The Wandering Falcon

by Jamil Ahmad

  As the assistant commissioner finished, a heavy murmur arose from the assembled jirga. They realized that they were indeed in a fix. The terms of the treaty were clear enough, and yet theirs was a small tribe that could not conceivably take upon itself the task of forcing the Mahsuds, of all people, to return the captives or to surrender the accused.

  After talking among themselves for a while, they signaled that their reply was ready. When the men had quieted down, an old Bhittani tribesman—the most senior of all the elders present—got up with the help of a long wooden staff that had small studs hammered into it as decoration.

  “Sahib,” he started off in a thin, quivering voice, “you are right. The treaties are clear enough, as also is our obligation under them. Indeed, we are deeply impressed that you, who look so young and tender in years, should have taken so much pain and spent so much labor in studying them.”

  He stopped and let his glance rest on the upturned faces around him. There was a gleam of triumph in his eyes at the quip he had just made against the young official. This was immediately appreciated by his audience, which chuckled and grinned openly. The officer flushed with anger and embarrassment.

  “Sahib, we also acknowledge the shame brought upon our tribe by the outlaws who used our land to seek access to your area. It is indeed a terrible insult to us. But”—he paused again before adding—“let me narrate to you a story.”

  The crowd went silent, listening intently to the old man’s voice, which had now become clear and sharp, like the sound of plucked strings from a musical instrument.

  “The story goes, sahib, that a young boy and girl eloped and were running away from their homes, when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by a pack of ruffians out for mischief. These rascals, men of no honor, surrounded the couple and, threatening them with death, dishonored the girl. Not finding enough satisfaction in it, they asked the young man to strip and had their sport with him. After doing all this, these terrible and wicked fellows left the couple and went away. As their oppressors disappeared, the young man and girl calmed themselves and put on their clothes. The young man, after his fear had died, became furious with the girl. He accused her of having proven untrustworthy, disloyal, and faithless. He also charged her with possessing no sense of shame or modesty, as she had let so many men violate her body.

  “The girl thought for a while. Then she squared her shoulders, looked at the young man, and replied. Do you know what answer she gave him?”

  “Tell us, tell us,” cried the audience, spellbound by the story.

  “Well, the girl spoke thus: ‘My love,’ she said, ‘you are right. My body has been violated, but think of one thing. My body has been fashioned by nature for this very purpose. What was done to me was indeed wrong, but truly speaking, it is, as it were, only what nature has intended for me when it created me. Now look at yourself, you are a man. You were not made to be used the way these rascals used you. Yet you did not resist them. You allowed yourself to be violated just as I did. What reason do you offer?’ ”

  The old man stopped to let the effect of his story sink in before he continued: “So, officer sahib, that is what we say to you. We, the Bhittanis, are a weak tribe as compared to the Mahsuds. Yet nature has placed us on their borders. Because of this, the Mahsuds have to use our land when they go out of theirs or cross back into it. We do not like it but cannot stop them. We do not have the force that they command.

  “But what about you? What about all your police and your people in the districts who allow themselves to be kidnapped? You are like the man in the story. What the Mahsuds do to you, and the impunity with which they do it, was not intended by nature. Your nature should compel you to see that such things do not happen. Yet you let them do it, and when the deed is done, you rush out and vent your fury on others.”

  The old man’s story and its irrefutable logic had the whole assembly rolling with laughter. Even the police party and the group of officials from the district could not resist, and they, too, joined in the hilarity.

  Only the young officer stood crestfallen, realizing that he had performed poorly in his first battle of wits with the tribesmen. He could offer no story to counter the old man’s logic, and therefore his own case, though it had appeared to rest on such a sure and solid foundation, now stood demolished. There was no option available to him for the moment but to gracefully accept defeat. He hoped that his colleagues would not hear of the story.

  On approaching the hills, the band of men rested for a while near the spring. They baked bread and shared it with their captives, and also arranged for a few mules to carry the footsore teachers the rest of the way. Their destination was the house of an old man, Mandos, who was going to care for the captives and negotiate their ransom in return for a share of the proceeds. They reached the house after dark and found the old man finishing his midnight prayers. A room had been prepared for the captives. Since such a large number had not been expected, quilts had to be shared, two men to one quilt.

  When the morning came, one of the schoolteachers was asked to write a letter addressed to his relatives, indicating their fair state of health and the name of their host, and including, most important of all, fervent pleas for meeting the terms of their kidnappers and securing their early release. They were then served a breakfast of fried chicken, wheat cakes, and tea. From now on until their release, the hostages would be looked after with greater care and diligence than a tribesman can spare for his own sons.

  On the second day after the kidnapping, the deputy commissioner received the information that the party had crossed into Waziristan and was heading toward Mandos’s safe house in the notorious Shaktu Valley, which had provided sanctuary for half a century to most of the outlaws in the area. The fact that Mandos’s name had come to the forefront so early established quite clearly that this old man would do the yagh—make the proclamation about the terms for release of the captives from his custody.

  The large, mountainous territory of Waziristan was split into two administrative units, each with a political agent in charge. The two political agents were informed of the news, because from now on the game would have to be played by them and their people. Regular laws did not apply here, and the Frontier Crimes Regulations were the primary instrument of administration with which they had to try to balance the needs and customs of the tribes with the commands that reached them from the government.

  The political agent of North Waziristan was headquartered in a fort at Miranshah. The political agent of South Waziristan, who dealt mainly with the Mahsuds, had his base in a small cantonment at a place called Wana. These bases had not changed much in the past fifty years. Most of the men lived without their families, bugles were still blown in the morning, and the retreat formally sounded in the evening. The pickets and outposts retained their old British names—Guides Hill, Gordon Hill, Gibraltar Picket—as did the roads in the cantonment and the gates of Miranshah Fort.

  One of the few recent changes was that the two political agents could now communicate with each other by wireless. And it was over wireless that they agreed on the arrangements for handling the problem. As the first step, they had decided that since Mandos was a Mahsud, the Mahsud chiefs and elders would be collected and required to proceed to the Shaktu Valley to bring back the hostages, while a similar group from among the Wazirs would be sent to make sure that Mandos did not, as one likely gambit, move the captives into Wazir territory.

  The Mahsud jirga was in tremendous spirits. The next few days would be a kind of vacation for them, with long parleys and the sharing of jokes and stories at the expense of the government. For a few days, there would be no worries about families. Instead, desultory bargaining about the ransom for the hostages was interspersed with lengthy discussion about diverse subjects, such as the safest smuggling routes, the most profitable items of contraband, the relative quality of weaponry currently available in the market, the rising prices of ammunition, and all the current social gossip and scandals in t
he area.

  The jirga had taken eighteen thousand rupees in cash along with them. This was known to the gang even before their arrival. The bargaining continued for three days before an agreement was reached at twenty thousand rupees. After the deal was finalized, Daulat Khan, the head of the kidnapping party, graciously reduced the amount by another two thousand rupees as a gesture of hospitality to the jirga of his tribe.

  The money and the captives changed hands, and yet another Waziristan kidnapping case was closed.

  Six

  THE GUIDE

  If the ears of my corn be empty, let them stand as high as those of my rival.

  —Afridi proverb

  For more than a quarter of a century, the thought of undertaking this journey had dominated my life in one way or another. For the first few years, my father and I had dreamed about it together. He talked of returning to the land of his birth, and I reveled in the thought of missing the drab school days in the small German village school I was enrolled in, wandering away, seeking adventure in the company of my father. But reality was harsher. These were years of poverty, when my parents had to virtually break their backs in eking out enough sustenance from the small farm in Bavaria that my mother had inherited. Then came the war, and all our hopes had to be set aside. When the war ended, my father died and I was left alone to nurse our dreams and nourish them, year after year, as time passed and the journey had to be postponed. Finally, after years of frustration, there came a time when fortune, instead of conspiring against me, as it had seemed to, started to favor me, and I grabbed the opportunity to make the trip.

  Once I had made the decision, I took careful stock of my limitations. My knowledge of Pashto, never as good as my father wanted, had grown even rustier with disuse after his death. Though I had tried to practice it during the few months I had spent in Kabul as the representative of my firm, I lacked the confidence to speak freely and naturally in this language. What also loomed in my mind was the harsh fact that Tirah was a land forbidden to anybody other than true Afridis, and anyone who violated this unwritten injunction would be in serious danger. Similarly, in spite of my efforts, the clothes of my father’s people—loose gray-colored cotton trousers, a long shirt, a waistcoat, and black blanket over my shoulders, and sandals of raw untanned leather on my feet—felt uncomfortable and alien. I felt like a foreigner. My only advantage lay in the fact that some friends had recommended to me two guides, on whose loyalty and steadfastness I could depend.

  The three of us entered the larger of the two rooms of the hut, which lay only a few miles from the point where we crossed into the Afridi area, leaving our host, Gul Zarin, outside, as he’d expected us to. The distant glow from the city of Peshawar was still visible. We had decided on an early halt to refresh ourselves so as to start before dawn the next day. As we sat down on our cots, one of my companions turned to the other.

  “Gul Zarin is asking too many questions,” he remarked. His companion nodded slowly.

  “Perhaps it would be better to silence him.” They both turned to look at me.

  “No, no,” came my quick reply. “He is only being curious because I have given him reason to be so. He means no harm.”

  My vehemence surprised my companions. They talked for a while longer in whispers. Early the next morning, we made the expected payment to Gul Zarin for his hospitality and started off. The stars were still bright and clear, and the mist had not yet started rising from the ground. The air was extremely cold, and our breath and that of our animals froze into vapor as we continued climbing to the top of the range, beyond which lay the homeland of the Afridis.

  After traveling for a mile or so, one of the guides slipped away for a while, anxious about any danger lurking along the trail ahead. We took more than two hours, by my reckoning, to reach the top of the last ridge. Shortly after we started, the previous day’s pain returned and I had to rest frequently until my breathing became less labored and my leg muscles relaxed somewhat. Whenever we halted, my companions made obvious efforts to make me feel less embarrassed than I did, courteously pretending that they, too, needed the rest. At these times, Hamesh Gul, who was an Afridi himself, would move a little ahead and sit hunched over his rifle while the other, the man who called himself Tor Baz, would remain with me, sometimes tending to my blisters, sometimes giving me a few gulps of water out of the goatskin bag tied on to one of the mules. They could not, hard as they tried, hide their nervousness at these halts.

  While we walked, Hamesh Gul talked to me about his people, the Afridis. When he talked of them, he didn’t speak of them as just one of the many tribes living in this harsh borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was a total assurance in his voice, and a belief that the Afridis were the only people who mattered. The other tribes merely provided the setting for the Afridi jewel to shine and display its brilliance. I had expected an angry denial from our other companion, but to my surprise, I found Tor Baz agreeing with Hamesh Gul.

  He explained the ancient division of the tribe into the eight famous clans, each proud and independent. Occasionally, when the need arose, they joined together in various combinations to act in concert. He spoke with pride of the tribe’s fights with the British, out of which they had emerged with honor and, at the same time, with respect and affection for their adversaries. Interspersed with this detailed account—some of it extremely confusing to me—were descriptions of a few tribal raids on the city people. The Afridis, he claimed, with a perceptible squaring of his shoulders, had regularly raided Peshawar, and the very name of their tribe had inspired terror in this large city, whose traders had made it one of the richest in Central Asia. He claimed that his tribe had denied passage to all the conquerors of the Indian subcontinent through the famous Khyber Pass, permitting the raiders through only after they had paid for the privilege in cash.

  When I reached the crest of the last hilltop, my companions were waiting for me. They had moved away from the track to a small bald patch that lay amid thick pine forests for miles around.

  The sun had come out about half an hour before. It was still weak, but the sunshine was gradually driving out the effects of last night’s drizzle from our bodies and from the foliage around us. With the rising sun, my sores and bug bites, mementos of my host’s quilt of the previous evening, started itching furiously.

  I stood on a flat rock and watched the panorama that stretched out before me. There, resting like a saucer-shaped depression within the ring of dark, forbidding mountains, was Maidan, the heart of Tirah, the land of a quarter of a million or more Afridis. Standing at this height, one could look over its entire expanse, about fifty square miles of it. It seemed from this distance like a neat patchwork quilt of green colors interspersed with tiny stones and mud houses, each with a tower.

  “And there”—Hamesh Gul pointed at a sparkle of lights from a tin roof right in the center of the depression—“that is Bagh—our capital.”

  I was home at last. The tenuous link that had been created by my dead father and nurtured all these years by my memory of his lonely and sad living years had finally brought me to the land of his people.

  “I am an Afridi, too, you know,” I told Hamesh Gul.

  “Where from?” he inquired.

  “From the Upper Qamber Khels,” I replied, and explained my background to him.

  “If you have remained away for all these years, your cousins must have captured your fields. I hope they do not find your return irksome. Shall we start out now?”

  The word “cousin” in my father’s language meant both a family relationship and one’s bitter enemy. If I had thought to impress him with the romance in the story, I had failed. His matter-of-fact acceptance of the reasons for my journey nettled me. Perhaps to him, there was nothing strange about an Afridi—even a half-Afridi—visiting his homeland. Perhaps such a compulsion was to be taken for granted. I half began to understand the intensity of feeling that had rent my father’s heart at his inability to move back among his peo
ple.

  “Yes, I am ready to move now,” I told my companions. Tor Baz hit the front mule with a switch, and we started on our downward journey. It was quite a relief to be traveling downhill; my legs, which had been silently protesting at going uphill, now suddenly felt relaxed at this unexpected relief. I was also helped considerably by a thick staff that Tor Baz had fashioned for me out of an oak sapling. With walking becoming easier, I found it possible to take greater interest in the surroundings than I had done in the last two days.

  The day had finally dawned. Soon we were meeting groups of people. A few girls walked past with water pitchers on their heads to fetch water from some spring, perhaps miles away. They would make at least three trips during the day to get water for their menfolk, and yet find it within themselves to make another trip to refill the wayside casks that provided water for travelers. They were talking brightly among themselves, but their chatter fell silent as they approached the party of strangers. In this land where imputation of immorality meant certain death, both men and women were careful.

  We saw a long string of ponies winding their way at a lower level; they had been loaded with fine timber. Some were loaded with hand-cut logs, but mostly they transported trunks of young pine trees stripped of their bark, to be sold in the cities for the frames of string cots.

  The track wound its way over bare outcrops of rock. While still descending, we came across many and various signs of human habitation. We met parties of firewood collectors. These were usually small bands of women and girls who moved exceedingly fast so they could reach and occupy the best sites before the others did. The matrons walked in front, while the very young girls—some of them hardly eight or nine years old—skipped along in the rear. Apart from carrying cutting tools, each had her own water bottle (usually an old army issue) and a small inconspicuous bundle, which contained the day’s food. They rushed past us almost in a flash, without sparing even a glance for any of us. They appeared completely absorbed by their immediate quest—to seek out and establish themselves in favorable grounds before the rush began.