Praise For NOOR

Probing old wounds
Mahim Maher

What was the 1971 war on East Pakistan like, and how do Pakistani men who committed atrocities there face questions back home? Sorayya Khan is one of the handful of Pakistani Women writers who have felt compelled to tackle these questions (Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography Maniza Naqvi’s Mass Transit come to mind as similar attempts).

Khan’s first novel, Noor, published last year, is a lean meditation on this moment in Pakistan’s history, a slow novel that circles its subject at an unhurry pace, the only way it could have done justice to its complex themes of family, nation and war.

The novel, set in Islamabad, is a about Noor, Sajida’s daughter, who is born with something that seems to be Down syndrome (Khan does not spend much time specifying which disease). Noor’s father Hussein rejects her at birth, “separates” from his wife Sajida, and starts sleeping in the dining room. Sajida takes to sharing her marriage bed with her daughter whom she loves and nurtures unquestioningly.

While Noor’s character is exceedingly complex, Khan has used it as a vehicle for rich metaphor and symbolism. She bring together the past and the present for her mother Sajida and her grandfather Ali, a retired army man who fought in East Pakistan in 1971.

It is Noor’s development that Khan draws in the rich lives of her other characters. Sajida, for example, was brought to Pakistan from Bangladesh by Ali after her entire family was wiped out in a cyclone. And the night Noor is conceived Sajida has a dream in which she realizes her child will be special.

Khan’s ability to sensitively portray the character for child with special needs is exceptional. While it takes time for Noor to develop her verbal skills, she soon shows her family that she is a gifted artist. but it is when she starts painting near-photographic renditions of her mother and grandfather Ali’s time in Bangladesh during the war that the family is forced to contend with the past. These paintings are the focal point of the novel, which uses them as a portal onto the past. Khan’s writing, therefore, does not rely on an action-pact plot. She is more concerned with slowly weaving a tapestry of characters. But the result is far from tedious; there is no tense build-up to a climactic denouement by the end of the novel. The reader is instead drawn into the mystery of the characters and anticipates how Noor will change them. Most of the action takes place in Bangladesh and related through a series of quick flashback. Khan uses this technique to make the happenings seems more distant, thereby, giving emotions and their interpretations more weight. The action only serves to complete our understanding of how the war changed the characters.

Noor therefore circles the theme of war and how it affects families, the nucleic units of the nation. Khan writes in several terrible rape and torture scenes in Bangladesh, which betray Ali’s complicity in acts of war. “War is war,” he says. But is it really so? And how can his daughter and mother understand why he did what he did in East Pakistan?
What makes Noor a success is that while Khan has asked all the right questions, she does it very subtly and instead of attempting to furnish pop psychology answers to wrap up her subject she leaves much to the imagination. There are no theatrical displays of emotion, no facile, clever word play or symbolism. The reader is not infantilised; Khan treats the issue with reverence.

Khan’s language is spartan but this does not detract from the expression of the depth of each character. Noor is a work of literary fiction that yields man shades of meaning with each turn of the page. For example, because it is a work of fiction, its irony is that we, as readers, can never ‘see’ Noor’s paintings even though they are described in detail. Thus readers who have never seen the war in person are reminded of its mystery. We are made aware that the logic and emotion of war may never be accessible to readers today, who nevertheless have to contend with its legacies.

Noor, the child, is an embodiment of hope for the future, but also a reminder of the past through her paintings. She can also be seen as the personification of East and West Pakistan. When she breaks her leg in an accident the limb withers while in a cast and Noor never regains full use of it. She seems to not have the capacity to feel pain. This is brutally echoed in a war rape seen where Ali is shaken to see that the young Bengali girl his senior is raping and mutilating doesn’t even whimper. Noor is replete with such parallels and metaphors, which make it a rich but mysterious work of fiction with many layers to ponder.

Khan’s effort is in part reminiscent of Kamila Shamsie’ Kartography, also a novel that dealt with 1971. Noor’s fear of lines and Raheen’s aversion to maps in Kartography are a metaphor for both writers’ refusal to impose order and explain away the troubles of Pakistan. And while the open ending of Noor may bother some readers, it should be taken as a testament to the breath and depth of Khan’s undoubted literary talent.

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