At 79, Pak official comes up with stories of troubled border

A 79-year-old retired Pakistani official, who served several years in the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, has penned a book of short stories that gives a rare insight into life in the forbidden regions.

Penguin India has acquired the rights for Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon and it will be published by its imprints Hamish Hamilton and Riverhead early near year.

The book, being compared to Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, will be published in India, the US and the UK.

The Wandering Falcon is a collection of interlinked stories that shows from inside in a remote and impenetrable culture.

One of the stories, The Sins of the Mother, is about a couple from Baluchistan who risk everything by fleeing from their tribe and it will be published in the upcoming Pakistan issue of the Granta magazine.

"I had a tip-off from a friend in Pakistan that a remarkable book had been written. Jamil Ahmad is an extraordinarily talented writer. The Wandering Falcon is stark, compelling, wise, emotional yet unsentimental all at once," says senior editor of Penguin Meru Gokhale.

"...I was struck by the clarity and power of the writing, and the way it brings to life a place and a world which has remained hitherto largely unrecorded. As only the best fiction can, the book brings us news but, more than that, it brings us stories which lodge in the mind with force and emotion," says Simon Prosser, publisher of Hamish Hamilton.

Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books, says, "Jamil Ahmad powerful stories offer a perspective that is increasingly of interest and importance to American readers,"

Born in Jalandhar in 1931, Ahmad began his career in the region in the 1950s and was an official in the Pakistan embassy in Kabul at the time of the Soviet invasion in 1979.

At the time of his posting in the Frontier Province, he acquired a working knowledge of Pushto and the fluency continued to improve with increased usage. This helped him interact freely with the locals.

At one point, with the help of some friends from the Afridi tribe, he walked into the Tirah Valley, the heartland of the Afridis. This initiative created quite a stir, as it was the first-ever venture into this territory by a government representative.

He was encouraged to write by his wife Helga, who painstakingly typed the handwritten manuscript on a typewriter with German keys. He lives in Islamabad.