The Last Falcon: Jamil Ahmad

The late bloomer from Pakistan immortalised the lives of the frontier

This Monday, we lost Jamil Ahmad, long-time Pakistani civil servant and late-in-life author; Ahmad made his literary debut when he was 79 with The Wandering Falcon (2011), and passed away at home in Islamabad at 83. The book was the result of two decades in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA); Ahmad was commissioner of Swat and later of Waziristan, as well as minister in Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul before and during the Soviet invasion. Shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary in 2011, his work became a small, quiet classic, contemporary yet old-world in its depiction of the harsh world of the tribes, pre-Taliban.

The stories feature Tor Baz (or black falcon), the son of a couple who elopes; he is the ‘wandering falcon’ of the title, after his parents are killed. Through him, those who make the news yet remain distant, are shown up close. Ahmad writes of this elusive world:

‘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 civilisation 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 prose read quaint for a reason; the book had been written in 1974 and literally shelved (aside from attempts by Ahmad’s wife Helga to show it around) till a short story competition was announced on radio. Taking the nine linked stories to publishers, it set Ahmad on his path to modest literary stardom.

After reading 900 stories for The Life’s Too Short short story prize she co-ran, editor and critic Faiza Sultan Khan took Ahmad’s manuscript on a first trip to Bombay, though wary of a submission from an elderly bureaucrat—and never left the hotel except to eat. “Before I met Jamil sahib, I didn’t realise un-pompous bureaucrats existed—he was funny, charming, self-effacing, incredibly well-informed and as happy to discuss the literary merits of Joseph Conrad as he was to chat about his favourite Sidney Sheldons,” says Khan. “He told me we’re all from some tribe or other. I think his great wish was that his book would bring some attention to the people he’d written about and dispel some of the pervasive ignorance about tribal life and tribal codes of honour. ”

From Khan, the book went to Meru Gokhale, now Publishing Director at Penguin Random House, then Penguin Books India’s Senior Commissioning Editor in London. Gokhale championed Falcon abroad, selling rights in the UK and US, and praise spread through critical approval and by word-of-mouth. The Independent compared Ahmed’s Granta debut (‘The Sins of the Mother’) to Arundhati Roy’s; NPR likened him to Cormac McCarthy. Poignantly, he was the oldest person to win an Indian literary prize for debuts, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award.

“Ahmad’s writing had so much feeling and yet it was plain, almost classical. You felt you were there with the tribes on the frontier,” says Gokhale. “We met for the first time in London, when he came with his family for the publication. He had great style.” In 2013, when Ahmed visited India for the first time since he had left as a child during Partition, Delhi dinner parties adored the tall, charming man, full of tales from the border. “It was a pleasure and an honour to have known him,” says Gokhale. “He took the long view.”

No one might ever have read those tucked away pages. Now, many have seen through the eyes of the falcon.

Jamil AhmadMan Asian Literarywandering falcon