by Jamil Ahmad
“Conscience!” the old man’s voice broke in. “Jangu, do not talk to me of conscience. What kind of a guide is it when it comforts the evil man in his labors no less willingly than another who struggles against wrong. Never have I seen a man truly troubled by his conscience. Conscience is like a poor relation living in a rich man’s house. It has to remain cheerful at all times. It has to remain cheerful at all times for fear of being thrown out. Our cause is right, because we think it is right—but never depend on conscience, yours or another man’s.”
As he finished, two voices broke in eagerly. “Sardar,” they pleaded, “please, let Jangu continue.”
There was no impatience, only pleading, in their voices, but the old man felt immeasurably sad and lonely behind his curtain of darkness. They do not understand, he thought. I hope to God there are people as full of doubts about right and wrong on the other side as I am. “Continue, Jangu,” he said wearily.
“So,” Jangu went on, “six new moons have we seen since the trouble started. In this time, so many things have happened—mostly evil. Our crops have been burned, our grain stolen, and our animal flocks sold away or slaughtered. We have pointed our guns at them, and they at us. We have killed, and so have they. By now, even their airplanes hold no terror for us. All this we know, but now I shall tell you some things you do not know.”
He had the full attention of the small audience now.
“Yes, Sardar. This you must know. Last week, I met a Baluch who is a charcoal burner near the big salt lake in the north. He told me that in our absence from our homes, our families have been made prisoners by the authorities. They—our women and children, even those remotely related to us—are living in jails. Bred and brought up in the deserts, they are now living and sleeping in evil-smelling dark rooms in the city.”
A murmur swept the group of men.
“Yes,” continued Jangu. “Our sardar is right in what he said. The men who did this remain glorious creatures in their own conscience.”
He paused for a while and then went on again: “But I also heard another thing, which you do not know. This same Baluch told me that the officers have offered a safe conduct for us to hold parleys with them, so as to end our quarrel.”
Jangu took out a soiled printed paper from within his shirt and carefully opened its folds. “On this paper is written the invitation and the safe conduct. Copies of this have been sent to many people.”
None of the men could read or write, but each looked at the paper carefully and with seeming deliberation before passing it on to the next person.
The boy had been sleeping fretfully after his meal. As the talk drew toward its conclusion, he awoke and heard them decide to head to the headquarters of the authorities to discuss the terms of the safe conduct. They had agreed that their willingness to talk would not compromise their honor in any way.
On the evening of the third day, the Baluch led their camels into the town. The boy, who possessed no shoes, remained perched on one of the animals. They stopped at the first large building they saw. What seemed to them a palace was in fact the local post office.
Jangu went up the steps to a man standing in the doorway and produced the worn-out leaflet.
“Read this—we have come for the talks,” he said.
The postmaster read the paper carefully. He looked at the men, excitement showing on his face. As he hurried to the telephone, he looked back and shouted, “Wait for the officers. They will be coming soon.”
The seven men, the boy, and the animals were taken to a large house. For the next two days, they were given their meals, but no one came to see them. Each one of them was impatient about the delay but carefully hid his feelings from the others.
The pervading silence of their land had taught their people to be deliberate in their actions and slow in responding to emotions. They observed, though, that a party of soldiers had been placed around the house. Even this they avoided discussing with one another—much less mentioning it to Roza Khan. Finally, after the fourth day, they received some visitors, who brought a Jeep for them. The Baluch were asked to leave their guns and camels behind. They were driven for a while, until the vehicle entered a closed area surrounded by thick mud walls. The Jeep stopped at one of the buildings within the compound.
The room that they entered was full of people. Some were sitting on chairs, and others on benches. People were talking, and the conversation did not stop with their entrance. The men moved toward a part of the room that was bare, took off their shoes, and started making themselves comfortable on the floor.
Harshly, they were asked to remain standing. It is a strange custom of these people, they thought to themselves, when one part stands and the others sit. They were asked to swear an oath on the Koran that they would tell only the truth. This made them even more curious. They swear by a book, while we swear by our chief—the sardar of our tribe.
All the while, around them, the air remained thick with talk and laughter.
Then the charges were read out to them. They had killed two army officers. “If proven guilty, you could die,” they were told by a man sitting at a table on the other side of the room.
“Oh, no,” Roza Khan protested. “We came for talks.” He waved the paper in the direction of the voice that had addressed him. “Read this,” he said.
“I know this paper,” said the other man. “It is of no value. It carries no signature.”
“Sardar, you speak for us,” said Jangu, who was standing beside him. The others concurred in murmurs.
“Well, then I speak also for six of my companions.”
“Seven,” the boy interrupted.
“Seven,” said Roza Khan. “I speak as their sardar, and I say that a word does not require a signature, nor a mark, nor yet an oath. The word was offered, and we took it.”
“Do I have to write all that is being said?” asked the clerk petulantly.
“No,” replied the magistrate. “Write only the things of importance. Thus far nothing has been said that needs to be written. You may merely say that the charges were read out and explained and the accused pleaded guilty.”
“This is not what I said. Men were killed. Many men, not merely the two you speak of. Ours and yours. When my brother tribe was told that they would have a sardar no longer, could any man suffer such an insult? Has there ever been a Baluch who did not have a sardar?” Roza Khan fell silent.
“Have you more to say?”
“What shall I record?” asked the clerk again.
“I am wondering,” said Roza Khan, “how to explain to you what a sardar is. If people in this room could be silent, thoughts shall come easier to me. We Baluch are used to the silence of the desert,” he apologized handsomely, “and are not as clever as you.”
The room fell silent. After a while, Roza Khan spoke again.
“I do not know what you would make of this tale, but it is said that each man needs a sardar, seeks and finds one for himself—a Baluch more than others. The story goes that Adam was the first Baluch on this earth. When he found that he was alone and there was none besides him, he was so desolate that he created one in his mind and called him Allah, thus making a sardar for himself.”
The lines around Roza Khan’s milky eyes etched themselves sharply as he came to the end of the story.
The boy looked toward Roza Khan. “It is a beautiful story, Sardar, but they are not writing it down.”
“No, nothing has been written down so far,” agreed the magistrate. “Fables have no use here. They are not evidence. Can a fable explain a death? Say something about the men who have died. How did they die?”
“All right.” Roza Khan’s voice suddenly seemed stronger than before. “I shall tell you something which you may like to write down. There has been killing, not a few men but many. I led my tribe into it. I killed men myself. My final crime has been that I have led my tribe into this last folly. I asked them to join these parleys. This terrible wrong and this misjudgment have all been m
ine—”
“No,” the magistrate interrupted him. “That no man can accept.” He added the final ignominy: “For a blind man to claim that he killed, or that he was the leader, is an act of pride that has no substance.” He turned toward the clerk. “Write down in the record that the accused admitted to the killings.”
Before the evening lamps had been lit, the trial was over. The clerks had started to tie up the files and close the cupboards. They wanted to leave for their homes as soon as the sentence was passed.
The magistrate turned to the clerk. “Show in the record that only seven men were tried, and they pleaded guilty. Let the child go.” He then passed the sentence of death and asked the staff to drop off the boy in the town on their way home.
There was complete and total silence about the Baluch, their cause, their lives, and their deaths. No newspaper editor risked punishment on their behalf. Typically, Pakistani journalists sought salve for their conscience by writing about the wrongs done to men in South Africa, in Indonesia, in Palestine, and in the Philippines—not to their own people. No politician risked imprisonment: they would continue to talk of the rights of the individual, the dignity of man, the exploitation of the poor, but they would not expose the wrong being done outside their front door. No bureaucrat risked dismissal. He would continue to flatter his conscience through the power he could display over inconsequential subjects.
These men died a final and total death. They will live in no songs; no memorials will be raised to them. It is possible that with time, even their loved ones will lock them up in some closed recess of their minds. The terrible struggle for life makes it impossible for too much time to be wasted over thoughts for the dead.
What died with them was a part of the Baluch people themselves. A little of their spontaneity in offering affection, and something of their graciousness and trust. That, too, was tried and sentenced, and died with these seven men.
When the subedar with the large mustache patrolled the town early in the morning, he recognized the small boy leaning impassively against the prison wall. The boy had been with the party of Baluch outlaws as they had walked proudly into the town. The subedar halted his patrol and walked up to the boy. “What are you going to do now?” he asked. “Your companions, they are all dead.”
“I do not know,” said the boy. Suddenly, he lifted his face. An eager look came into his eyes. “Can I go into the fort?” he asked, pointing toward the prison walls. The subedar looked closely at the boy to see if he was joking. Ghuncha Gul hated levity, but the boy was totally serious.
“No,” he said quietly. “At least not yet. I am leaving this town, and you will come with me. The place I am going to is far away, but you and I might like it.”
Ghuncha Gul ordered the patrol to start marching. He looked back and saw the boy following him.
Three
THE DEATH of CAMELS
He called himself Sardar Karim Khan Kharot. By men of his tribe and all others, he was addressed as General. No man knew his age. If asked, he would grow reflective and say, “I know not. I can only say that I am in my third span. Two generations of men who roamed the earth with me have returned to their Maker, and I alone am left.”
His hair gave credence to his tale. Even his eyebrows and eyelashes looked like patches of freshly fallen snow clinging bravely to a cliff face. But then his energy and vitality seemed to belie his claim as he led his nomadic tribe, year after year, on their seasonal migration from the Afghan highlands in autumn and their return from Pakistan after the winter was over, in early spring.
He was a familiar figure in all the lands through which his tribe ever journeyed. With a faded purple-and-gold cloak over his shoulders, he always walked in the company of his youngest son, Naim Khan, who was approaching fifty. A replica of his father, with the same square shoulders and stocky figure but a jet-black beard, Naim Khan called himself Colonel, and as with his father, no man dared ask him where he had obtained his rank. Since it was difficult to imagine either the father or the son submitting to discipline, it was generally assumed that they had received these honorifics as well as the elder’s purple cloak from some long-dead king. If his tribe knew the secret, they chose to keep it to themselves.
The Kharot tribe numbered about a million men, whose entire lives were spent in wandering with the seasons. In autumn, they would gather their flocks of sheep and herds of camels, fold up their woven woolen tents, and start moving. They spent the winter in the plains, restlessly moving from place to place as each opportunity to work came to an end. Sometimes they merely let their animals make the decisions for them. When the grazing was exhausted in one area, the animals forced them to move on to another site.
With the coming of spring they would start back to the highlands, their flocks heavy with fat and wool; the caravans loaded with food and provisions purchased out of the proceeds from work and trading; men, women, and children displaying bits of finery they had picked up in the plains. This way of life had endured for centuries, but it would not last forever. It constituted defiance to certain concepts, which the world was beginning to associate with civilization itself. Concepts such as statehood, citizenship, undivided loyalty to one state, settled life as opposed to nomadic life, and the writ of the state as opposed to tribal discipline.
The pressures were inexorable. One set of values, one way of life, had to die. In this clash, the state, as always, proved stronger than the individual. The new way of life triumphed over the old. The clash came about first in Soviet Russia. After a few years, the nomad died in both China and Iran.
By the autumn of 1958, with the British Empire dismantled and the once fluid international boundaries of high Asia becoming ever more rigid, both Pakistan and Afghanistan challenged the nomads. Restraints were imposed on the free movement of the Powindas, the “foot people.”
The Kharots started moving from the highlands in the usual manner. Each kirri, comprising about a hundred tents, each one a day’s march behind another, each with its own leader, converged toward Kakar Khorasan, the point at which they always crossed the border. Each tent meant a family. A family denoted not only the man, his wives, and his children but also his dogs and a few chickens, which the women generally insisted on carrying along with them. The dogs were a special kind of mastiff, savage and massive. They had been bred over centuries, and were known as the Kuchi breed—the breed of the nomads.
A family also meant the accompanying herd of camels and flocks of sheep. These were usually kept together, and the animals of a kirri could number up to a few thousand sheep and a few hundred camels. Being kept together did not mean that the ownership was common, nor did it cause any confusion of identity. Not only the owner but also his five-year-old child could pick out their own animal from the herd without the slightest hesitation. While the General was the unchallenged head of the entire tribe, each kirri would also informally choose a leader to make the decisions for their group as they traveled.
It was the second day of the march, and Dawa Khan’s kirri was settling down for the evening. The black woolen tents, open on all sides, had been pegged down and looked like rows of black bats resting on the ground. The smoke from the fires was swirling up into the folds of the tents, rolling out and drifting away with the light evening breeze.
The men were busy unhitching the panniers from the animals and bringing their loads to the tents, mostly carpets, dried fruit, and nuts, which they carried with them to sell in the cities. The women, too, were busy, cooking and milking the she-camels and sheep, or suckling their babies. Only the dogs were relaxed. They had done their day’s work, ambling with the caravan, rushing sometimes to the front, sometimes to the rear, keeping the flock of sheep in order, traveling two miles for every one traveled by their masters. They were tired and needed their rest before they began their responsibility of guarding the camp during the hours of darkness.
Dawa Khan and his son carried in the last load and placed it in the tent of his younger wife. It was Gul
Jana’s turn to cook for the family that evening, but the other wife was helping her by baking the bread. The youngest child had crawled onto the dog, which had come with Gul Jana in her dowry. Gul Jana tasted the stew and added some more water.
Suddenly, the dog reared up, throwing the plump child onto the grassy floor. His haunches tensed, and the ruff of his neck bristled. Dawa Khan and his son looked in the direction that the dog was staring.
The sun had not fully set, and while some areas were in shadow, the top of the mound in front of them was still covered with sunlight. As they watched, two figures gradually rose into view: an old man wearing a purple-and-gold cloak, with a black-bearded younger man behind him.
“The General and his son are here,” Dawa Khan addressed his wives. “Prepare for their dinner tonight.” As he started walking toward the mound, other men emerged from the hundred black tents and followed him. They met the visitors at the foot of the mound. For a few minutes, there was such a lively exchange of salutations and greetings that no one could actually hear what the others were saying.
After this tumultuous welcome had died down, the group of men started moving toward the tents, with Dawa Khan and the General in the lead. Most of the other men gradually fell back in ones and twos, returning to their own tents, till only Dawa Khan and four others remained.
At Dawa Khan’s tent, some carpets had been spread on the ground, and two animal packs lay on the edges to serve as backrests. The men took off their shoes and sat down. The General, who, as always, kept his cloak on, looked at the men around him. They were old, familiar faces. He had known these middle-aged men since they were toddlers and had known their fathers before them. He smiled wryly at a hulking mustachioed figure sitting opposite him—this man, Torak Khan, had been so short in his childhood that he could not reach a camel’s tail till he was thirteen.
