The Wandering Falcon (4 page)

He paused for a while and then went on again: “But I also heard another thing, which you do not know. This same Baluch told me that the officers have offered a safe conduct for us to hold parleys with them, so as to end our quarrel.”

Jangu took out a soiled printed paper from within his shirt and carefully opened its folds. “On this paper is written the invitation and the safe conduct. Copies of this have been sent to many people.”

None of the men could read or write, but each looked at the paper carefully and with seeming deliberation before passing it on to the next person.

The boy had been sleeping fretfully after his meal. As the talk drew toward its conclusion, he awoke and heard them decide to head to the headquarters of the authorities to discuss the terms of the safe conduct. They had agreed that their willingness to talk would not compromise their honor in any way.

 

 

O
n the evening of the third day, the Baluch led their camels into the town. The boy, who possessed no shoes, remained perched on one of the animals. They stopped at the first large building they saw. What seemed to them a palace was in fact the local post office.

Jangu went up the steps to a man standing in the doorway and produced the worn-out leaflet.

“Read this—we have come for the talks,” he said.

The postmaster read the paper carefully. He looked at the men, excitement showing on his face. As he hurried to the telephone, he looked back and shouted, “Wait for the officers. They will be coming soon.”

The seven men, the boy, and the animals were taken to a large house. For the next two days, they were given their meals, but no one came to see them. Each one of them was impatient about the delay but carefully hid his feelings from the others.

The pervading silence of their land had taught their people to be deliberate in their actions and slow in responding to emotions. They observed, though, that a party of soldiers had been placed around the house. Even this they avoided discussing with one another—much less mentioning it to Roza Khan. Finally, after the fourth day, they received some visitors, who brought a Jeep for them. The Baluch were asked to leave their guns and camels behind. They were driven for a while, until the vehicle entered a closed area surrounded by thick mud walls. The Jeep stopped at one of the buildings within the compound.

The room that they entered was full of people. Some were sitting on chairs, and others on benches. People were talking, and the conversation did not stop with their entrance. The men moved toward a part of the room that was bare, took off their shoes, and started making themselves comfortable on the floor.

Harshly, they were asked to remain standing.
It is a strange custom of these people,
they thought to themselves,
when one part stands and the others sit.
They were asked to swear an oath on the Koran that they would tell only the truth. This made them even more curious.
They swear by a book, while we swear by our chief—the sardar of our tribe.

All the while, around them, the air remained thick with talk and laughter.

Then the charges were read out to them. They had killed two army officers. “If proven guilty, you could die,” they were told by a man sitting at a table on the other side of the room.

“Oh, no,” Roza Khan protested. “We came for talks.” He waved the paper in the direction of the voice that had addressed him. “Read this,” he said.

“I know this paper,” said the other man. “It is of no value. It carries no signature.”

“Sardar, you speak for us,” said Jangu, who was standing beside him. The others concurred in murmurs.

“Well, then I speak also for six of my companions.”

“Seven,” the boy interrupted.

“Seven,” said Roza Khan. “I speak as their sardar, and I say that a word does not require a signature, nor a mark, nor yet an oath. The word was offered, and we took it.”

“Do I have to write all that is being said?” asked the clerk petulantly.

“No,” replied the magistrate. “Write only the things of importance. Thus far nothing has been said that needs to be written. You may merely say that the charges were read out and explained and the accused pleaded guilty.”

“This is not what I said. Men were killed. Many men, not merely the two you speak of. Ours and yours. When my brother tribe was told that they would have a sardar no longer, could any man suffer such an insult? Has there ever been a Baluch who did not have a sardar?” Roza Khan fell silent.

“Have you more to say?”

“What shall I record?” asked the clerk again.

“I am wondering,” said Roza Khan, “how to explain to you what a sardar is. If people in this room could be silent, thoughts shall come easier to me. We Baluch are used to the silence of the desert,” he apologized handsomely, “and are not as clever as you.”

The room fell silent. After a while, Roza Khan spoke again.

“I do not know what you would make of this tale, but it is said that each man needs a sardar, seeks and finds one for himself—a Baluch more than others. The story goes that Adam was the first Baluch on this earth. When he found that he was alone and there was none besides him, he was so desolate that he created one in his mind and called him Allah, thus making a sardar for himself.”

The lines around Roza Khan's milky eyes etched themselves sharply as he came to the end of the story.

The boy looked toward Roza Khan. “It is a beautiful story, Sardar, but they are not writing it down.”

“No, nothing has been written down so far,” agreed the magistrate. “Fables have no use here. They are not evidence. Can a fable explain a death? Say something about the men who have died. How did they die?”

“All right.” Roza Khan's voice suddenly seemed stronger than before. “I shall tell you something which you may like to write down. There has been killing, not a few men but many. I led my tribe into it. I killed men myself. My final crime has been that I have led my tribe into this last folly. I asked them to join these parleys. This terrible wrong and this misjudgment have all been mine—”

“No,” the magistrate interrupted him. “That no man can accept.” He added the final ignominy: “For a blind man to claim that he killed, or that he was the leader, is an act of pride that has no substance.” He turned toward the clerk. “Write down in the record that the accused admitted to the killings.”

Before the evening lamps had been lit, the trial was over. The clerks had started to tie up the files and close the cupboards. They wanted to leave for their homes as soon as the sentence was passed.

The magistrate turned to the clerk. “Show in the record that only seven men were tried, and they pleaded guilty. Let the child go.” He then passed the sentence of death and asked the staff to drop off the boy in the town on their way home.

 

 

T
here was complete and total silence about the Baluch, their cause, their lives, and their deaths. No newspaper editor risked punishment on their behalf. Typically, Pakistani journalists sought salve for their conscience by writing about the wrongs done to men in South Africa, in Indonesia, in Palestine, and in the Philippines—not to their own people. No politician risked imprisonment: they would continue to talk of the rights of the individual, the dignity of man, the exploitation of the poor, but they would not expose the wrong being done outside their front door. No bureaucrat risked dismissal. He would continue to flatter his conscience through the power he could display over inconsequential subjects.

These men died a final and total death. They will live in no songs; no memorials will be raised to them. It is possible that with time, even their loved ones will lock them up in some closed recess of their minds. The terrible struggle for life makes it impossible for too much time to be wasted over thoughts for the dead.

What died with them was a part of the Baluch people themselves. A little of their spontaneity in offering affection, and something of their graciousness and trust. That, too, was tried and sentenced, and died with these seven men.

W
hen the subedar with the large mustache patrolled the town early in the morning, he recognized the small boy leaning impassively against the prison wall. The boy had been with the party of Baluch outlaws as they had walked proudly into the town. The subedar halted his patrol and walked up to the boy. “What are you going to do now?” he asked. “Your companions, they are all dead.”

“I do not know,” said the boy. Suddenly, he lifted his face. An eager look came into his eyes. “Can I go into the fort?” he asked, pointing toward the prison walls. The subedar looked closely at the boy to see if he was joking. Ghuncha Gul hated levity, but the boy was totally serious.

“No,” he said quietly. “At least not yet. I am leaving this town, and you will come with me. The place I am going to is far away, but you and I might like it.”

Ghuncha Gul ordered the patrol to start marching. He looked back and saw the boy following him.

He called himself
Sardar Karim Khan Kharot. By men of his tribe and all others, he was addressed as General. No man knew his age. If asked, he would grow reflective and say, “I know not. I can only say that I am in my third span. Two generations of men who roamed the earth with me have returned to their Maker, and I alone am left.”

His hair gave credence to his tale. Even his eyebrows and eyelashes looked like patches of freshly fallen snow clinging bravely to a cliff face. But then his energy and vitality seemed to belie his claim as he led his nomadic tribe, year after year, on their seasonal migration from the Afghan highlands in autumn and their return from Pakistan after the winter was over, in early spring.

He was a familiar figure in all the lands through which his tribe ever journeyed. With a faded purple-and-gold cloak over his shoulders, he always walked in the company of his youngest son, Naim Khan, who was approaching fifty. A replica of his father, with the same square shoulders and stocky figure but a jet-black beard, Naim Khan called himself Colonel, and as with his father, no man dared ask him where he had obtained his rank. Since it was difficult to imagine either the father or the son submitting to discipline, it was generally assumed that they had received these honorifics as well as the elder's purple cloak from some long-dead king. If his tribe knew the secret, they chose to keep it to themselves.

The Kharot tribe numbered about a million men, whose entire lives were spent in wandering with the seasons. In autumn, they would gather their flocks of sheep and herds of camels, fold up their woven woolen tents, and start moving. They spent the winter in the plains, restlessly moving from place to place as each opportunity to work came to an end. Sometimes they merely let their animals make the decisions for them. When the grazing was exhausted in one area, the animals forced them to move on to another site.

With the coming of spring they would start back to the highlands, their flocks heavy with fat and wool; the caravans loaded with food and provisions purchased out of the proceeds from work and trading; men, women, and children displaying bits of finery they had picked up in the plains. This way of life had endured for centuries, but it would not last forever. It constituted defiance to certain concepts, which the world was beginning to associate with civilization itself. Concepts such as statehood, citizenship, undivided loyalty to one state, settled life as opposed to nomadic life, and the writ of the state as opposed to tribal discipline.

The pressures were inexorable. One set of values, one way of life, had to die. In this clash, the state, as always, proved stronger than the individual. The new way of life triumphed over the old. The clash came about first in Soviet Russia. After a few years, the nomad died in both China and Iran.

By the autumn of 1958, with the British Empire dismantled and the once fluid international boundaries of high Asia becoming ever more rigid, both Pakistan and Afghanistan challenged the nomads. Restraints were imposed on the free movement of the Powindas, the “foot people.”

The Kharots started moving from the highlands in the usual manner. Each
kirri,
comprising about a hundred tents, each one a day's march behind another, each with its own leader, converged toward Kakar Khorasan, the point at which they always crossed the border. Each tent meant a family. A family denoted not only the man, his wives, and his children but also his dogs and a few chickens, which the women generally insisted on carrying along with them. The dogs were a special kind of mastiff, savage and massive. They had been bred over centuries, and were known as the Kuchi breed—the breed of the nomads.