ice candy man

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A decade after the novel, Bapsi Sidhwa gets her due thanks to the movie. Bapsi Sidhwa has many crackling stories about how she learnt novelists should let directors work in peace. The following is a favourite. "Maybe I shouldn't have written it down," she laughs, "but it is funny and true." Deepa Mehta is shooting a key scene in 1947 -- Earth, based on Sidhwa's novel Cracking India. The writer, who is visiting Delhi from her Houston home to watch the shooting, wonders if a scene could be changed to be true to her book. When the raffish ice candy man (Aamir Khan) hands over a cache of stolen gold coins to the ayah (Nandita Das), Sidhwa feels he should not close her hands. Let her palms be open, as in the book, when she tells him she won't have the gold. Mehta hears of Sidhwa's suggestion and wants to talk to her. "As she approaches," Sidhwa wrote in The New York Times, "black hair spread, eyes ablaze in the night light, she resembles the Hindu goddess Kali. I quake. Deepa brings her hands together in a loud clap and holds them before her bowed head in the posture of an angry supplicant: a very angry one. 'Please don't ever do this to me again There is only one director on the set'." When she saw the completed film, Sidhwa says she loved the scene -- and various changes made from the book. "It took me some time to realise that Deepa could not have had all the characters I have in my book. Then it would not be a film but a mini-series," says Sidhwa. "I gave away my baby to her in full trust. And she has made an honest, beautiful, splendid and touching film." The story is told through the eyes of eight-year-old polio-stricken Lenny, who not only witnesses hatred and violence during Partition but also ends up unwittingly betraying the ayah she loves dearly. Though Sidhwa's eight-year-old book, which was published as Ice Candy Man in India and the United

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