The blind man of Taxila: a folktale of Tirh

Extract

Early in 1944, while I was holding charge of the Mansehra Subdivision of Hazara District in the North-West Frontier Province (then part of India), the following tale was told to me briefly by my friend Muḥammad Ẓarf Khn, a member of the leading family of Kuki Khel Afridis of Tirh, who was at that time serving as Political Tahsildar at Oghi. Tirh is, of course, the celebrated tribal tract lying west of Peshawar in present-day Pakistan. I wrote the tale down exactly as Muhammad Zanf told it to me. To enable the story to be more easily understood, I have slightly expanded the narrative, but I have not added any element which was not in the original version. I see no reason to doubt that the story is, as its narrator claimed, one of the traditional tales which are told round the hearth in the hill-country of Tirah to which he belongs.