Road to Damascus: Road to Damascus: A true story - Paperback

by Jazz Shaban (Author)

Spanning 30 years, Road to Damascus is the true story of sisters, Suzan and Jigi. Separated as children they are brought up in different countries, neither knowing of the other whereabouts. Twelve year old Suzan is taken by her mother to Amman, Jordan, after the death of her father in 1965. But Jigi, Suzan's baby sister and born with a rare bone disease, is left behind in a south London hospital. Their mother promises the authorities that she will return to London after she has buried her husband, but she doesn't. Moving from hospital to a children's home in Oxfordshire, Jigi knows little of her family background, or that she has a sister at all. Armed with a cast-iron determination not to conform to stereotype, Jigi bumps and crashes her way through school expecting freedom, a fun and Simon Le Bon when she finally leaves. What she finds is discrimination, loneliness and an ill-prepared society that has no use for society's rejects. Arriving back in Amman, Suzan is passed around various family members for the next six years while her mother embarks on a new life without her. Forced to marry a Syrian man she loathes on sight, Suzan's dreams are finally shattered: She will never return to her beloved England. Instead she gains a veil, a violent husband, and a cruel, nagging mother-in-law from whom there is little escape. However, a life destined for purpose is seldom left to chance. Discovering that her mother has made a mysterious visit to London, Suzan sets out to find the baby sister she has had no knowledge of for nearly two decades. Knowing nothing of what she is about to get into, but in need of adventure, Jigi embarks on a roller-coaster trip, that will change her life forever. Surviving the Middle East's suffocating heat and the relentless chaos within a family she has never before set eyes upon, Jigi returns to London with a money belt stuffed to busting, vowing never to touch Arab soil again. But she does, again and again, compelled to do so by a reckless nature, and a truckload of unresolved business. When Suzan's husband's temper unintentionally kills his mother, and his cowboy antics put him in prison, Suzan finally takes to her prayer mat. Perhaps she will at last find peace in Islam? However, Jigi's road to salvation takes a different course. Driven by her sense of rootlessness, Jigi searches for the only God she has ever known: a benevolent, but distant entity she met briefly in Sunday School. During a particularly turbulent trip on a road to Damascus, Jigi and Suzan finally come to terms with their separate destinies, and together face the mother who abandoned them.

Author Biography

Jazz was born in London and went to school in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire. After several years working in the community sector in various parts of London she headed north to study film at Northumbria University. Finding work as a general dogs body with a number of production companies she eventually started making her own short films and documentaries for the festival circuit and Channel Four. Jazz's own need for answers and search for cultural roots eventually took her down an international development path where she cultivated a passion for authentic storytelling. For fifteen years this has taken her around the world working with a range of communities and overseas development agencies. Heading back to leafy Oxfordshire, Jazz currently divides her time between regular work to put bread on the table, and writing and filmmaking projects.