The Wandering Falcon [Paperback]

Jamil Ahmad's 'The Wandering Falcon' is set in the heart of the stateless stretch of mountains where the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran meet: an area mythologized by news bulletins as lawless, tribal Taliban hidey-holes, buzzing only with unmanned drones.
Ahmad gives a rare voice to this forbidden region's human collateral as he follows the wanderings of a boy named Tor Baz - the Black Falcon - through its many different, complex cultures and honour-bound societies.
Ahmad writes of a region pre-Taliban, but its roots are plain to see in a land where 'imputation of immorality meant certain death', and whose relentless hardships breed a perverted if somewhat understandable sense of justice:

'Despite their differences, the two tribes [Mahsuds and Wazirs] share more than merely their common heritage of poverty and misery. Nature has bred in both an unusual abundance of anger, enormous resilience, and a total refusal to accept their fate. If nature provides them with food for only ten days in a year, they believe it their right to demand the rest of their sustenance from their fellow men who live oily, fat and comfortable lives in the plains. To both tribes, survival is the ultimate virtue. In neither community is any stigma attached to a hired assassin, a thief, a kidnapper or an informer.'

The region is changing. Governments are beginning to patch up their porous borders, threatening to irrevocably alter the lifestyles of the wandering tribes who have migrated between mountains and plains for centuries. The young are beginning to look less towards their elders and more to the distant cousins who have grown rich selling opium in the city.
Ahmad captures this creeping change through an extraordinarily successful narrative device, in which the wanderings of Tor Baz act as a conduit for the author to shine his light on each new tribe or clan in turn: often, that is where the role of Tor Baz ends, as the story loops away to engage others before we meet him again, chapters later, elsewhere. This clever conceit enables the author to stay true to the traditional storytelling techniques of the region, at the same time deftly weaving in elements of a more modern, character-driven tale.
Ahmad's book laid unpublished for thirty years before his wife convinced him to seek publication. Now 78, Ahmad, who served in the border regions as a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan and later as minister in the Pakistani Embassy in Kabul, has been rewarded with a longlisting for the prestigious MAN Asian Literary Prize.
'The Wandering Falcon' is a deeply affecting book which provides a riveting insight into an area which the West is all too ready to write off as a vast outdoor training school for bandits and bombers. What Ahmad has, in fact, crafted out of this land of endless dust-storms and unforgiving mountain ranges is a beautiful testament to the triumph of the human spirit.

The Wandering Falcon is Jamil Ahmad's first book and he's 78 years old and started writing the stories in this book half a lifetime ago. He worked for the Pakistani civil service and was posted to the frontier area where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran meet up. It's not the type of area where you could expect much of a welcome or to have an easy time but Ahmad clearly loved his time there and that love of the people and place comes through in these stories.

Is The Wandering Falcon a novel or a collection of short stories? It's not entirely true to say that either is strictly the case. A single character - Tor Baz, which translates as the Wandering Falcon - knits together the 9 stories, growing older as the book progresses so that we are able to follow the passage of time and its impact on the tribes and he appears in all but one of the chapters. Occasionally his presence seems a bit forced - a modification or an afterthought, pushed onto a page where he doesn't entirely belong - but Tor Baz is by his very nature a character who doesn't belong anywhere so even that sense of alienation on the page is compatible with the story.

Tor Baz is born in the first chapter which tells of a couple who run away together, the woman leaving her husband to run off with the man, her husband's servant. In the next story Tor Baz is living with a group of camel traders who rescue him when he's found alone and huddled against the corpse of his family's camel. He passes into the hands of a wealthy land owner and then on to a renegade mullah before reaching an age when he's no longer anybody's property or adopted son and begins to take on his own identity - as a guide, as a trader or as a man looking for a wife. Tor Baz is both everyman and no man - a symbolic representation of the tribal identity, unbound by loyalty to any group but able to flit between them with ease.

The stories are short and the entire book is less than 200 pages long so it's not a long read. Each story could stand alone without the need of the other stories but their chronological progression helps us to see how times change and how some things never alter, regardless of their point in history. There's a lot of fighting, plenty of kidnapping, women are bought and sold - in one case a father sells his favourite daughter for a pound of opium and in another a wife competes for her husband's attention against his dancing bear. The harshness and danger of the nomadic life is clear to see - it's a life of uncertainty and conflict with no guarantees that the roads ahead with be passable, either literally or metaphorically.

Despite the presence of Tor Bag in all but one of the stories, we really learn almost nothing about him and this is perhaps because it's not really his tale. Ahmad merely uses him as a literary device - a clever one, but not one for whom we should feel much attachment. Remarkably, given the location, the stories are pretty much free of the major conflicts that mark the last 50-60 years of the region - there's no mention of the wars that took place in any of the three countries because the nomadic existence is not one that interacts with international politics other than the random drawing and redrawing of national boundaries. A lot of horrible things happen to the characters in the book, but there's none of the overly emotional heart-string tugging that's typical of books about Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran. There's no Islamic fundamentalism, no terrorism, no Taliban, no Russian invasion, no Iranian Revolution in this book - despite the fact that all these are present somewhere in the background, they have no day to day impact on the timeless people who wander through the pages of The Wandering Falcon. The stories are 20th century in timing but many of the events could have occurred centuries before.

For a first book, this is remarkable. I hope that the writer has time to add to his book shelf with many more volumes filled with these finely constructed short stories

This is one of those novels that could be read as a fairytale. Actually it contains all the elements of a good old fairytale, as it talks about habits, customs and traditions in the forever mysterious east, and tries to explain to the ever ignorant people of the west some of the things that however how hard they try they do not seem able to comprehend.
The main character in this story is a man that goes by the name of Tor Baz; a love child. Tor Baz was born at a military outpost in the middle of the desert, and grew up among the soldiers and his constantly worried parents, who were afraid that their sin would catch up with them. What sin was that? Well, they were not actually married, and his mother was the wife of his father's boss. As it turns out they were right to be afraid, as one day they would be discovered by the people they have wronged and thus lose their lives. Tor was spared his life but he was left behind all alone in an oasis in the desert, helplessly hoping to live to see another day. And that's exactly where an army officer found him and decided to save his life. So he had the six year old boy follow him to a far away town, where the kid was destined to discover an exciting new world; a world of written and oral knowledge, of modern and ancient wisdom. His teacher was an idiosyncratic mullah called Barrerai, a man who was bound to play an important role in the future history of the region. While times were changing and new realities were starting to emerge, and as "one set of values, one way of life had to die," he had to do the best he possibly could to protect his people from their worst instincts, to stand in the way of the bad things to come out of their ignorance and sometimes plain stupidity.
Tor Baz and Barrerai, using as their only weapons their knowledge and their cunning, would in the future pave different courses around their remote world, but their paths would meet time and again, either in the dens of memory or in some godforsaken places. Following their adventures we get to visit lands unknown to us and learn about some values and ways of life completely different from the ones we know. The aphorisms we read every now and then may sound crude to our ears; "Conscience is like a poor relation living in a rich man's house"; but probably they speak tons of truth about the people in the region. As the two protagonists wander again and again over the invisible at the beginning but more tangible as time went by borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan, they get to meet, and introduce us to, a lot of people, and they see and hear and learn too much; they reach great heights of wisdom; wisdom which they share with the reader.
This is a novel in fragments. However the author does not seem that interested in experimenting with the writing; he simply wants to tell his story; a story that evolves through the shards of different lives; a story about a world waist deep into the still waters of tradition and incapable of embracing change and adapting to new realities. But this is also a story about a land where women have no voice and no rights, and where the men's ethics can at the very best be described as questionable, since they consider abductions and the trafficking of women as normal; no matter that the memory of one the secondary characters was "only a sea of women's faces, and his small body shook with tension every time he saw yet another face to be sold."
The Wandering Falcon is a novel that really has a lot to tell to the readers in the west. At times it becomes dark but that only adds to the reading pleasure. Its prose is beautiful and nostalgic in a way that I cannon really explain, since the story carries a lot of echoes of today. This is a book finely crafted and worthy of the attention of any reader who's interested in the mysteries of the east.