Bapsi Sidhwa wrote about human foibles, resilient 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

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 realize 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 favorite 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.

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.