CHUP! (’Changing Up Pakistan’) interviews Bapsi Sidhwa:

Lenny is very different from me. If she was like me, I would have been very self-conscious and couldn’t have written the book because it would have become autobiographical. Someone once said that autobiography is always sort of a lie, whereas fiction has much more truth. You lose your inhibitions in fiction and you can therefore be more revealing. I was a very different child from the way I portrayed Lenny - that’s how I created distance from myself and that child. However, I did give her a lot of incidents from my life - like the polio, and I somewhat portrayed my parents, as I’ve done in most of my books. Some of the characters were people I knew while some are totally created.