A Case of Exploding Mangoes
(2008) is a comic novel by the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif
based on the plane crash that killed General Muhammad
Zia ul-Haq, former president of Pakistan.
The book has a dark satirical style.
Plot summary
The
central theme of the book is a fictitious story behind the real life plane
crash which killed General Zia, dictator of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988, about which there
are many conspiracy theories. After witnessing a tank parade in
Bahawalpur, Zia left the small Punjabi town in the C-130 Hercules aircraft
designated 'Pak One'.
Shortly
after a smooth take-off, the control tower loses contact with the aircraft.
Witnesses who saw the plane in the air later claimed it was flying erratically,
before nosediving and exploding on impact, killing General Zia and several
other senior army generals, in addition to Arnold Raphel, the US Ambassador to Pakistan, and
General Herbert M. Wassom, the head of the U.S. Military aid mission to
Pakistan. Zia had ruled Pakistan for 11 years prior to his death.
The
book develops through the eyes of the narrator, Ali Shigri, a Junior Officer in
the Pakistani Air Force who seeks revenge for the death of his father, which he
is convinced, although apparently a suicide was orchestrated by General Zia
himself.
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?
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.
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.
Real persons appearing as characters
- General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
- General AkhtarAbdurRahman
- General MirzaAslam Beg
- US Ambassador Arnold Raphel
- Director of CIA operations Charles Cogan
- Osama
bin Laden
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