Praise For NOOR

"NOOR, Sorayya Khan"
Aradhika Sekhon

A narrative around the 1971 war. The war that created Bangladesh; that left in its wake, staggering death statistics; and for those who survived, fractured histories. It is a story peopled by ghosts from a tortured past and individuals who must piece their lives together with the facts of war, even when everything threatens to come undone.

Ali returns from a way he once understood as “a precious opportunity to live life on his own terms”, only wanting to forget. He imagined his story, the sum of horrible details, so neatly stored away, he’d done away with any reason to retrieve it. Ever. And that was how Ali had planned to return to life. however, for, Sajida, the waif he picks up from the Dhaka road side and makes his daughter, the details of war are her sole means to terra firma. All that she remembers, is the cyclone when she lost her family and Ali, now ‘Abba’, rescuing her. In between, there is the war, the blurred grey area. And Hussein, Sajida’s husband, has to confront the reality of his daughter, very unlike the ‘sweet reborn fragrances of budding flowers’ and the realisation that in life - not quite like the assembly line production in his plastic bottle factory - a ‘defective’ piece can’t be trashed so easily.

The shadow lines between truth, truths not told and truths ignored, are forced into the light, with a frighteningly eerie immediacy, in the uncanny crayon drawings of Sajida’s child, Noor. Variously diagnosed as ‘Autism, Rett syndrome, Asperger’s syndrome, Martin-Bell syndrome and more’, this grotesque child borne of the grotesque fact of war and the accumulated years of half truths, mistrust and misgivings, forces the family towards reconciliation and reckoning. And a re-threading of the narrative of their lives so that the future does not ignore the river, rain, and dead, bloated bodies.

So they might learn…the tenor of what forgiveness might mean, that life is pain, just like its love, was infinite and uncomprehending. That holds and emptiness, where only one manifestation of sadness and not even a great one at that. And, finally, that love, in its eternity and sincerity, its God-awful trueness, could be more exacting than anything (one) believed. Or dreamed.

Noor is the unbearable lightness of being explored (not explained to the point of a gut-wrenching, tear-jerker). It’s a history of wars won and lost and boundaries redrawn and barbed. To the point of futile no-finality. It is about life without the “happily ever after”, not because cynicism tears asunder fairy tale endings, but because, in perspective, life isn’t tidy, it has a messy un-chiaroscuro in-between.

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