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The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad: book review




 
The Wandering Falcon (2011) by Pakistani writer, Jamil Ahmad, is set along the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan – in Balochistan and Wasiristan – in a lonely military outpost where the wind blows with savage fury. It is long before the time of the Taliban.

A man and a woman, and their camel, approach the outpost seeking shelter. It is provided, and it is here where their child is born … “to most of the soldiers there was sheer wonder in the wizened looks of the infant with his black locks of hair” as he “brought back memories of their own families whom they had not seen for years.”

When the boy, Tor Baz (black falcon), is five years old tragedy occurs when a camel rider appears. But it is not the only tragedy in the young boy’s life. He travels the route of secrecy, kidnappings, killings and slaughter – of men and camels.

It is not just the tale of a boy wandering the region as he grows into a man. It is also of the villagers and tribes, the fighting men, the hard working women, and the children who walk barefooted. Tor Baz travels among the Mahsuds and the Wazirs, but he is neither. One person says to Tor Baz, “I have been trying to place you, but I have failed. Who are you and where do you come from?”

From the third person narrative, the novel shifts in Chapter 6 to the first person. The narrator is from the Upper Qambar Khels, and he is an Afridi, raised in a small German village before World War I. Traveling with Tor Baz, the narrator writes, “Furious voices were accusing someone of having brought me, a foreigner and an infidel, here and having defiled their land … Among the voices, I suddenly heard the voice of Tor Baz.” What does Tor Baz say? Is he friend or foe?

The next chapter reverts to the third person narrative, which is now suddenly more descriptive (in an otherwise unembellished novel) as Upper Chitral’s beautiful landscape appears. Ahmad describes a girl – married early – destined to be a slave girl. If it’s a hard life for men, it’s an even harder life for women. Is it the beauty of the landscape or the women that makes Tor Baz contemplate ending his wandering life?

Ahmad writes of a place and people known to him for he lived and worked in the Frontier Province and Balochistan. There are stark cruel pages, but there are also poetic paragraphs that evoke the compassionate emotions and feelings behind the traditions of weather-hardened people in an unforgiving land.
  

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