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Survival Issues And Identity Crisis In Khalid Javaid's 'Last Invitation'

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Survival Issues and Identity Crises The general population of innate zones are confronting survival issues and identity crises. The Wandering falcon is the unforgettable story of a boy who wanders between tribes in the remote tribal areas defying his fate and surviving against all odds. The world he inhabits is fragile and unforgiving. displacement is that experiencing both fluidity of identities and survival issues. Khalid Javaid, a Delhi-based distinguished contemporary Urdu fiction writer, has described in his short story Aakhri Dawat (Last Invitation) the miseries attached to the melting down of the monolithic identity of self that quickens the fluidity and plurality of identity. “I don’t want to live here as an individual. I want to experience …show more content…

There are over-burdened fathers who have forgotten the names of their children, women sold as virgins or whores at market, rebel mullahs, outlaws and once-great tribal leaders whose lion pride has been cut down by old age. It is this orphaned boy, Tor Baz, whom the reader follows as he wanders nomadically, his personal fortunes crisscrossing with the men and women from the various tribes - the Afridis, Wazirs, Bhittanis, Gujjars and Mahsuds. There are over-burdened fathers who have forgotten the names of their children, women sold as virgins or whores at market, rebel mullahs, outlaws and once-great tribal leaders whose lion pride has been cut down by old age. Jamil Ahmad 's narrative style can seem so dispassionate and detached that The Wandering Falcon feels almost like nonfiction. His style is sparing and stark, and strangely beautiful despite the harshness of the landscape and the lives led by the people living in …show more content…

This phenomenon has left its undeniable marks on the life of so many people on either side of the boundary. Jamil Ahmad has tries to dissect the inner psychology of tribes’ men to struggle to identify himself in this state of confusion created by these borders. The story of Tor Baz is a microcosm which represent the life, thinking, psychology, apprehension, repression and suppression felt by Pak-Afghan tribes after the reconstruction of the borders. Tor Baz, who moves in and out of the stories, leaving a spectral trace, a light footprint. While we learn of his birth and his adventurous life, we hardly get a measure of his psychological complexity or ‘interiority’. This seems to be Ahmad’s deliberate ploy because in a communal tribal society, the ‘individual’ could at best be a fleeting presence. That’s why Tor Baz, the wandering falcon, is more of an interloper than a stable presence. Individualism on which much of fiction thrives is relegated to the

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