Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
– W B Yeats: The Second Coming
All travel memoirs are never anything except a philosophy expressed in images. Like a good novel which is a hybrid form– part story, part fantasy – a travelogue is also social history that has disappeared into the images. Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, Rs 399) set in Pakistan’s turbulent Af-Pak northwest is a description of life on the very margins of existence, where ancient honour-bound cultures rule the roost and one day’s massacre simply merges into the next’s. More than any other academic work, past or contemporary, this travelogue tells you why the region has never been subdued by outsiders in history; why tribal cultures and loyalties defy central control either from Kabul, Kandahar, Herat or from Pakistan’s border districts in Peshawar or Quetta; and above all, why the conventional concepts of law and order simply do not apply.
As a member of Pakistan’s elite Civil Service, Ahmad is eminently qualified to write on this region since he served in the Frontier Province and in Balochistan. He was the Political Agent in Quetta, Khyber and Malakand, posted in Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul and ended his bureaucratic career as Chief Secretary, Balochistan.
Jamil’s observations are based not merely on a profound knowledge of the region but on hands-on experience. The story he tells here is spun out through the eyes of a young boy who sees the world around him with a freshness (and innocence) unlike scholars who put their own take on the scene: “It is true I am neither a Mahsud nor a Wazir (the two tribes in warring Waziristan). But I can tell you a little about who I am as I can about who I shall be. Think about Tor Baz as your hunting falcon. That should be enough.”
Tribal societies anywhere are a world of contradictions: custom and cruelty, hardship and survival, a fragile and unforgiving world goes hand-in-hand with understanding and compassion. In the eyes of the young Tor Baz this is all part of life — you accept it and carry on, as best as you can. In any case, the price of protest is not just ostracism but it could be life itself.
The book consists of nine chapters which deal with a different facet of violence, physical, emotional, sexual or plain sadism. The chapter headings give it all away: The Sins of the Mother; A Point of Honour; The Death of Camels; The Mullah; A Kidnapping; The Guide; A Pound of Opium; The Betrothal of Shah Zarina and Sale Completed. An outsider reading these accounts would want to know what the root causes of this endemic violence are: Is it land, or water, (a scarce commodity in this barren waste), or simply a code of honour that is handed down from one generation to another? There is no pat answer; each chapter has a different story which could be many factors brought together or a simply long-lost vendetta come to pass. Many would conclude that it is the harshness of the terrain that Ahmad describes so tellingly that it turns the heart into stone.
For instance: “Upper Chitral is a land of stone. Wherever you look, the landscape is full of stone. There is a variety of forms, of colour and weathering, but there is nothing but stone. In size, they range from small grains of sand to giants as tall as two-storied buildings. Stones in one way or another occupy the thoughts of men in this area and Sher Beg’s thoughts too were flitting from one mountain top to another. There lay the mountain in whose shadow he had been born, lived most of his life, married, begotten children. He would also die here. All around him were the crags where he gazed his animals, and peaks, he had climbed in his early days.” Much of the attraction of the book lies in the way language moves to describe the harsh landscape where Ahmad spent his professional life.
Here’s the gist of some of the stories. “The Kidnapping” tells the story of a missing boy in the village. The rumour that set off a short fuse among the warring tribes was that the boy had been abducted to be sodomised and the response to this was to either respond in kind or take up arms against the alleged kidnappers. In tribal societies, sodomy is fairly widespread and widely accepted as a justifiable form of revenge.
In “The Death of Camels” the search for water in the parched lands becomes the excuse for inter-tribal rivalry: one tribe demands water for its thirsty camels, the other denies. A woman who defies the ban by carrying a Koran she believed would protect her is mowed down, along with her camels. In the fierce tribal rivalries, no quarter is given, no quarter asked.
Ahmad’s message is simple: this is a wild country where neither the falcon nor the falconer knows the other and where primordial passions will always decide what’s right or wrong.
