>Sorayya Khan’s Noor (2003)

fiction

by admin | on June 23rd, 2011 | 0 comments

What do you think is the greatest gift we have. Does something called Memory figure anywhere in the list! Even if it is absent, hats off to the creator, the one with the capital C, it’s one lovely technology put in place to recollect the past. However, it does become a burden when some phases of that past are painful and the sapiens concerned have sharp memories!! The ingenious memory technology then becomes a torture! Even then, to remember good times and bad, we have this something installed in our brain. Kudos to our creator… and thank you, we do have that freedom to shout at them when things go bad!

I talked about memory in so much length as Noor is about that. Memory may not be a character in the sense of a persona but memories of the main characters play the vital part in solving the puzzles, for realizations, and tying loose ends. I would love to call it a thriller then!

In short, Noor is a story of recollections through Paintings by a little special child called Noor!

The memories here are traumatic so much so that one character, Sajida, Noor’s mother has forgotten that she has memories of her childhood days during the cyclone of 1970. On the other hand, our war hero, Ali, who adopted her at 5 or 6 from Bangladesh, has shut everything linked with the war he was part – the War of Independence fought by the people of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 neatly into compartments in his brain. He locked them threw the keys into the Arabian Sea! Such is the story line. Sajida is oblivious, therefore, has no realizations until she is made to remember them all. Ali is a living trauma for he suppresses those memories consciously.

Noor acts as the catalyst or her paintings does. Each of her painting is an image from their past. It acts as a trigger to remember the whole incident. Ali and Sajida come to terms with their respective pasts, are able to talk about it with some clarity….

She a child born with some disability not named in the novel, and her ability to paint memories of her grandfather Ali, whom she has no blood relation with is something bordering magic realism …. At some level, it can be looked at a reconcilliation at the domestic level of what is played out at the national level in Pakistan, East Pakistan and Bangladesh. Therefore, Melodramatic and Symbolic.

The story in a nutshell

We have a soldier, Pakistani by birth: Ali, filled with youthful patriotism, he enlists in the army to fight this war. Within a few days in the battlefield, he realizes that war is an ugly affair just like his Naanijaan had predicted before he left. But, since he was here, he had to obey orders, orders which he was forced to obey for he was a junior officer. Typhoid comes as a rescue, and Ali heads home. On the way to the airport, he finds a girl of 5 0r 6 on the road… He takes her along with him Naanijaan and brings her up as his daughter, Sajida…

Noor |Sorayya Khan | Alhamra Publishing, Islamabad, 2003 |Penguin India, 2004|Style: leaning towards a documentary!

Cross Posted @ Pins N Ashes