Have you heard of Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes? Recipient of the inaugural 2008 Shakti Bhatt literary award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for Guardian First Book Prize and selected for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers’ series, Hanif’s remarkable first novel exploded onto the literary scene last year and is definitely one of the years’ best reads.
Although it is his first published story you could say it is not the work of a novice. A graduate of England’s University of East Anglia creative writing program, he has written plays for the stage and for BBC radio. His critically acclaimed film, The Long Night, has graced the screens of film festivals around the world. Hanif works as a journalist and currently BBC’s correspondent based in Karachi.
Perhaps Hanif might not have written this book if he had not been the son of a farmer in the Punjab or if he had not served time in the Pakistan Air Force and actually flown an American made T-37 trainer plane when he was still a teenager. Sounds incredibly exciting? “It wasn’t,” confesses Hanif, “I vomited into my gas mask.” He hated flying but it is those youthful experiences that enrich and inform this darkly sardonic and very funny political ‘who dun it’ based on historical facts.
The novel is set in 1980’s at the Pakistan elite air force academy where the main protagonist, Ali Shigri, a pilot and a Silent Drill Commander of Fury Squadron, finds himself to be one of the main suspects. What caused the solid C-130 Hercules, nick-named the Pak One, aircraft which carried military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, along with several top military generals and the American Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, to spiral down in a fatal crash on 17 August, 1988?
Who did this and got away with it? It is still an unsolved case. The actual investigation brought suspicion on the CIA, the KGB, Mossad, Murtaza Bhutto (brother of the recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto, 2008) and even General Aslam Beg, Zia’s right-hand man.
This seems like an example of real life outdoing Shakespeare. Conspiracy theories are delicious and addictive mind candy. Mohammad Hanif stirs the thick theory pot and adds generous dollops of spicy ingredients all his own. Truth may be stranger than fiction but Hanif proves that facts are only fiction’s first draft. Fiction uses a broader and more colorful brush than reality and Hanif introduces all sorts of other tasty questions and motives into the assassination story:
Why was a crate of mangoes loaded on the military plane with the high brass at the last minute?
What about the drunken mango-sucking crow?
Was nerve gas released by the mangoes and thus killed everyone on board in seconds of release via the air condition system?
Who really killed Ali’s father?
Can blind women’s curses cause airplanes to fall out of the sky?
Did the Maoist street cleaner do it?
Did the tapeworms that inhabited General Zia’s intestines finally make their way to his yummy non-alcohol contaminated liver and do the old dictator in? Did this happen on the sturdy but ill-fated Hercules airplane?
Or was the crash due to simple mechanical malfunction?
One of the pleasures of reading this novel is to notice how skillfully Hanif weaves facts and fictions into plausible and often humorous probabilities. The book is full of extravagant, likeable, absurd, characters. My favorite is the main narrator, Ali Shigri. He is obviously, but honestly based on Joseph Heller’s seminal anti-hero, Yossarian, from the classic Catch-22. Both novels are best understood as satires on the military establishment and it’s adherence to regulation, militarism and officious piety. It has been said that Heller ‘shouted his words onto the page’. Hanif is also an angry young man (with plenty of good reasons) and he should be proud to occupy literary territory with Heller.
Fiction takes us where facts can’t go and that is the beauty and power of the imagination. Mohammed Hanif hits his best notes as a writer in his disdained portrait of the pompously pious and villainous General Zia who reads the Quran like a daily horoscope, leers at non-Muslim cleavage when chance permits and sobs loudly during morning prayers. Hanif describes, how Zia “broke into violent sobs. The other worshipers continued with their prayers; they were used to General Zia crying during his prayers. They were never sure if it was due to the intensity of his devotion, the matters of state that occupied his mind or another tongue-lashing from the first lady.”
The black humor surrounding a real life sadistic bully general with a case of vicious tapeworms is fun for a reader to revel in. But the opposite is true when you find yourself encountering the case of the blind woman imprisoned for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. The situation becomes unbearably horrid when her supposed adultery is the result of a gang rape. Hanif makes the reader see that impersonal institutionalized cruelty, absurdity, stupidity, and misguided holiness raise the stakes on human misery. The horror is that the joke is on all of us but it isn’t funny.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes is uncannily prescient as the novel’s arrival coincides with the recent and very real assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the deployment of NATO troops into Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, as well as Pakistan’s current internal war with Islamic extremists. In Mohammed Hanif’s world fact and fiction are cozy bedfellows. I wonder what issues he will take on next.
Mohammed Hanif will be appearing at the 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.
