Bapsi captured human foibles, spirit, writes Deepa Mehta

I lost my mother, Vimla, a week ago to the day, and the news of Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa’s death has come as an added devastation. We had a long friendship that goes back decades.

It began in 1997 when I adapted her novel, Ice Candy Man, to 1947: Earth, the second film in my trilogy. Not many realise this but Lenny Baby’s character in Ice Candy Man, Bapsi Sidhwa’s phenomenal 1988 book on the Partition of India, was semi-autobiographical. To date, the 1998 Indo-Canadian film remains my favourite work because of this very reason.

The eight-year-old precocious narrator, a child with a disability in her leg, who belongs to the Parsi community, mimics all the details of Bapsi’s own childhood as a young girl born in undivided India in 1936 to a Zorashtrian family, a resident of Lahore and affected by polio. But these details don’t reveal the true similarity between Bapsi and Lenny Baby. The young narrator, like Bapsi, was serious, super bright, honest, and always bore the most sublime smile despite everything that transpired.

Bapsi possessed a collaborative spirit that made working with her not just fun but also immensely enriching. The only sort of people she could not tolerate, she often admitted, were those who did not have the ability to laugh at themselves. Bapsi was exactly the sort of woman who could laugh at herself — and she often did. Her works were studies of human foibles, but equally displayed the resilience of human spirit.

I was in awe of the generosity of spirit she displayed. The story of our first meeting will exemplify this.

After making Fire, I wanted to make a film about the Partition from the point of view of a woman. In 1997, I happened to be in Seattle, and in a bookshop, I found a copy of Cracking India, the US title of Ice Candy Man. At the back of the book, Bapsi Sidhwa had written: “All wars are fought on women’s bodies.” A line, so powerful, simple and true even today. This line changed the way I thought.

A common friend, Nasreen Rehman, put us in touch the very evening I finished reading the book. And after she spoke to me, she invited me over to Massachusetts, where she taught at Mount Holyoke. She didn’t know me at all, but I stayed with her for five days. We got along really well — she had such a great sense of humour. I told her that I wanted to adapt her book, and asked her if there was anything she would like me to keep in mind or pay special attention to. She simply replied, “Go write the script. Make it your own”.

After reading the script, she asked me why I hadn’t included the last few chapters (the book carries the narrative forward of its main protagonists) and I said, it felt anticlimactic. A few days later, after thinking about it, she agreed. “A book and a film are different,” she said, and green-lit my adaptation.

A few years later, after I wrote the screenplay to Water, Bapsi wrote a novel based on it.

In her acknowledgements in the 2006 book, Bapsi generously wrote: “When Canadian publisher Anna Porter asked me if I would turn Deepa Mehta’s film Water into a novel in three months — to time it with the film’s release in the US — I was hesitant.

I had never written within the confines of a structured story before, or the constraint of time. Deepa sent me the film script: it told a stunning story.

She also sent me an early edit of her film, and it took my breath away. The songs by [music composer] A.R. Rahman was enchanting. I agreed to give it a try.”

I was thoroughly flattered by Bapsi novelising the original screenplay of Water. In a way, we had exchanged roles. When I asked her what her reaction would be if I didn’t like the novelisation of the screenplay, her answer was typical Bapsi. “Tough,” she said, “I’m not going to change a word!”

I last spoke to her about a month ago, mostly about a superb documentary on her titled Bapsi: The Silences of My Life by Sadia Uqaili.

She wasn’t well but in her usual spirited way she told me, “Bas kar, aur milne aa” (Stop talking and just come to meet me). And I was indeed going to Houston, Texas, to meet her next month.

What a loss. My thoughts are with her family, daughters Parizad, Mohur, son Koko, and husband, Noshir.

(As told to Dhamini Ratnam)