Book review: 'The Wandering Falcon'

Book: The Wandering Falcon
Author: Jamil Ahmad
Penguin
l 181 pages
l Rs399

Ehose who have diligently been putting off writing their first book can take much reassurance from Jamil Ahmad, a first-time author at 78. Ahmad is a retired civil servant who was posted along the western border of Pakistan in various administrative capacities. The Wandering Falcon comes as an introduction in fiction to this fascinating region and the tribes that inhabit it.

This part of the world has a tradition of resisting external authority, and parts of it remain semi-autonomous even today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Much of the current interest in the region today — in the world’s expedient way — is centred around Waziristan, refuge of the Taliban after 2001. But Ahmad’s book is set in a time before the current conflict.

The Wandering Falcon is a collection of nine short stories tied together by a recurring character — Tor Baz, ‘black falcon’. The first story is set “where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet” in a military outpost that shelters a Siahpad couple on the run. Tor Baz is born there, orphaned at five, and picked up at a waterhole by a group of Baluchs.

For the rest of the book, he makes appearances in different places: he witnesses the mutual incomprehension of a Brahui tribe’s ways and the state’s legal system, sees the disruption of the migratory Kharot tribe’s life by national boundaries, is instructed by a mullah who arbitrated tribal alliances for the Germans and British in World War II, becomes an informer about the activities of the Wazirs and the Mahsuds (“the two predatory tribes of Waziristan”), guides an outsider going to his father’s birth-place in insular Afridi territory, prospects for gemstones, and buys a woman in a slave market.

The curiously amoral Tor Baz is incidental to most of the stories, more a device than a character. Far more central is the landscape and the people who inhabit it. Perhaps it says something about an underlying commonality in the region and its way of life that Tor Baz clearly belongs to none of the tribes he spends time with, but is not completely alien to any of them.

Ahmad’s ethnographic intent is evident. His falcon systematically moves along the border, from Baluchistan through Waziristan and the Khyber, ending in Mohmand. Some of his characters seem to lack an edge from having to be not just themselves, but also representatives of a tribe or a tendency or a plight. But this is perhaps inevitable given the nature of the enterprise.

Ahmad knows the landscape he is writing about, its people and their rhythms of life. His prose is spare in keeping with the setting — “whorls of bare, cruel rock [. . .] occasionally throwing up spires and lances of granite” — and its simplicity often gives it an incantatory feel. The writing is organic to its world, as in the description of an old man whose “eyebrows and eyelashes looked like patches of freshly fallen snow clinging bravely to a cliff face.” Ahmad is alive to poignancy without being sentimental, and his stories have an easy naturalness to them.

A couple of stories in the latter half of the book take mildly jarring turns, hinting that Ahmad’s easy storytelling might not be entirely effortless.

The Wandering Falcon offers a glimpse into a world that is slowly disappearing.  But this is how it has always been, Ahmad might remind us, urging us to notice the ruins of elaborate water-channels on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, “patiently constructed by a people long since vanished and destroyed by another, also forgotten.”