Bapsi Sidhwa has died.

I write this while it rains in Lahore on a cold December afternoon. Memories flood my mind of the nineties when my friend Rabia asked me if I knew of Ice Candy Man. Somehow it rang a bell in my mind. I knew Ice Candy Man (later retitled as Cracking India). Who didn’t? That was the impact of Bapsi Sidhwa’s work. You realised it while not even knowing it. She made you realise it.

Pakistanis of our generation (popularly known as Millennials) didn’t talk about Partition. We were the generation that grew up on a post-Zia diet of Junoon, Vital Signs, the 1992 Cricket World Cup victory, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and lawn joras that were made of real, local cotton and not imported bedsheet material.

For those of us returning ‘expats,’ the children of parents who left for ‘overseas’ in the seventies and eighties, our minds were shaped by international influences and Lahore was a careful curation of musical evenings, glittering dinners, puppet festivals and quality schooling.

Partition was never mentioned and only taught in Pakistan Studies, which was dismissed because we did not need to know loss or understand it. We had it all. Lahore was ours; Pakistan was ours, served on a silver platter, unlike the steel trays used in the Gymkhana.

Sidhwa changed that. Like a seed sown into the soil, she opened up our minds, where questions began to sprout about the world we had ‘inherited’ and lived in.

Yet, we did not know much about it. Stories of desi love, the kind Ayah and the Ice Candy Man enjoyed, were lessons on brutality and harassment long before the West turned it into a hashtag that we dutifully adopted. How cruel love could be and how easy it was for the world to corrupt innocence.

The idea of a child – Lenny – with polio became a reality before the government decided to show ads about polio workers on television. The concept of ‘betrayal’ never fully explained, except as blanket ‘badtameezi,’ and the domino effect on people’s lives by one act, one word, the significance of language and the spillover effect of secrets were taught to us youngsters by Sidhwa alone. What happens to ‘fallen women’ in the same city where we played behind high walls, safe and secure, was the first introduction to a hidden part of a city that we thought we knew so well.

Years later, when I went out for my first feature story for The Friday Times, I stood in the red light district and thought of Ayah. The ayahs who were unnamed and unacknowledged in that part of my city. Sidhwa had made me aware of them before any historian or academic had.

Sidhwa may have mined her own life to write, but with each story she decolonised our minds and our understanding of how we lived our lives.

Hers was an uncomfortable awareness we had never known, a mirror to our faces, bringing us face to face with an ugly truth of history, especially Partition. To reduce her to a writer would be unfair; she was larger than that. She decolonised minds long before the idea of decolonisation.

Up until that point, there was a sense of apathy, a disdain. Could we be written about? Were we worth writing about? Only the ‘white man’ could write stories about whiteness, and we were to sigh over the accident of where we were born, the place now referred to as the Global South. It was Sidhwa who taught necessary lessons; no, we could not have Lahore the way we wanted it to be. No, we were not entitled to the beauty of Lahore or any part of Pakistan without recognising the silence of history that screamed at us from every nook and cranny of the country.

Sidhwa opened up new dimensions of literature, spanning regions and detailing how to tell a story. How we – South Asian desis – could show the world who we were with our heavy histories and yet find the delight in the daily mundaneness.

Who else could enable one to shoo away Jungle Book for the actual Junglewallas and find validation in the familial struggle between Faredoon and his mother-in-law, Jerbanoo?

Unlike in Ice Candy Man, which shook the ‘comfortable truth’ of one’s homeland, with Junglewallas there was a familiar comfort, an easing into the desi identity, shrugging off community differences, united in one truth: No, my family is not the only mad one.

The tension between Faredoon, as he would try to be intimate with his aptly named wife Putli, with Jerbanoo sitting and observing Faredoon’s attempt to assassinate her – Sidhwa singlehandedly opened a new genre of writing, which would come to be recognised as the South Asian narrative. Not the Pakistani narrative, but the South Asian one. Authentic, straight from the soil, she familiarised the world with ‘desi-ness’ and made a name for herself amongst the best writers.

The impact of her fiction cannot be stated enough. Weaving history and culture and mixing politics with the personal, Sidhwa’s work stands alone in a global sea of academic work surrounding Partition. Personalising lived experiences, she gave nonfiction a shape, a face that left an imprint on everyone’s mind. Even as years have merged into decades, her work stands apart due to the relevance of it. As India and Pakistan muddled to make friends, not war, Indian cinema eventually picked up her work and turned it into a film.

Could Pakistan have done more to honour Sidhwa? Yes. Is it too late? Perhaps. Can more be done? Absolutely. She did not need us – Pakistan and Pakistanis needed her and still do. Today, as more and more Pakistanis enter the literary market, they do so because she opened up the market. What they know of Pakistani literature is because of her. She made you realise it long before you knew.

Transcending the limitations of geography as a Pakistani writer, Bapsi Sidhwa was eternal long before she touched the sky. Her physical loss will be felt, but her body of work will continue to teach and shape future generations of writers.

Mehr Husain is an author and publisher based in Lahore. mehrfhusain@gmail.com