The Wandering Falcon (14 page)

Tor Baz stood close to me. Whenever small groups would pass by, he would whisper in my ear. “That is a neighboring tribe, the Para Chamkanis,” he would say. “Have you seen the leggings they are wearing?” Or, “See, those are the Orakzais. I wonder what brings them here. They have their own Bagh.”

Then he pointed out a group of bearded men walking past. “There you see some Hindus. They are not allowed by the Afridis to wear white turbans, so they wear colored ones.”

He reeled off name after name of the tribes, and of the Afridi clans. There were so many names that they confused me, and after a while I stopped making an effort to remember them. I suddenly began to feel very cold and shivery.

Hamesh Gul, who had been silent for most of the morning, turned to me as my bandaging was completed. “I must go back to Mehboob Khan's house after the Friday prayers. I am to take the mullah with me.”

I kept silent. “When are you coming back?” asked Tor Baz.

“Tomorrow, perhaps. After the funeral is over.”

“Whose funeral?” I inquired.

“Mehboob Khan's. He died during the night.”

“Mehboob Khan is dead?” I repeated incredulously. “Why was I not told?”

“Yes, he is dead. His sons did not wish you to be disturbed. A man that is born must die, and only he who dies without sons dies unhappy. I shall be back tomorrow, if God wills.”

“I shall remain with him,” Tor Baz told Hamesh Gul.

My shivering was worse now, and my attendants noticed my discomfort with some worry. They insisted we proceed straight to the shrine that Tor Baz had mentioned, and said that my food would be brought there.

The pain became much worse, and I had to walk with the support of my two companions. We passed the main mosque, where a crowd was already collecting for prayers, and we entered the shrine next to it. My companions prayed briefly at the graves and tasted a pinch of salt each before coming back to me. One of them touched my temples and turned to the other.

“He is burning with fever.”

“He will not see the flags raised,” said the other.

My shivering did not stop, and I felt ashamed of it. Whenever I opened my eyes, I faced two truck headlights that some devotee had embedded in the cemented grave of the holy man who lay buried here. Sometimes one headlight looked bigger than the other, but I could not keep my eyes open long enough to judge whether one was really bigger than the other.

Out of the darkness that was creeping around me, I heard a crescendo of noise, and I knew that the flags had been raised. I had not been able to see them, but perhaps I would one day. Later, some sounds woke me. I still could not open my eyes, but I could hear a number of people standing and talking around the corner from the room where I was lying. I could not understand most of what was being said, as all the voices seemed to blend into one loud wave of sound. Furious voices were accusing someone of having brought me, a foreigner and an infidel, here and having defiled their land. The crescendo waxed and waned around me. Among the voices, I suddenly heard the voice of Tor Baz.

“Why are you worried about this poor man?” he asked. “Can you not see that he is dying?”

On the leeward side
of a high boulder, an old gaunt man sat, warming himself over a low peat fire. He had been sitting patiently for the last few hours, protected by the boulder from the icy blasts of wind that portend the advent of winter in Upper Chitral. The wind came rushing in and out of the crevice and around the corners, splattering gravel and small sharp stones against his refuge, making Sher Beg huddle closer to the smoky fire.

Occasionally, he would gather his long white beard in his left hand, bend down, and blow into the smoke until his eyes streamed. Sher Beg was tall, as most of the men of this area were. He would have been handsome even in his old age but for his neck, which was swollen to a grotesque size because of goiter. Fresh raw goatskin strapped to his legs with leather thongs provided a contradiction to the rest of him—an incredible old man with ragged clothes and a hopeless and tired look in his eyes.

Upper Chitral is a land of stone. Wherever you look, the landscape is full of stone. There is a variety of forms, of color and weathering, but there is nothing but stones. In size, they range from small grains of sand to giants as tall as two-storied buildings. Stones in one way or another occupy the thoughts of men in this area, and Sher Beg's thoughts, too, were flitting from one mountaintop to another. There lay the mountain in whose shadow he had been born, lived most of his life, married, begotten children. He would also die there. All around him were the crags where he had grazed his animals, and peaks he had climbed in his early years.

Further distant were the massifs that had provided him with a livelihood in his youth. The backdrop to this panorama was the biggest mountain of them all—the giant Tirich Mir.

The major part of Sher Beg's life had centered on Tirich Mir. He had grown to manhood on its slopes, progressed to head porter after a few expeditions, and was accepted as the key guide year after year. During all these years, Tirich Mir provided him with fodder for his body and for his pride. The climbing seasons were short, but even during the long periods of inactivity, he had dreamed about the giant—planning the routes, the camps, the loads; deciding who to weed out from his teams of porters and who to employ in his stead.

Oh, those were grand years, indeed. When he was not climbing, other men pointed him out to one another and spoke of him as the Tiger. He remembered how his heart had swelled with pride when his wife had insisted on naming their newborn daughter Sherakai—the Tiger's Daughter. A man is lucky if he has one such year. He was truly favored by God for having so many of them.

Year after year, the climbers came. They would vie with one another for Sher Beg's help. He would lead them—young men, middle-aged men, and old ones. He would bring them back, their sometimes torn, bruised, and crippled bodies, and see them off only to welcome them back the next year. After each attempt, it was he who distributed any surplus supplies and clothing among the villagers. Boys and girls, women and men, came to him for the castoffs. They were glorious years. How quickly had they passed.

One year the summit of Tirich Mir was finally conquered. Sher Beg didn't realize what it meant at first. In fact, he celebrated along with the rest of the expedition and was bursting with happiness at the achievement. It was only when he found employment difficult the next year and impossible the year after that he truly understood what had happened. It was not Tirich Mir that had been defeated. It had been his defeat.

A sound interrupted Sher Beg's reverie. A noise that would have gone unnoticed among the moaning and sighing of the wind if he hadn't been waiting for it for the last few hours. The familiar cackle of the bird. Very slowly, he got up and carefully unstrapped the small crossbow hanging over his shoulders. Taking a small pebble from his mouth, he fitted it into the pouch.

He moved slowly and silently, step-by-step, and peered around the corner. A plump brown bird was sitting on an outcrop a few yards away. The old man lifted his crossbow and took careful aim.

The small pebble hit the rock on which the bird was sitting and shattered itself into small fragments. The brown bird rocketed up in the air and whirred toward the hillside. Its sudden passage frightened a herd of ibex that had been sunning themselves in a mountain cleft. They scampered up the hillside in mincing steps toward higher ground, accompanied by the small tinkling sounds of stones dislodged by their feet.

The hunter returned wearily to the fire and started gathering it in an old tin can that he always carried with him. He was still bent over the fire when the earth started trembling and shaking. Softly, the man cried while he waited for the tremors to subside. He had not tasted meat for two seasons now.

Walking toward the next ridge, Sher Beg turned his thoughts again to Tirich Mir. Yes, he nodded to himself, everything had turned to ashes with the conquest of Tirich Mir. Suddenly, the same villagers who had almost worshipped him ignored him and appeared to look through him when he passed by. Since he could not get his livelihood from mountain climbing any longer, food became more and more difficult to find. His family, who had once walked about with pride, began to feel like hunted animals as the vengeance of the villagers turned against them. A time came when Sher Beg could no longer bear it, and he left his village and family and went away to the plains.

Oh, he remembered now what had happened to Sherakai, the Tiger's Daughter. He had sold her to somebody before he left, for a pound of opium and a hundred rupees.

He spent a number of years in the plains—how many, he could not remember, but it was a long time before he came back. Hard as he tried, he could not live without the mountains. He could not die anywhere else.

On his return, he found his wife faithfully looking after the small patch of land he owned. She was alone. He never dared to ask her about the children in case she was reminded of his failure to provide for them. It was strange, he mused, that he could not remember the names of any of his children other than Sherakai—the one that by rights he should have forgotten.

 

 

I
n Lower Chitral, it had been raining intermittently for the last two days. Gusts of high winds had raged over the mountaintops, breaking the tall pines as they dipped into the defiles. Sometimes they drove the rain clouds toward one valley; now they scattered them, once again bunched them, and drove them to another valley. Winter was coming early this year, and the mountain people were all wondering whether to risk staying for a few weeks longer in their huts in the hope that the pass would remain open or to start moving with their goods, children, and animals on their three-hundred-mile annual journey to the plains. Some of the families, deciding to play it safe, had already started preparations for the move.

In one of the huts three-quarters of the way up a mountain in Chitral, a couple lay in each other's arms. Their youngest child lay at the foot of the string bed. The other two children, both girls, and the mother-in-law occupied the second of the two rooms, which they shared with the chickens during the night. The woman was short and stocky, even by the standards of her tribe. She looked older than her twenty-two years. However, she was full of energy and strength, and the decision to move had caused her no more than the usual worry. It had to be done, and what did it matter if they set off now rather than in a few more weeks?

She never considered herself anything other than lucky at being where she was. At one time, when she was eight years of age, she had lost all hope. That was when her father had sold her for a pound of opium and a hundred rupees to a local prince.

It had taken her mother another year to save the money to buy her back, and still the prince had refused to let her go. She could even now feel the terror when, at her mother's pleading to spare her child, her owner had laughed coarsely and said, “A child? She is a Sherakai. I assure you if she can accept a small finger, she will find no difficulty in accepting a man's organ.” It had taken prayers, pleadings, and luck—not to speak of her mother's savings—to secure her return, and that, too, not before her master had made an attempt to prove his boast before he lost her. He had failed but mercifully had not damaged her seriously.

Her mother had managed to get her married three years later, and her husband had nursed her carefully for two seasons before taking her to bed, and she had enjoyed his hidden fire. Looking at him, she would never have thought that his bearded, glowering visage could hide so much passion and gentleness. This night, he had woken up again and again, seemingly unsated. She guessed rightly that the thought of not being able to sleep close to each other for the next few months—the duration of their journey—was making him indulge to excess even at the cost of tiring himself for the hard work that had to precede the start of the excursion.

While she lay awake, she planned the loads for each child. The youngest would, of course, have to be carried on her husband's back. Although the girl was five years old, she was too weak to manage the fifteen-mile-a-day stages. Perhaps they should let her walk for a few miles each day, to test her legs and see how soon she would be able to join her sisters in sharing their responsibilities.

She got up together with her husband after a silent agreement to make the most of the early hours of the morning. As she rose, she looked affectionately into the other room, where the older girls were sleeping in sacks, and prayed silently that her mother-in-law's insidious comments on her inability to produce sons would not influence her husband.

These three children were all that had survived out of the five she had given birth to. On the mountain, the survival of the mother and child depended entirely on nature. The timing had to be just right so that the mother did not have to carry the child on the journey during the last days of pregnancy. Most of the children that survived were born immediately on their return to the highlands. If they were born too late, they again found it difficult to survive the downward journey in infancy.

She tried to remember how many of her brothers and sisters had lived. Probably, it was two sisters and three brothers, or was it the other way around? She wondered where they were—dead or alive. Even their names eluded her. Her husband had once talked about a brother of his who, he had heard, was employed in the president's house at Rawalpindi. He had tried to see him once but could not gain admission. That was before their marriage. He had then spent the evening wandering about the town and had picked up the old matchlock gun he liked to carry with him on their travels. She never remembered its having been fired.