The Progress of the Nomads
Anna Badkhen is the author of Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories and Waiting for the Taliban, now available in paperback.
Jan 03, 2012
By Anna Badkhen
The Wandering Falcon
By Jamil Ahmad
Riverhead Books; Pp 243, $25.95
The riders advanced at a four-beat gait on an unpaved track that bisected swatches of hilly farmland. Flint jingled under their donkeys' hoofs. The tiny mirrors sewn into the skullcaps of the men and the enormous homespun silk scarves of the women shimmered in the sun, reflecting fragments of their world: the cerulean fields of chicory, the emerald slopes of winter wheat, the quivering gold of Afghan road dust churned up by their procession and suspended between heaven and earth. Slightly to the riders' side, their sheep ambled along a narrow rim of shade where rowan trees drooped with the saccharine blossoms the women believed to be an aphrodisiac.
The dazzling caravan drew closer and I raised my notebook and pen in the universal plea for journalistic alms. The riders, both women and men, raised their hands in greeting. They did not slow down. They were Kuchi tribespeople: nomads who wander with the seasons between the vertiginous mountains of Afghanistan and the lowland pastures of Pakistan in a stately minuet of annual migration. They were not about to break their pace for me. They were not about to break their pace for anyone. They had been riding at this pace through this land, year after year, for centuries.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Wandering Falcon, Jamil Ahmad's marvel of a novel about the people who live along the border that divides Afghanistan and Pakistan, is its author's ability to maintain that pace. Ahmad unscrolls the unending sands and unyielding mountains of the herders' seasonal passage in a language as unhurried and precise as the sparse and iambic landscape they traverse. Here is a band of Baloch rebels steering their camels toward a water hole:
Patiently, they had skirted stretches of oily, ocher-coloured quicksand and had bravely pushed their animals through the bruising patches of camel-thorn bushes and burning salt flats.
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Jan 03, 2012
By Anna Badkhen
The Wandering Falcon
By Jamil Ahmad
Riverhead Books; Pp 243, $25.95
The riders advanced at a four-beat gait on an unpaved track that bisected swatches of hilly farmland. Flint jingled under their donkeys' hoofs. The tiny mirrors sewn into the skullcaps of the men and the enormous homespun silk scarves of the women shimmered in the sun, reflecting fragments of their world: the cerulean fields of chicory, the emerald slopes of winter wheat, the quivering gold of Afghan road dust churned up by their procession and suspended between heaven and earth. Slightly to the riders' side, their sheep ambled along a narrow rim of shade where rowan trees drooped with the saccharine blossoms the women believed to be an aphrodisiac.
The dazzling caravan drew closer and I raised my notebook and pen in the universal plea for journalistic alms. The riders, both women and men, raised their hands in greeting. They did not slow down. They were Kuchi tribespeople: nomads who wander with the seasons between the vertiginous mountains of Afghanistan and the lowland pastures of Pakistan in a stately minuet of annual migration. They were not about to break their pace for me. They were not about to break their pace for anyone. They had been riding at this pace through this land, year after year, for centuries.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Wandering Falcon, Jamil Ahmad's marvel of a novel about the people who live along the border that divides Afghanistan and Pakistan, is its author's ability to maintain that pace. Ahmad unscrolls the unending sands and unyielding mountains of the herders' seasonal passage in a language as unhurried and precise as the sparse and iambic landscape they traverse. Here is a band of Baloch rebels steering their camels toward a water hole:
Patiently, they had skirted stretches of oily, ocher-coloured quicksand and had bravely pushed their animals through the bruising patches of camel-thorn bushes and burning salt flats.
Read More