The Ice Balls
برف کے گولے
बर्फ के गोले

The Ice Balls

There was a character in the neighbourhood of my childhood — Sheedi Lal. He had stayed on after Indo-Pak partition. I later came to understand that his heart had grown fond of someone — a girl who happened to be Muslim. Her family did not accept it, but Sheedi Lal, moved by something only he could explain, chose to remain in that very neighbourhood. He did not leave.

I do not really knew how he survived the winters, but in the summers, Sheedi Lal would appear on a large street not far from our home, selling baraf ke golay — crushed ice balls drenched in syrup. His entire enterprise was contained in a wooden box that he carried to the lane each day. In one corner of the box, an inverted carpenter’s plane was fitted firmly. Holding a cube of ice wrapped in burlap in one hand, he would grate it across the plane, collecting the shavings in a small brass bowl with the other.

On the opposite side of the box sat glass bottles of thick, coloured syrups nestled in wooden frames. There were also tin moulds of various shapes: a ball, a rooster, a bear — those were two-paisa treats; a smaller ball, a shell, a sparrow — those were for one paisa. Sheedi Lal would fill one half of a mould with the crushed ice, embed a stick of reed through the centre, and clamp the other half shut. He was a master of infusing these cold sculptures with colour and sweetness all the way through.

He would twirl the figurines in the air — making the bear dance, the bird fly, the ball bounce as though it were part of a game of pithoo garam. In his other hand, one bottle after another would shower the ice in syrup like applause on a street performance. A few lucky children would buy the golay. The rest, wide-eyed, would watch, delighted just to see Sheedi Lal's bear dance, his sparrow soar, and the ball arc through the air.

His wooden box was as vibrant as the syrup bottles themselves — and he kept it clean, polished. In that grimy alleyway, the little box glowed like a sanctified shrine. As he scraped the ice back and forth on the plane, the box would emit a soft, rhythmic hum — to which Sheedi Lal would often hum along, lips closed, quietly lost in melody.
Once I had the courage to ask him what song he always seemed to sing. He looked around, then said in a near whisper: "It’s a bhajan. My parents used to sing it."
That conversation happened during a time when the spell of the ice balls had just begun to wear off, and the hotel on the street corner had started calling me in with its cups of milky, cardamom-laced tea.

I still saw Sheedi Lal from time to time. He lived in a tiny room tucked behind a shop. The back courtyard, though barely wide enough for a water tap and a latrine, also found space in summer for Sheedi Lal’s cot — laid out with such skill that its foot lay just before the latrine, and its head directly under the tap. In winter, once the shop shut at dusk, he would bring the cot inside. A small wooden door in the courtyard wall opened into a narrow slit of passage between two homes — just wide enough for a person to squeeze sideways into the street. My connection to Sheedi Lal passed through that narrow lane. Once or twice a month, in the evenings, I would walk from the hotel with two enamelled mugs of hot, creamy tea and reach his room, compelled by something like a debt I owed for the times I had watched his dancing ice balls as a child, without ever paying.

Sheedi Lal once told me that his parents used to live in that same neighbourhood — but now refugees lived in their house. He didn’t know where his own family had gone after being displaced. In 1947, the entire Hindu population of the town was ordered to evacuate and assemble in a camp in an open garden. Young Sheedi Lal had slipped away from that camp and returned quietly to his streets one night — only to find his home had already been assigned to incoming refugees.

He never spoke of the girl he had loved, or of her family. All I learned was that she had married in another city and now had children of her own. In the early years, once every year or two, when she came back to her parents’ home, she would sometimes stop at the other side of the lane and gently nudge her children forward to buy an ice ball.
"Even the children are grown now..." I still remember how softly Sheedi Lal said those words — as though even his own ears weren’t meant to hear them.

Education and work took me far away. Years later, when I returned to that city, searching for the past, Sheedi Lal was no longer there. The shops, the market, the faces — everything had changed. In that same spot where I had once seen his ice balls dance, now stood my past and present, side by side, stunned like refugees. And then — through the strangeness of unfamiliar voices — rose a tone I recognised: "It’s a bhajan. My parents used to sing it." Few people had really known Sheedi Lal. I didn’t know what to ask, or whom. I don’t know whether his body was respectfully cremated or simply buried in silence.

Decades have passed, and I think: Sheedi Lal never built a Taj Mahal. But did he need to? His love never died — so what mausoleum would have served it? My world has changed, too. But when friends from the northern and southern corners of the world share winter photos — with snow blanketing the window ledges and roadside walls — I see in that still white sheet, a refugee camp of a million ice balls. Transparent, waiting — with innocent longing to absorb colour and sweetness into their cold, clear bodies. But they never make it across the lines we humans have drawn - so they wait, and sigh, and melt. Lines of wealth, of caste, of borders, of belief.

Riaz Akber
Australia