Bapsi Sidhwa

Sidhwa was born in Karachi to a Parsi family and contracted polio at two, spending much of her childhood confined and largely out of school, which she later credited with pushing her toward reading and eventually writing. She married young, had three children, and began publishing fiction only in her forties, self-financing her first novel when Pakistani publishers showed little interest in a Parsi woman's perspective on the country.

Cracking India (1991, published in some editions as Ice-Candy-Man) narrates the horror of Partition through Lenny, a young disabled Parsi girl in Lahore whose beloved Hindu and Muslim servants are torn apart by the new religious border cut through her city: the Parsi community's traditional neutrality giving the narrator a rare vantage on violence from multiple sides. It was adapted into Deepa Mehta's film Earth.

She later emigrated to the United States, continued writing into her eighties, and was honored with one of Pakistan's highest civilian awards before her death in 2024.