Mesmerising and haunting at the same time. Jamil Ahmad's vivid storytelling is something we should have gotten more of, this being his only book, unfortunately.
While paying tribute to the peoples of the frontier regions of what are now Pakistan and Afghanistan, from Balochistan to Upper Chitral, from their resilience to their tribal discipline and codes of honour, the book does not shy away from starkly depicting some of their brutal ways and customs, under which women are little more than objects to be bought and sold, by paying a "bride price", or one man's murderous act can be avenged on his male progenies.
The book can be described as an anthology, the strongest of the extremely loose connections between the stories being the presence of Tor Baz, the wandering falcon, in all of them bar one. Apart from his birth, there are no beginnings, nor ends. There are just stories, human stories of love, honour, greed and brutality, and above all of traditions that are being erased by the unstoppable force that is the modern nation state and its thirst for absolute power within its self-proclaimed boundaries.
Bearing witness to these tales are heavenly landscapes, which one must see to believe, even if the author leaves no stone unturned to portray their grandeur on paper.
The pictures painted of these areas have made me resolve to travel there the next time i am in Pakistan, such is their beauty.
I know it is a dream destined to remain unfulfilled, much like Jamil Ahmad's potential as a storyteller, but this book should be published in Pashto and Balochi, so the people it depicts can appreciate it in their own languages.

Recent events led me to starting this book, a choice that I now think I should have made ages ago. Then again, an earlier reading would not have resulted in the same breed of appreciation, not while I continued to adhere to the common formula of treating literature and politics as distinct and isolated entities. This is not to say that my interpretation is based on the current flavor of toxic vomit circulating in US media in regards to Pakistan, but rather that I acknowledged its insidious existence and stepped around accordingly. I will never be successful at such careful endeavors so long as my country's fetish for war eyes the lands described in this book (indeed I'm likely presuming too much when I consider my ingrained prejudice will stop in accordance with the times), but this work went well enough for me to look forward to more.

A single word that comes to mind in conjunction with this work is 'unassuming'. I don't say this in the much abused small-town-Americana or the tiny-village-Britannica senses of the word, but in efforts to describe the exact prose, the mix of mental insight and physical description, and the matter of fact observation of death, madness, and the cruelty of both environment and human being. It would make for a quick read if Ahmad didn't glide over a great deal of the myriad cultures and all their clashes within each of the nine links of stories, spending no longer than was necessary to paint a landscape and/or ideological picture before following his Tor Baz, the Wandering Falcon, on the next leg of his journey. The resulting read is both swift, yet sure.

In regards to the low rating, I have my suspicions that people came in for the hysterical badgering of terrorists and those who are popularly known as such in US media for springing out of convenient vacuums. Instead, you will find desert winds of insanity-birthing duration, colonialism, views of World War I in a far less mentioned part of the planet, the brutally jarring alignment of standing cities and migrating tribes, strength, persistence, and a world not as far removed from the United States as its politicians would like to think. Misogyny would be a common indictment of this, but there is a vast divide between the facts of a culture and the mentality of the author, and I did not find anything in the latter that encouraged a hatred of women. As for the selling of others, capitalism does this under the table in far more loftier institutions with the lives of millions and the capital of billions, so it is not something I can judge. In regards to everything else, the author never scorned nor mocked his characters and the ways in which they interacted with the world, so it would not begrudge me to do the same.

One last thing I must mention is the delightfully engaging scene of the planning, performing, and resolving of a kidnapping. It may be nostalgia for the Arabian Nights and other aspects parsed through Disney and the like that's doing it, but as I am now more than ever intrigued in my four-volume set of the former, I'd say it worked out.

I was looking for a continuous story which I failed to find, but the anecdotes of the different tribes in this men were interesting and made me want to keep reading. It is so true that the nomadic tribes do not want to be bound by boundaries of countries, they want to lad their animals and their families from one grazing spot to the next, whichever country that may fall in.

Aika jännä, vähän kun ois lukenut novelleja peräkkäin ja niissä vilahteli sama tyyppi, jos osas sillee jäljittää, että se oli sama tyyppi. (Osasin koska olin lukenut takakannen.) En kauheasti pitänyt, oli raskasta mulle, kun oli koko ajan eri henkilöitä ja mikään ei oikein pysynyt samana kuin maisema. Ja mulle miljööt on vaikeimpia saada kiinni, varsinkin vieraalla kielellä lukiessa. Hahmoista saan paremmin otteen.

Pakistan

Mogu samo reći jedno-Ako ste plakali uz Lovca na zmajeve , uz ovo ćete podjednako plakati.
Izuzetno teška sudbina jednog dečaka kome je rat oduzeo roditelje. Primoran da luta, bez kuće, bez odraslih, bez sopstvenog detinjstva, snalazi se kroz pustoš i tamu. Sam.
Srceparajuća, emotivna ali opšivena brilijantnom dubinom arapskog pisca Džamil Almeda.
Ne može vas nikako ostaviti ravnodušnima.

Good Read!
One can get some real life experiences of tribal people over the regions of Afghanistan, Pakistan, especially the tragedies faced by government norms, stringent policies over the borders, sales and betrothal cultures.