by Jamil Ahmad
We crossed small flocks of animals—sheep and goats and sometimes a few cows. They were herded by young boys and girls, who also carried water bottles and food. Whenever they passed us, one of them would give a whack to the nearest animal—a gesture of defiance or bravado, perhaps in unconscious imitation of the grown-ups.
Soon fields began to appear. The first one was just a patch, hardly bigger than two beds placed end to end. It rested by itself, a lonely and pathetic spot of green among giant boulders and rocks. Its owner, whoever he was, for no house was in sight, had carefully constructed a high wall of stones around it to prevent years of hard work from being destroyed by a vagrant flood.
More fields came in sight, and also the first houses. Squat buildings with thick walls made out of small round boulders set in mud, half buried in the ground. No-nonsense houses without embellishments of any sort, meant for protection from the weather and designed to be defended against sudden assault.
It was midday, and we were still in the Kuki Khel area—belonging to the second-largest of the Afridi clans. Hamesh Gul, who was leading, turned us away from the main track.
“We shall go to my father-in-law’s house,” he explained. “The old man is a trusted malik of the government and is usually in Peshawar in Pakistan. His wife lives in the mountains.” Hamesh Gul had himself served the Afghanistan government and had received an allowance from them. It could as easily have been the other way around, as long as the other government was willing to pay for the privilege.
Soon we reached a house, and Hamesh Gul stood a short distance away, cupped his hands, and shouted, “Is anybody home in Amir Khan’s house?”
After a few moments, a face half showed itself in one of the slits in the wall that served as a window.
“Who is it, wanting to know?” a woman’s voice shouted back.
“It is I, Hamesh Gul, Amir Khan’s son-in-law.”
“Which daughter of mine have you married?” the disembodied voice called back skeptically.
“The one after the eldest. I have brought two guests.”
After a minute or two, the door was unlatched and an old woman beckoned us inside. We tied the mules outside. As we entered, she caught Hamesh Gul by his sleeve.
“How is my daughter?” she asked.
“She is well,” he replied. “I will ask her to look you up.”
It was not until later that I came to know that Hamesh Gul had never visited his in-laws, nor had the old woman seen her daughter after the marriage. That was now more than twenty years ago.
The old woman shuffled about inside, making preparations for her guests. It had required no offer on her part, and no polite demureness on ours, for her to start preparing food. There were no shops and no restaurants, and any travelers—even strangers—had to be fed.
While the food was being prepared, Hamesh Gul talked about the clan he had married into. The Kuki Khels were the second-largest of the eight clans. Law-abiding and peaceful, their greatest moment had been when their chief had been recognized as the chief of all the Afridis by the British. Their second venture into prominence had also come through the same family, when one of the sons had raised the standard of revolt against the Pakistani government. As a result, their castle (we were to see this imposing structure later) had been bombed by the Pakistani air force, and there it stood to this day—a blackened empty shell. The son had obstinately argued that since the government had damaged the building, it was for them to repair it.
As the old woman brought in the food—some coarse millet loaves, a chicken cooked with lentils, and a jug of sour buttermilk—Hamesh Gul turned to her and said, “Can we have some walnuts and corncobs to eat on the way?”
The old woman’s distress and anger were plain to us. Very reluctantly, she went away to fetch them. Hamesh Gul gave a chuckle. “These Kuki Khels have the sweetest corn and walnuts in the world and hate parting with them,” he explained. “She cannot refuse them today, because that would be an insult to guests. I knew I would get some off her.” He chuckled deeply again, and Tor Baz joined in the mirth.
The food over, we took leave, Hamesh Gul tarrying a little, his bundle of corncobs and walnuts hanging over his shoulders. “I will send your daughter to you,” he promised. “Do you want to send some corncobs for her?”
“She should grow her own,” the old woman retorted savagely, and turned her back on us.
Hamesh Gul was still laughing when a rifle shot rang out. It hit the door that had just closed behind us. Within a minute, the old woman fired back defiantly from her house.
I had stopped in confusion. “Don’t worry,” said Hamesh Gul, continuing to laugh. “These two families have been feuding with each other for the last two generations. The men from both houses are away, but the old women let loose at each other once in a while.”
We now started hurrying toward our destination. Where our pace had been slow and leisurely for the last two days, Hamesh Gul insisted on our crossing into the Qamber Khel area before dusk so that he did not have to spend a night in alien territory. When the pace started telling on me, they simply placed me on one of the pack animals, fashioned two rough stirrups, and rushed along, almost without a pause. I could not understand the reason for their haste, but it was explained to me later.
Hamesh Gul’s mother-in-law had slipped him a word of warning that some trouble was expected between her clan and their neighbors; that the Kuki Khels might try to lay ambushes on the tracks leading through their area to deny passage to their enemies. Whenever this happened, movement between the two areas would be totally suspended until the elders or the mullahs of both tribes arrived at some agreement.
The boundary between the tribes was not marked in any way. But suddenly, in the middle of a path, while we were following a gushing stream, Hamesh Gul relaxed and became solicitous about my welfare. He insisted on my getting down and resting. He asked me to cup my hands and take a drink of water from a trickling spring. “The sweetest water in the world,” he said. He laughed and joked with two small boys fishing in midstream, and as a final sign of his relaxation, he picked some wild pomegranate flowers from a tree and stuck them carefully on his cap. He wished he could buy a transistor radio. “It makes one forget one’s tiredness,” he claimed.
“Of course, I could not have dared to mention it only ten years ago,” he said, and laughed. “The poor man who brought the first radio to Tirah was hauled up before the mullahs. His transistor was condemned, and a firing squad shot it to bits.”
Hamesh Gul left Tor Baz and me to walk at a slow pace and hurried ahead to make arrangements for the night’s lodging with “another father-in-law” of his. “We will enter Bagh tomorrow,” he told us before leaving. “It will be Friday, and the place will be extremely lively.”
After Hamesh Gul disappeared, we walked along quietly for a while, until the voice of Tor Baz interrupted my thoughts.
“Friend,” he spoke softly, “all this while, I have been wondering what makes a man like you, who has lived in a foreign land, seek out and visit this place and these people? After all, the only memory you have is your father’s. This land should have meant nothing to you, as you have not seen or lived in it before.”
“It is difficult to explain, Tor Baz,” I replied thoughtfully. “It is only a question of feeling, and reasons do not come into it. Let me put it this way: that without knowing my people and my father’s land, I have always felt that I did not truly know myself. I think in my place, you would do as I am doing.”
“Oh, no, not I!” He snorted derisively, with surprising intensity. “To me only a few things are important, and seeking out one’s past is of little consequence. What good comes of looking for it?”
I remained silent. Tor Baz spoke again: “I did not wish to hurt you,” he said reflectively. “It is not necessary that I should be right in this matter.”
After about one hour’s journey, we found Hamesh Gul waiting for us in the middle of the track. He was not alone. With him were
two very old men. Both were short and slight in build. Both carried almost identical walnut staffs in their hands, but there the resemblance ended. Old age had defeated the first one. His beard was completely white and rippled like a field of grass with the slightest movement of his head. His right hand, as he shook it with mine, was quivering with palsy, and even his skin had the dull look about it that marks a man moving close to death and being aware of it moment by moment. He was introduced to me by Hamesh Gul as his “second father-in-law.”
“You will not meet many of his kind nowadays,” Hamesh Gul told me with obvious pride. The old man heard this and accepted the tribute without any change in his expression. The other man was probably as old, but the fear of death was not upon him yet. His beard and mustache indicated regular care and had been dyed with henna. He was one of the ugliest old men I was to see in the area, but his energy and restlessness made him curiously interesting.
“I came down with my friend Mehboob only to greet you,” he said. “It is an honor for us to have eminent guests visit us.”
All the while his eyes kept flickering across me, over the animals, to Tor Baz—back and forth. He was madly curious about us. We started off in a single file, the pair of old men leading and Hamesh Gul following behind, after the mules. The path was very narrow, and for most of the distance it lay by the side of a dry ravine. It had suddenly become very dark, as the clouds had gathered overhead and were packing themselves together, seemingly resigned to preparing the daily evening shower for Maidan.
Before we reached Mehboob Khan’s house, a very fine drizzle had started. All of us opened our chaddars and wrapped them around ourselves, more as an instinctive gesture than as a conscious protection against being soaked.
The old men slowed down. They hopped over a low wall that I only sensed but did not see in the enveloping darkness. There was a muffled shout, and suddenly a door opened in the night, showing a pale light inside a room. We stepped into it. This was Mehboob Khan’s hujra—his living room, guest room, conference room, and men’s quarters combined into one.
It was a large, sprawling room, bigger than the hujras I had seen so far. There were more than a score of men of various ages sitting around—some squatting on the floor, thickly covered with dried rushes of reeds and grass, others reclining on the string cots scattered against the walls. The two oil lanterns in the room provided very poor light, and only in small pools. Large parts of the room were in shadow, and the feeble efforts of the oil lanterns were blanketed by the smoke streaming from large iron pans full of burning wood.
As we entered, the murmuring died down and the men froze for a moment. I can hardly remember the introductions. I recall only that about a third of the men present were introduced by Mehboob Khan as his sons, most as his nephews, and the rest as guests. I, too, was introduced as a guest and led to a string bed, over which a few pillows and cushions had been laid. Ghairat Gul, Mehboob Khan’s henna-bearded friend, followed me to the same cot. The men went back to doing what they had been doing before we arrived. There was the gurgle of a hookah, the clicking of knitting needles from a man who was making a shapeless sweater for himself, the rustling of rushes in one corner as another made himself more comfortable on the floor, and the room reverted to its old mood.
I took off my sandals and socks, and passed my hands over my sore feet. Some blisters had burst. These patches were raw, and blood had soaked my socks. Hamesh Gul and Mehboob Khan, who had gone inside the house, joined us again. Mehboob Khan shouted an order. Two young men got up from one corner and came toward me. One of them bent down and dragged away a large earthen pan from under my cot and moved it toward another corner. It was full of old, dirty-looking hand grenades. The other picked up one of the braziers by the edges and brought it nearer to my bed.
“Warm your feet over the fire,” ordered Mehboob Khan. “They should be washed and bound tonight.” He moved away to another cot, where a place had been made for him. Ghairat Gul remained where he was, warming his hands and feet, cracking his fingers with obvious enjoyment, and continuing his frank examination of me.
As my eyes grew used to the darkness, more and more of the room came into focus, and the people in the shadows started assuming clearer shape and identity. There was the knitter in the corner, clicking away without pause, a group of three men sitting a few paces away from him and passing the hookah around, a group of four sitting around the second fire pan, talking among themselves softly and passing a box of chewing tobacco around. The box had a mirror on the lid, which caught the light from the lamp and flung it back in mad dashes across the room. The rest had rearranged themselves near and around my brazier.
The gloom near the rafters was more difficult to penetrate, and try as I might, I could not make out the two massive objects hanging near the ceiling. Ghairat Gul caught me looking at them. “You know what they are?” he asked.
“No,” I replied after a while.
“They are parts of a plane which Mehboob Khan brought down about fifty years ago. Mehboob Khan and I searched the wreckage for days, but we could not find the special pistol which the pilots carried in those days,” he reminisced sadly.
“And every year in those fifty years, I tell you twenty times that I am not sure I brought down the plane.” Mehboob Khan’s voice was shaking with suppressed anger. “I only know that I fired at it and it dropped after some time. It could have been due to so many other things. We are not young men, Ghairat Gul,” he continued, “that we have to boast about things which we may not have done. We should be more than satisfied with what our share of life has been.”
“That is so. That is rightly so,” agreed Ghairat Gul. The room fell silent. Even the dog, which had been moving restlessly, whimpered to itself and lay down under one of the cots.
The two old men sat staring at the fire, frowning with concentration. I was watching Mehboob Khan. His face in profile did not look like an old man’s face. Even his hands had stopped their trembling and lay docilely in his lap. Suddenly, he broke out of his reverie and looked at me with recognition.
“I knew your father,” he said. “You should know it. We grew up together. Two youngest sons of two poor families. We drove our flocks together. We started working the fields at the same age. It was together that we made our first bold remarks at some girls and then hid together the rest of the day, worrying whether they would tell their fathers, who would come after us. We shared one gun together, an old matchlock—and we were together when I killed my first man with it. He was an enemy of my father’s, and I had crept after him as he was working in the field. When I was near enough, I lit the fuse and aimed the gun. The man saw this and started running. The gun took some time before it fired, and I started running after him, gun aimed at the fleeing figure. Your father found the sight very funny and stood there laughing until the gun finally went off and my father’s enemy fell.
“Get me that gun down from the rafters,” he told a boy sitting near his feet. The boy scrambled up and brought down an old matchlock with a long, heavy barrel and a thin curved butt. It was dark with age, and the wood below the barrel was splintered. The fuse in the hammer was missing.
“Our paths separated after that. Your father had always been restless. He went away one day without telling anyone and joined the army. I stayed on.”
He remained silent for some time. One of the young men moved from the corner and stirred the embers and blew them into small dancing flames. Mehboob Khan looked thoughtfully at the boy.
“Boy,” he said, “you are Abdul Malik’s son. Are you not?”
“Yes, Uncle,” the young man replied.
“It was your grandfather, child, who looked after me when I was your age. He was not a friendly man, and not many people knew him personally throughout Tirah and even beyond. His reputation was fearful. He was known as one who would be prepared to attempt anything, if only there was sufficient money involved. There were grim tales of how he had acted as a hired assassin in his youth, but in his o
ld age he had steadied and was getting more than enough money from supplying information and doing a few odd jobs for foreign governments.
“He was in touch with Afghanistan, with Turkey, with Belgium and Germany, and even with Russia and China. He was working for all of them, but they did not mind, as he was reliable and dependable in his own way. He must have heard of my circumstances, as he sent for me one day and asked me to do some work for him. It was a simple task, and he paid me when I carried it out. I must have pleased him, because gradually he entrusted more and more work to me, till I was working for him almost the whole time and was being allowed to make decisions on my own. In less than two years, I was a kind of overseer for him and was looking after the work myself.
“Boy, your grandfather died just before the First World War broke out. His spirit must indeed have been unhappy at leaving this world just when his services were needed most. Anyway, as soon as the war started, there was a heavy rush of work. I, too, had to make a choice of who among my various clients had to be treated as the most favored. Gradually, it somehow appeared to resolve itself, and I found myself working almost entirely for Afghanistan, Turkey, and Germany. They considered our area and our people as deserving real importance in those years, and were prepared to spend a lot of money to see that their interests were looked after properly.
“One day—I think it was the time when the war had run half its course—I received a very unusual message from my German contacts. They told me of a scheme which had been dreamed up back in their country to organize our entire tribe to fight against the British. Eight battle standards or flags, one for each of our clans, had been made in Germany, with suitable verses from the Holy Koran embroidered on them. The standards were being sent to us through Turkey and Afghanistan. I was to see that these battle standards were accepted with the honor due to them, and to ensure that each of the clans started using them as symbols against the British.
