The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmed

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

In the last few months, Jamil Ahmed’s story has been told again and again. The 79 year old civil servant had served in the Frontier and Balochistan, been a political agent in Khyber and Malakand, retired as chief secretary of Balochistan and had finished a manuscript of stories about those areas 1973, after his wife dismissed his initial attempts at poetry. There was some talk of magazines being interested in publishing some of these stories, but nothing came of the manuscript for years, until any years later Ahmed’s brother Javed Masood heard about the Life’s Too Short Short Story Prize on my radio show, and convinced Ahmed to submit in his work. Founder of the prize Faiza Khan was impressed by the stories, and sent them out to editors she knew. These things take time, Ahmed and his brother were told. But very quickly, Penguin picked up the rights to publish the work internationally. Right away, Jamil Ahmed’s story is interesting; right away it is poetic – karmic, almost.

The Wandering Falcon is a set of connected short stories, the first of which, The Sins of the Mother, was possibly the best piece in Granta magazine’s bestselling Pakistan edition. The book is set in pre-talibanised tribal areas in the tri-juncture of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan; territories previously unexplored in Pakistani fiction. The stories are woven together delicately, though each reads perfectly as a stand alone piece as well. The character of Tor Baz, drifts in and out of the stories, often just as the very peripheries, sometimes almost unrecognizable. Ahmad has said ‘a perpetually strong central character is unnatural. I feel a human being is like a twig carried by a strong current. It is only for brief moments and infrequently that he bobs to the surface, but is then rapidly swept into the depth of the stream of life’. And so Tor Baz wanders amongst the tribes, watching their lives, their loves, births and deaths. There is no judgment in Ahmad’s work, no critique, no defense of the often bleak events that take place. His prose is sparse, minimalist and perfectly representative of the landscape he writes about.

The book is a close, true look at various tribes in the region– those trying to come to terms with political geography ending their nomadic ways, those who abide by their jirga systems no matter what, some who fail and some who succeed, stories of personal loss and grief, loyalty and community; the desert always a constant, the wind, the sand, the camels – the desert is dry, coarse, bare, desolate and so are the lives of many of the people who live there. The tribes have their own rules, their own systems and the establishment (for what its worth) does not interfere with the tribal jirga, no matter how cruel their decisions may have been.

How many of these tribes still exist now the way they did then, in the 70s? Ahmad writes of how geo-political changes affected these tribes and in ‘The Death of Camels’ he is possibly at his most poignant. He writes of the nomadic Kharot tribe, ‘about a million men whose entire lives were spent in wandering with the seasons’, sometimes letting their animals grazing habits make their decisions for them. But the ways of the nomadic tribes could not last forever as their world began to be ‘associated with civilization itself’. The ‘foot people’, the Pawindah, attempt to carry on as before, and are stopped at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are weary and thirsty; their animals may die if they do not reach water and so they attempt to cross regardless of the subedar’s insistence that they are to remain where they are. A woman offers to cross first with a Koran on her head, expecting the border patrol to let her through. But Ahmad is clear, concise and brutal of his depiction of what happens – there is no romance to this story, no sudden sympathies. Machine guns mow down men, women and children. Most of the animals are killed in the three attempts the Pawindah make to cross. In a perfect example of his elegant prose, Ahmed describes what the event results in – ‘while the camel bones and skills have been bleached white with time, the shale gorge still reeks of death’.

These are the areas that are infamous for being home to the Taliban, areas that no one has written this way about before. This is fiction yes, but these are all stories that Jamil Ahmad must have heard in his years working in these areas. What has happened to these tribes? What are their ways now? So much global political interference must have forced them to adapt in strange unfamiliar ways and yet many systems may remain. Critics may well say that Ahmad’s subject matter is exactly what foreign audiences want to hear about Pakistan, but even those naysayers will have to remember that The Wandering Falcon was written in the 70s, when there very simply was no gallery for South Asian writers to play to. Ahmad’s writing prowess is often astonishing, and no matter when the book is read, this is what will stand out the most.