Book Review
A Pakistani author writes a novel of 1971
Noor, Sorayya Khan, Penguin, pp.223, Rs. 250.
Rakhshanda Jalil
Sorayya Khan's Noor is a remarkable novel for the simple reason that it breaks the long tacit silence among Pakistanis of all hues to speak of the horrors of what they saw and did in East Pakistan. Some like Intezar Husain and Faiz Ahmad Faiz have alluded to that bloodstained legacy of shame, but there has been no attempt so far to flesh out the bare bones of that long-buried nightmare. Ali, a young Pakistani soldier, brings home Sajida, a girl of "fiveandsix" who has lost her family in a cyclone and is found wandering about a Dhaka street, and raises her as his own daughter. Sajida marries, grows roots in Pakistani soil, has children, one of them being Noor, a child so special and different and gifted that she has access to secrets yet to be revealed and to memories her mother and Ali have buried. Born with Down's Syndrome, Noor begins to paint the most astonishing pictures from her very first birthday. In the blue of her infant drawings there is the blue of the Bay of Bengal, that relentless body of water that rose up in an angry tidal wave and swept away her mother's childhood. Noor's unerring drawings bring the past back for Sajida: the cyclone, the sea full of fish, the fishboats plying the seas and the shores of what was once East Pakistan and has since become Bangladesh. Wrapped like a snake in a tree high above the swirling waters, young Sajida had survived near rotting fish in torn nets when the rest of her family had perished. In a series of chilling portraits, Noor brings the past back with an exactitude that is both fearful and astonishing. She draws uprooted trees, shattered boats and the unrelenting monsoon rains. But she also details the atrocities too unimaginable and inhuman committed in the name of nationalism: the senseless killings of millions, the rivers red with blood, the bloated corpses with tied hands floating like paper boats down the river and the graffiti in a now-forgotten script written on a wall: Joi Bangla. Noor draws what Sajida has forgotten and what Ali has barred and bolted in the drawers of his memory. Her drawings reveal a "connection" -- not severed, merely buried -- with Sajida's past, with Ali's compliance in those acts of unmitigated barbarism. Ali, so good, so noble, so ordinary, is the average Pakistani who is plagued by memories that rise up "like stench". The novel moves inexorably towards its final cathartic question: "What was it like? There?" and in the answer lances a long festering wound. From The Hindu, May 2004
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