The Bag - Bushra Khalfan

Al-Bagh in Persian language means orchard, and it is used in Muscat to refer to a walled farm with a house in the middle. This story's title and its metaphors come from this, Oman-specific in its finest details. It takes its reader back in time to experience events and transformations in modern Omani history, depicting internal conflicts and civil wars that Oman suffered during the twentieth century. A novel that tells about the Omani person with their resilience, love, and fragility, longing for the past but viewing it from a broad perspective, and exploring all possibilities. Through two characters (Raya) and (Rashid), who emerge from the injustice of a village into what seems to be a shared destiny that binds them with a rope to cross the muddy phase. No one can predict what might happen to them! We close our eyes for a moment and find ourselves in a place we did not choose, we close them again and find ourselves in a time we do not know, or in a role we were avoiding. What we are today might be the opposite of what we will be tomorrow, and the wheel keeps turning without us finding the chance to ask ourselves about our options and our fates. Raya cannot find an answer to her dilemma when she faces her brother Rashid as they leave the bed: "Injustice everywhere, first and foremost," so why then did they leave? In the harsh, swift, and sudden cycle of time, Raya will learn how life arranges our roles and how it makes us different from what we are. How we accept today what we rejected yesterday, how we are tested in what we hold most dear, and in our loved ones. Al-Bagh is a novel from Oman that depicts a full life of love, transformations, and confusion, filled with questions from different times. But it is also the story of every place, where Bushra Khalfan Boushaala navigates the compass of possibilities and ventures to find a difficult answer about the act of time—how it transforms and changes us unnoticed, perhaps into the opposite of what we rejected yesterday.