Cracking
The theme of “cracking,” which gives the novel its title, refers to the Partition of India into the two countries of India and Pakistan. As a child hearing conversations about this possibility, she imagines that the countries will be literally “cracked,” “broken” and “split.” She tries to get a straight answer from the adults. At one point she wonders: “Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is? Or crack it further up on Warris Road? How will I ever get to Godmother’s then?” Of course, what happens is less literal than this, but in a certain sense, this theme of cracking is played out in all of the relationships the novel spends so much time describing. When former friends become enemies or mixed-religion groups start to stereotype each other—or, worse, attack each other—over religion, then the country really has cracked into various pieces.
Sexual awakening
One major theme in the novel is Lenny’s slow realizations about the reality of adult sexuality. She learns about sex from watching Ayah and her admirers. She slowly becomes aware of the “involuntary female magnetism” that people like her possess in that they attract the people around them. Lenny is also aware of the sexuality of her mother, Godmother, and the other older women in her life. Lenny’s earliest sexual experiences are with Cousin, who often crosses the line in talking about sex or even touching his much younger relative. Throughout the course of the novel, Lenny learns about the dark side of sexuality. When she learns about Ayah being forced into prostitution, 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.” Seeing Ice-candy-man’s actions towards Ayah, Lenny learns that sexuality and desire can also be a destructive force.
Sickness
Much of the first half of the novel focuses on Lenny’s struggles with polio, which has damaged her legs and feet and caused her to walk with a limp. Lenny is both worried about her health and also enjoys the attention that being sick wins her. She appears to enjoy visits to the doctor and the worrying of her family. When she gets her cast off, Lenny is worried that she will lose her limp and become just like everyone else. For her, being sick is a mark of being different. Some analyses of the novel by literary scholars compare this theme of Lenny’s physical sickness to a metaphorical sickness in Indian society at this time. Just as Lenny’s body is racked by polio, the communities described in the novel slow become sick and dysfunctional as people begin fighting each other based on religion.
Individual and societal trauma
Another important theme in the novel is how the trauma that individuals experience gets mirrored in the trauma of an entire society. For example, in the previous theme, we saw that Lenny’s sickness often gets compared to a larger sickness in society. Similarly, Ice-candy-man’s grief and anger over seeing Muslim civilians slaughtered in a train cause him to light fires and attack people from other religions in Lahore. Others who are subjected to his individual revenge might also then seek revenge. In this way, individual trauma quickly turns into societal trauma and snowballs into something increasingly violent and difficult to heal.
Control over women
The novel shows the various ways that patriarchy, the system by which men have power and authority over women, affects their lives. This is shown to be an older and more general form of violence than Partition, but it is also part of how the inter-communal tensions between religious groups get acted out. For example, Papoo is married off to a man much older than her. She gets no choice in the marriage and is drugged by her family so that she will not protest. Similarly, during Partition different religious groups seek to get revenge against each other by raping or kidnapping the women of the other group. Lenny learns that even after some of these women are recovered, their families do not want them back. Godmother tells her that this is because some men “can’t stand their women being touched by other men.” Lenny finds this unfair that women are seen as property. She is also faced with the reality of how society controls women when Ice-candy-man kidnaps Ayah. When the people around her describe this as “fate,” Lenny reflects “I’ve seen Ayah carried away—and it had less to do with fate than with the will of men.” In the end, Ayah refuses to see her as damaged. After she is freed, she decides to go across the border to her family in India—whether or not they accept her.
Memory
Memory is shown to be unreliable in the novel. The story is narrated by Lenny from years after the events. When describing the fires in Lahore, she describes them as lasting for months though she knows this cannot be true: “But in my memory it is branded over an inordinate length of time: memory demands poetic license.” The theme of memory also comes up when Lenny thinks about how Ranna has gotten over his trauma of nearly being killed by a Sikh mob and then escaping into Pakistan. She looks up to Ranna because he is able to accept his loss by letting his memories of the trauma go. In contrast, Lenny’s refusal to forget makes her a more bitter person: “The small bitterness and grudges I tend to nurse make me feel ashamed of myself. Ranna’s ready ability to forgive a past none of us could control keeps him whole.” In this sense, being able to misremember events or forget them can actually be a healthy thing. To forgive partly relies on forgetting.
Honesty
Lenny is disturbed by her inability to be dishonest. She hates the fact that she cannot get away with anything. Even if she tries to do something sneaky, she eventually admits it to her family. For example, she experiences this when she steals Rosy’s jars. Later, Lenny’s honesty has even more dire effects. When the mob comes to the Sethi family’s house looking for Ayah, Lenny tells Ice-candy-man where she is. This allows him to kidnap her. She curses her own honesty after this event and blames herself for Ayah’s kidnapping: “I am the monkey-man’s performing monkey, the trained circus elephant, the snake-man’s charmed cobra, an animal with conditioned reflexes that cannot lie…” Honesty becomes a curse for Lenny and her tongue a “vile, truth-infected thing.”
Social groups
The different groups that make up society is a repeated theme in the novel. In the beginning, people from various religions socialize with each other. An example is the diverse group of suitors who harmoniously gather around Ayah. There is also much discussion throughout the novel of how the English play different social groups against each other with the logic of “divide and conquer.” The various groups also begin to mistrust each other, particularly Hindus and Sikhs. On the more individual level, Ayah’s suitors began to see each other more as “tokens,” or stereotypes of the groups they belong to, than people. By the time of Partition, the social groups are no longer able to live in harmony as India and Pakistan descend into violence.