Bapsi captured human foibles, spirit

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.

- 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 Zoroastrian family, a resident of Lahore and affected by polio.