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THE Baluch were asked by a clerk to swear an oath by Koran that they would tell only the truth. Curious, they thought: "They swear by a book, while we swear by our chief — the Sirdar of our tribe." The disconnection between their lifestyle and bureaucracy introduced by the British Raj could not have been more sharp. This was to be their first, and last, encounter with it. They were hung soon after.
Venturing into a sandstorm is an act of courage, nay desperation. A sandstorm brings to a border post illicit lovers who are given shelter. They spend years at the border fort, even as one Subedar’s tenure ends and another’s begins. They have a son, the protagonist, Tor Baz or black falcon. The family elks out a bare existence, and seeking protection of the people at the fort, but after six years of so, they are told to leave the safety of the outpost. Once outside, they are traced by a party that had set out after them, comprising the woman’s father and her estranged husband. The meeting ends in bloodshed, as anyone who knows the frontier could have predicted. Over a decade ago, a woman was killed in Pakistani court by her brother who sought to avenge the dishonour caused to the family by her daring to marry someone of her own choice. A visiting Pakistani Brigadier, who was proud that the then ruler of Afghanistan was from his tribe, held forth not on the horror of the act but on the inefficiency and bumbling by the people of a rival tribe, who the assailants and victim belonged to, by not finishing the job where it would not have attracted attention. The author is a former Pakistani bureaucrat who has served in mainly in the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. It’s a tricky area to work in and entails a thorough knowledge of the tribes, their laws, peccadilloes, and requires a deft touch, negotiation skills and lots of patience. His personal knowledge of the area and its people comes in every part of the book. An amusing incident in which a young assistant commissioner seeks to negotiate the release of a party of schoolteachers from tribesmen, but is bettered by the elder of the tribe, illustrates what is expected of officers in this area, and what they can expect from the people they are expected to administer. A man’s word is all that it takes to seal a deal. A sirdar is accepted and his word becomes the law for the entire tribe. Yet, for the sirdar, the loneliness of the pre-eminent position and the responsibility it entails. Early in the book, we come across the clash of tribesmen and the establishment, represented by the army in the border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The nomadic tribes see no border as they seek grazing lands for their animals; Pakistani authorities seek to establish their authority on their land. Tribes led by people like Dawa Khan, who did not adequately read the changes and what they entailed, are badly mauled, while those who adapt, survive. Women have to constantly adapt for their survival, since they have no rights. After Shah Zarina’s father accepts bride money for her, she has to get used to a lifestyle in which her husband would rent a room at the outskirts of a town. His performing bear gets the room at night and she would have it during the say, while the man and his bear earned money for the family. With cold logic the man informs her: "I can get another wife, but not another bear." The protagonist Tor Baz flits in and out of various episodes. A child born of adversity, he adapts to the world around him. Often an ungrateful survivor, he meets interesting people who care for him, and those who exploit him. He becomes a police informer, a guide, and even a potential pimp as he buys Shah Zarina. We try to understand what life would be like for a man like him, and just manage get some hints, just as this great story of tribesmen and their culture leaves us longing for more. The author tale is made more powerful because of the felt experiences and simplicity of expression that impels us to read it in one go.
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Sandstorms obliterate much
as wind swirls around and people caught in them hunker down. When they
die down, they can reveal what was, till then, below the surface. So
does The Wandering Falcon, a raw tale, set in the mid-1920s, of
the areas that have shown tremendous resistance to the imposition of any
order other than one that has evolved in that milieu over millennia, its
own code of honour.