Summary
One evening Lenny also sees Ayah. She is passing in a taxi dressed up in lipstick and make-up. She looks like an actress and is sitting between two thin men that look like poets.
Godmother invites Lenny and Adi to spend the night because Dr. Manek Mody is visiting again. As usual, Godmother and Slavesister fight humorously. Godmother accuses Slavesister of being possessed by the Demon of Laziness. Dr. Mody jokes that he can exorcise the demon if they pull his finger. When they do pull his finger, he farts and says it is the sound of the demon leaving his body. The children find this hilarious and notice how their meals of cabbage and beans cause everyone at home to fart.
Hamida takes the children to the park. The queen statue is now gone. The park also looks quite different because there are only Muslims. When Hindus and Sikhs were there too, Lenny thinks, one saw all sorts of bright fabrics and the sight of brown skin exposed. Now there are people covered in black and white clothes and there are more men than women. Lenny sees mostly beards and white skullcaps (hats worn by pious Muslim men). People are doing their prayers in the park.
On another day, Lenny tells Godmother that she has seen Ayah in a taxi. Godmother says that Lenny is just probably seeing what she wants to see. Lenny is disappointed by this response. When Godmother says that Ayah is with her family in Amritsar, Lenny asks how she knows this. She is told to ask her mother. Finally, Godmother cracks and decides to tell Lenny more. She asks if Lenny has notices how Mother is always busy and going out with the car. Godmother admits that what Mother and Auntie are doing is rescuing kidnapped women. They either send them to their families or to Recovered Women’s Camps. Mother also arranged for Ayah to be sent for her family. Lenny does not believe the story fully, as she thinks Mother and Electricaunt were doing something more sinister with the petrol cans. Lenny is surprised that Godmother is so naive. She thinks of telling her about the petrol but decides that she should not betray anyone else by being overly honest and telling secrets she should not tell. Later that day, Godmother wonders aloud where Ice-candy-man has been all of this time.
Cousin tells Lenny the reason why Ayah was all made up. According to him, she has become a dancing-girl. Lenny does not understand and assumes that he means an actress. Cousin further explains that she is a dancer in Hira Mandi, a red-light district whose name means “Diamond Market.” This is where the girls, known as diamonds, are paid to dance and sing and “to do things with their bodies.” Lenny does not understand that Cousin is referring to prostitution. He offers to demonstrate what the men do to Ayah and touches her breasts and reaches for her underwear. Lenny gets angry and pulls away. She accuses Cousin of breaking his promise not to touch her for some time. Cousin explains that various men do these things to Ayah, from strangers to wrestlers to cooks and merchants. This thought disturbs Lenny and makes her think of how the strangers carried Ayah away in a cart.
Lenny decides to confront Mother about what is happening. Mother is preparing for the Friday ceremony that Parsees perform for the day of the two angels known as the Trouble Easers. Lenny acts moody until Mother asks what is wrong. Lenny says she knows what Mother is doing with the petrol cans in the trunks. Mother says that she is not setting fire to the city but smuggling rationed petrol to help Hindu and Sikh friends escape. The petrol is also used for the convoys sending kidnapped women across the border.
Lenny goes to Godmother’s, and Godmother admits that Ayah is in Lahore. Her sources have confirmed it. She is apparently no longer a dancing-girl but a wife. Her husband is coming to visit that evening and everyone is tense and excited. Finally, the husband arrives and it turns out to be Ice-candy-man. He is one of the thin poets Lenny saw in the taxi with Ayah. Ice-candy-man looks very different. He has a wool cap like Jinnah and long oily hair. His face is more oval and beautiful. He speaks less and when he does speak, he is more articulate and polite. He speaks like an educated and cultured man. When asked why he did not visit sooner, he responds with two lines from the famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz about waiting for someone until the dawn. Godmother asks whether he has become a poet or a pimp. She asks why he lives in Hira Mandi, the red-light district. This is not a place for a married man. Ice-candy-man explains the story of the place. It was built by the Mogul princes. The Moguls were the Indian rulers of India from the 16th century to the 19th century. Their princes brought their illegitimate children and favorite concubines there to live. The girls brought up there also became royal concubines and the boys become either musicians, singers, or poets. Ice-candy-man says that he also grew up in a Kotha or brothel. His mother was from a brothel too and his father died young. They came from old royal stock but were ostracized for being prostitutes. Yet Ice-candy-man says that they protect their women by marrying them and they come from a long line of princesses who are famous for their singing and dancing skills. He and Ayah live in Hira Mandi now because of his family connections and her skills as a performer.
Godmother’s careful reaction to Ice-candy-man’s speech shows she is in a “cold rage.” She accuses him of letting Ayah be raped by strangers. She accuses him of letting her be taken off in the cart so that he could marry her. She calls him a pimp, letting his wife be disgraced. Now Ice-candy-man has lost his attitude of superiority. He tries to say that Ayah would have been killed if he had not married her. Also, no one has been with her since they got married, but this was months after she was initially kidnapped. Godmother threatens to report him for pimping and have him hanged. Lenny now also sees him as dangerous and terrible. Ice-candy-man tries to apologize, but Godmother says that it is too late to repent. The only thing to do is to take her back to her family. He says that he cannot exist without her. Love has made him do this. Lenny starts to feel a pain in her eyes and head. She compares it to a massive explosion. She appears to have a seizure and is comforted by Godmother. Finally, the storm that everyone has been waiting for comes. They run inside and leave Ice-candy-man out in the rain.
Analysis
The chapter begins with comic relief and fart jokes before heading to more serious territory that links together many of the themes and topics that have been dominant throughout the book: truth-telling, sexuality, loss of innocence, the dangerous force that is love, and the fate of Ayah. The short scene in the park shows how homogeneous Lahore has become since the exchange of populations. With only Muslims there, it is far less colorful.
Lenny returns to the theme of truth. After her honesty led Ayah to be kidnapped, she decides not to tell Godmother about the petrol cans: “One betrayal is enough. I, the budding Judas, must live with their heinous secret.” This is an allusion to Jesus’s apostle Judas, who betrayed him to the Romans. Similarly, Lenny wonders why Mother did not tell her the truth about the petrol cans, but realizes that it was out of fear of Lenny's pathological honesty: “How can anyone trust a truth-infected tongue?” Lenny is slowly learning the importance of keeping secrets.
Realizing what has happened to Ayah plays a major role in Lenny’s loss of innocence. When Cousin tells Lenny about men touching Ayah, she has terrible dreams: “That night I take all I’ve heard and learned and been shown to bed and by morning reel dizzily on a fleetingly glimpsed and terrible grown-up world.” This terrible glimpse of the adult world is confirmed when she hears Ice-candy-man’s story about making her a prostitute and then marrying her. All of the attempts to protect her have now come to nothing: "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 around 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." Her initiation into the adult world comes with understanding the details of the terrible things that have happened to Ayah. Even more importantly, she realizes that the terrible things that have happened to her stem from what Ice-candy-man thinks of as love. Desire is a destructive force that allows people to do awful things to those they supposedly love. This is the lesson that causes Lenny to grow up.
