“There is nothing left of us in the wilderness save what the wilderness kept for itself.”— Mahmoud Darwish

HERE are some facts: Jamil Ahmad is a Pakistani writer and a former civil servant. He has written a book of fiction set in the tribal areas. His age is 78. This is his first book.

Now stretch these over one thousand words and you have a fairly good idea what is being said in about The Wandering Falcon in the South Asian literary community. I have yet to come across a review that treats it as a work of fiction and raises questions that are usually asked of fiction: plot, narrative techniques, characters, voice, etcetera. Most reviews seem to be revelling in the apparently astonishing fact that somebody has written something at age 78, while the rest make you think that this book is trying to wrestle with questions like: why are people in tribal areas going over to the Taliban, why are they this way, and well, how are they anyway, and why don’t we know anything about them in the first place — and like, why aren’t they on TV?

You know it’s that old tosh, looking to fiction for factual information. But the scale on which it is happening in this case is alarming. One interviewer at CNN-IBN asks Jamil Ahmad a total of eight questions and only one references the word ‘literature.’ It’s the last question of the interview: You’ve made this fabulous literary debut at 78! Was it a difficult process?

Among her other, more ‘normal’ questions, was this one: Your reaction to the killing of Osama bin Laden?

Umm… how about your reaction to the word ‘fiction’?

But there you have it. Fiction from Pakistan is not supposed to have artistic engagements — it’s required to provide information not an experience. In other words, it must be a reliable Dispatch from the Terrorists Lair and have clear policy implications for all the experts on Pakistan to evaluate — and who isn’t an Af-Pak guru these days?

IF you trust the description on the book jacket, this is a ‘novel’ about the character, Tor Baz — the wandering falcon, the roving figure whose story we must pursue. As it turns out, he’s only a marginal presence in what are nine distinct short stories, and he serves as little more than a device to bring a sense of unity to the stories. The device does not fail but it doesn’t succeed spectacularly either, since Tor Baz remains a minor character in the stories and his reappearance in various stories is rarely a significant event. For this reason, it would be much more accurate to call this work a collection of interconnected stories (i.e. standalone stories with recurring actors, settings, motifs, etcetera) rather than a novel, which usually requires much greater narrative oherence and thrust.

The subdued-starring role in this collection of nine stories is played by the physical setting itself: the wildernesses and the inaccessible hills and mountains of Balochistan and the Pak-Afghan tribal belt. This harsh and ruthless landscape recurs throughout the stories and serves as one of the more effective ways to link them. It is also the second strongest character in the book.

The strongest character however is the dreadful Mullah Barrerai — the charismatic preacher, wheeler dealer, a man-eater (yes, that’s for real), conflict resolver, a devoted agent of dancing girls, a loyal friend to strangers, but ultimately, he’s a chameleon and a wanderer. He’s a surprisingly refreshing character who derives much of his appeal through his seemingly motiveless malice and kindness. He hovers large in the readers’ imaginations because there is so little to either explain his actions or predict his behavior — yet he’s a compelling presence on the page. Here he is delivering a sermon, describing the houris of paradise to a rapt audience: “Wondrous, fair, and who possess breasts which are beyond your imagination. Breasts so large that it would take a crow a full day and night to fly from one nipple to another.” He is later asked by an officer of the Scouts if he believes this tall tale himself; he replies without blinking: “No” and goes on to argue that these stories are like “ointment, meant for healing, or like a piece of ice in the summer with which water in a glass is cooled. Would you call that piece of ice a lie?” The account of his life results in the most affecting and disturbing story of the collection.

But the real star of the stories is “The Sins of the Mother,” which was also one of the highlights of Granta’s Pakistan issue. It is a love and survival story of an eloped couple that’s trying to evade killing/capture by their tribe. They find refuge in a government fort that houses soldiers where they find cautious solace for a few years but their sins gradually catch up with them. This story is by far the finest in the collection for its narrative control, patient descriptions, and the gradual building of tension and emotion. It climaxes in a coldly executed scene of brutal killing which is remarkable for its unsentimental rendering and shows the deft hand of a real storyteller.

Another shocking and finely executed scene occurs in “The Death of Camels,” where the caravans of nomads, the Pawindahs, are shot down by soldiers for trying to cross over to the Pakistani side of the border. In this story we get close to the travails of this nomadic tribe and their mode of living. Among the many highlights of this story are surprising moments of sharp humor — when a Pawindah woman, for instance, insults a soldier for staring at her: “You there! Do you not know that you are smaller than my husband’s organ?” The story ends with us being witnesses to the massacre of the Pawindah caravans — “mowed” is the cold, precise verb that the author uses. But the story of the massacre doesn’t end there: once killed, the corpses then begin to stink, following which, we get this inspired moment: “The soldiers from the forts had to move out two days after the Pawindahs departed. The stench from the dead animals was so terrible that it was driving the soldiers mad. They also say that while camel bones and skulls have been bleached white with time, the shale gorge still reeks of death.”

These final lines also reflect the overarching conflict of this book: the state vs. everybody else. And the state always wins — even when it loses sometimes.

HAVING said this, The Wandering Falcon is also a catalog of missed opportunities. However, its shortcomings are not so much in its writing as in its editing. The running cracks in the stories stem from a steady presence of needless adverbs and adjectives (the travellers talk “brightly”; the old woman retorts “savagely”; the beard “ripples”; the trickle of water is “thin”), tired, unimaginative similes and metaphors (an old man’s voice is “clear and sharp like the sound of plucked strings from a musical instrument”; the movement of the camel “swayed smoothly like the ears of wild grass sway smoothly with a light breeze”), or the plain dead commentary which is present in abundance and is the main distraction from the stories. There are digressions here on writ of the state, citizenship, civilisation, and ways of life of the nomads, on the geography of Lower Chitral, on the Pakistani media for not faithfully reporting the plight of the Baloch, and then some.

It’s not just the quality of prose that suffers as the collection wears on but also the quality of narration. Scenes are replaced with long expositions that deal summarily with potentially rich material. In the last story, for instance, a girl Shah Zarina is married off to a man who owns a bear and earns his living by its performances. Shah Zarina envies the bear for earning much greater fraction of her husband’s affections, time and care, and so, finally, one day she questions his reasons for allowing the bear to have a room of its own when they must sleep outside. He tells her flatly: “I can get another wife but not another bear.”

Zarina schemes to hurt the animal — she spices up its food and spikes the staff with nails which is used by her husband to smack the bear. She’s found out soon enough for this. As retribution, her husband gives her the exact number of blows with the spiked staff as he had given the bear earlier. He also ensures thereon that she receives the same food as the bear, the same bedding and much the same treatment otherwise.

Here is material of terrific possibilities, but all it receives is a hasty exposition of about three pages. The story then skips over to other things. The patient and meticulous hand we see in the first story is entirely absent here, and in other later stories.

To be sure, there is a better book buried somewhere beneath this present book.

Nonetheless, there is much here to recommend itself to a reader who is willing to read it as fiction and not as a Manual of Tribal Ways of Life.

In the pantheon of the new writers from Pakistan, Jamil Ahmad is a welcome new addition.

The reviewer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

The Wandering Falcon (NOVEL) By Jamil Ahmad Penguin Books, India ISBN 9780670085330 256pp. Rs795