Noor and Goldberg had first met and fallen in love while both were students at the Ecole Normale de Musique, and for a while he was accepted into the Khan household of Fazal Manzil and even given the name Huzoor Nawaz. But Noor’s family were not happy about the relationship, believing the class divide was insurmountable. Goldberg came from an impoverished working-class family – his mother worked in a laundry – who could hardly afford to pay his fees, while Noor was a noble princess. They believed her attraction to him stemmed partly from her sympathy for his deprived background and fear that if she left him he might try and end his life.
By the summer of 1938 she had passed exams which qualified her to teach child psychology, but the Khan family did not expect its women to take on professional, paid jobs. Instead she was establishing herself as an author and poet, contributing regular children’s stories, based on ancient Indian and Greek legends, to the Sunday Figaro. In addition, some of her stories were broadcast on Radio-Paris’s ‘Children’s Hour’ and won her excellent reviews at a time when stories of Babar, the elephant created by Jean de Brunhoff, and his queen, Céleste, were standard fare in every Parisian nursery. She often worked on her writing alone, in her room at night, but by the middle of 1939 she appeared to be happier and was contemplating ending the relationship with Goldberg and going to Calcutta to accept the proposal of another man, a wealthy Dutch Sufi aristocrat called Peter Yohannes, whose advances she had previously rejected. However, lacking the money for the fare to Calcutta, she put the trip to one side and continued to work on stories for newspapers as well as on her first book, Twenty Jataka Tales, which was published that summer in England. In the wake of her success she developed plans for a children’s newspaper and began collecting material for that. For Noor, the announcement of war ended her radio and newspaper work almost immediately as paper shortages loomed and stories about fairies and mythic creatures of the forest seemed inappropriate. The journalist with whom she had been working on the children’s newspaper backed out, telling her it would be impossible to go ahead at such a time when all that anyone wanted to read was hard news.