Cracking India

Lenny is a young Parsee girl growing up in Lahore in the years around 1947, polio-stricken, fiercely observant, and devoted to her beautiful Hindu Ayah. Through Lenny's eyes the reader watches the gang of suitors who gather around Ayah, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh, as the warmth between them curdles into the communal hatred that Partition unleashes. When the city erupts, Lenny's innocent answer to a simple question becomes the hinge of a terrible betrayal. Sidhwa renders one of the 20th century's great human catastrophes from the ground up, through a household, a neighborhood, and a child who understands the cost of what she has done only in retrospect.