Love Found Infrequent: Personal and Sociopolitical Struggles in "Cracking India" and "A Grain of Mustard Seed" Kartikeya Sundaram College

“What a terrible feeling to love someone and not be able to help them.”

- Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

The presence, portrayals and betrayals of love in Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa and A Grain of Mustard-Seed by Edith Pargeter shine a generally bleak outlook on the condition of mankind. Only the helpless few children, women, and those that secretly went against the wave of religious zealotry held fast in their love and support of their friends, across religious lines, and geographical ones too. The hidden kindness of Iqbal (Pargeter, 1) and Lenny’s mother’s heroic efforts to help smuggle their friends to India, and even Imam Din’s willingness to protect the Hindu Ayah from the Muslim murderers in Cracking India go on to show how this love for one another was absent in the majority of the people who aided in destroying the country, and their friends.

To demonstrate the shortage of love during and following Partition, Sidhwa depicts a better time before partition, showing the ability of different people to live together in peace. For example, via the variety of Ayah’s wooers - “Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsee are, as always, unified around [Ayah]” (Sidhwa, p105). Even Adi, Lenny’s brother, would often play with the...