially close because Godmother has no children of her own. There is an intimate bond between them.
The next scene shows Lenny at Mayo Hospital. A capable and famous doctor named Colonel Barucha, described as “awesome, bald, as pink-skinned as an Englishman,” is removing her cast with a saw. She feels no pain but when she sees blood thinks she should cry out. When she tries to, Colonel Barucha looks at her as if he can read her mind. She gives up on the idea of faking pain.
Then begins a short and “happy interlude” of school and playing. At school she and her cousin trick the teachers about which one of them has a disability. Lenny is sometimes teased at school, but she is a mostly happy child with lots of energy.
The happiness of this “interlude” is then contrasted with Lenny’s continuing struggles with polio. In the next scene, she is back at the hospital, in great pain on the operating table though she has been given an anesthetic. She has a new plaster cast that is intended to fix the shape of her foot. The pain is almost unbearable and her mother tells her a story to comfort her. A little mouse has seven tails and is constantly teased by the other kids. One by one she cuts off these tails, but when there are none left she is still teased. This story makes Lenny even more depressed. The only person who manages to make Lenny feel better is Godmother. She understands Lenny’s pain and doesn’t just repeat cliches like everyone else.
With her new cast, Lenny is taken to the zoo by Ayah. Everyone looks at her because of her cast and stroller. Even the monkeys in their cage stare at her. Lenny hopes that her foot will emerge from the cast fixed and that her “defect” will have been corrected. Then she is brought to the lion’s cage. She describes the lion as “the ferocious beast of my nightmare.” She thinks the lion might leap into her dreams at night.
Analysis
Lenny Sethi is the book’s main character and also its narrator. When the story begins in 1942, she is four years old. The city of Lahore, located in Punjab province, was at this time part of India. In 1947 India would become independent and split into a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a mostly Hindu India. When the novel begins, Lahore is still part of a united India. The violence of Partition (as the splitting of India and Pakistan is known) has not yet occurred. Lenny describes people of various ethnicities and religions (Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsees) getting along in relative harmony. The Sethi family are Parsee (the more widely accepted spelling today is Parsi), an ethnic/religious group who are descended from Zoroastrians who moved from Persia to India in the 7th and 8th centuries CE to escape religious persecution.
The opening chapter of the novel describes Lenny’s neighborhood as well as the family members and other characters that make up her community. There is her beautiful young nanny, a Hindu woman whose name is Shanta but whom Lenny simply calls “Ayah.” Lenny’s godmother is also an important figure for her. She describes Godmother’s home as a “haven” and “refuge from the perplexing unrealities of [her] home on Warris Street.” Then there is Lenny’s mom and dad, aunt and cousin, as well as other characters such as the charismatic doctor Colonel Barucha and even the English “gnome” in the street—a reminder that India is still under British rule at this time.
This chapter also introduces two important topics of the novel: sickness and sexuality. Ayah is described as sexually attractive with all her admirers in the city. Even at this young child’s age, Lenny is captivated by her nanny’s ability to command attention through beauty and sexuality. Similarly, Lenny describes her relationship with Godmother as an intensely passionate one. The relationship is not sexual, but it is heavy with emotion: “The intensity of her tenderness and the concentration of her attention are narcotic. I require no one else.” At the same time, Lenny’s life is strongly affected by the disease. Because she has polio in her right foot, she is constantly forced to undergo surgery and is often in pain. She is a happy child and does not mind standing out, but she also hopes that one day she will be healthy and whole.
