Author biography: Mohammed Hanif

Author biography:

Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan, in 1965. He graduated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as Pilot Officer, but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. He has written plays for the stage and BBC radio, and his film The Long Night has been shown at film festivals around the world. He is a graduate of UEA’s creative writing programme. He is currently head of the BBC’s Urdu Service and lives in London.

Mohammed Hanif has done what many brilliant authors tend do with their initial works. He has based the book in a world that he is familiar with, being an ex-pilot officer. But it would do him great injustice to suggest that this is the only reason that the book reads so wonderfully. He has artfully used perspectives, and clever weaved the past and future into the narrative. He makes his threads intersect sometimes, and provides bird’s-eye views from time to time so the reader doesn’t feel lost. He builds everything up carefully and skillfully, and entertains and informs marvellously along the way.

A Case Of Exploding Mangoes is a 2008 novel by Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif. In the final months before his suspicious death by plane crash, Pakistani dictator General Zia ul-Haq grows increasingly paranoid. Ali Shigri, a Pakistan Air Force junior officer, meanwhile finds himself being interrogated after his close friend Obaid dies while stealing a plane from the base at which both are training.

Mohammed Hanif’s exuberant first novel, “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” extends this tradition of assassination fiction and shifts it east to Pakistan. The death at its center is that of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988.

Zia’s fate is one of Pakistan’s two great political mysteries, the other being the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The established facts concerning his death are as follows. That on Aug. 17, 1988, after inspecting a tank demonstration in the Punjab, Zia boarded a C-130 Hercules — “Pak One” — to fly back to Islamabad. That he was accompanied on board by a number of his senior army generals, as well as by the American ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel. That shortly before takeoff, crates of mangoes were loaded onto the plane. That shortly after takeoff, the C-130 began to fly erratically, alternately dipping and rising: a flight phenomenon known to aviation experts as “phugoid.” And that the plane crashed soon after, killing all on board.

Theories as to the cause of the crash have ranged from simple machine failure to the idea that one of the mango crates contained a canister of nerve gas, which, when dispersed by the plane’s air-conditioning system, killed both pilots. Among those many groups or persons suspected of being behind the assassination — if assassination it was — are the C.I.A., Mossad, the K.G.B., Murtaza Bhutto (Benazir’s brother) and Indian secret agents, as well as one of Zia’s right-hand men, Gen. Aslam Beg.

“A Case of Exploding Mangoes” is set in the months before and the days after the crash. Far from coming to a conclusion about the cause of Zia’s death, Hanif gleefully thickens the stew of conspiracy theories, introducing at least six other possible suspects, including a blind woman under sentence of death, a Marxist-Maoist street cleaner, a snake, a crow, an army of tapeworms and a junior trainee officer in the Pakistani Air Force named Ali Shigri, who is also the novel’s main narrator.

Ali is irreverent, lazy and raspingly sardonic, and his obvious fictional predecessor is Joseph Heller’s Yossarian. Indeed, like “Catch-22,” “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” is best understood as a satire of militarism, regulation and piety. Much of Hanif’s novel is set in the Pakistani Air Force Academy, an institution staffed by crazies and incompetents who could have walked straight out of Heller’s novel. Among them are Lieutenant Bannon, known as Loot, a languorous American drill instructor who douses himself in Old Spice, and Uncle Starchy, the squadron’s laundryman, who — as we witness in a fine scene — self-medicates with snake venom, using a live krait as his syringe. The academy cadets, meanwhile, are so maddened by celibacy that they have sex with holes in their mattresses, and so erotically sensitized that copies of Reader’s Digest circulate as substitutes for pornographic magazines.

In the midst of all this lunacy is Ali Shigri: sane, if not entirely so, and bent on revenge. Ali is convinced that his father, Col. Quli Shigri, was killed on the orders of General Zia. By way of retribution, Ali develops an intricate assassination plot, which involves Loot Bannon, Starchy’s snake and “Baby O” Obaid. Baby O is Ali’s best friend and occasional lover. His idea of relaxation is to watch “The Guns of Navarone” while wearing Poison perfume, and he occasionally imagines himself to be the avian hero of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”

The novel cuts cleverly between Shigri’s self-told story of his assassination plans and third-person scenes from the last months of the man he is trying to murder, General Zia. Zia’s depiction is one of the book’s great achievements. Hanif summons all his satirical disdain for this pious and violent man, whose years of power have left him “fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia.” At morning prayer one day, Hanif writes, 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 jokes start early in “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” and they keep on coming. There are times when the novel feels just a touch too fond of its own one-liners. Satire is, after all, a comic mode that asks to be taken seriously. Certainly, this novel doesn’t have the sustained black anger of “Catch-22,” a book that — as an early reviewer observed — seemed to have been “shouted onto paper.” But there are shocking scenes in Hanif’s novel, and the shock they deliver is greater because they occur as interludes to the comedy. One subplot involves Zainab, a blind woman who is to be stoned to death for adultery, even though this alleged offense occurred while she was being gang-raped. Shigri himself is arrested and incarcerated in a torture center in Lahore Fort. From his cell, he listens to the screams of other prisoners being branded with Philips irons, and communicates through a hole in the wall with a man who has been in solitary confinement for nine years.

During Shigri’s time in Lahore, it emerges that his father was responsible for converting the fort into a torture center. “Nice work, Dad,” Shigri observes wryly. “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” is full of such topsy-turvy moments or incidents of farcical reversal. Absurdity operates as a scalable quality in Hanif’s vision of the world: it is visible in tiny details and geopolitical shifts alike. The largest of these reversals concerns America’s foreign-policy relationship with radical Islam. For as Hanif reminds us, America enthusiastically collaborated with General Zia to finance, train and supply the Afghan mujahideen in their insurgency against the Russians during the 1980s. It was Zia who permitted the shipment of American arms and billions of American dollars to the rebels, and who allowed the border regions of Pakistan to be used by them as a haven and training base.

Hanif has written a historical novel with an eerie timeliness. It arrives as NATO troops battle the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan; as General Musharraf fights Islamic extremism within his own country; as Pakistan assimilates yet another unsolved assassination; and as the menace of Al Qaeda persists worldwide. The most darkly funny scene in “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” imagines a Fourth of July party in Islamabad in 1988, hosted by Arnold Raphel. The American guests dress up in flowing turbans, tribal gowns and shalwar kameez suits, by way of ridiculous homage to the Afghan fighters. Among the invited guests is a young bearded Saudi known as “OBL,” who works for “Laden and Co. Constructions.” As OBL moves through the throng, various people stop to greet him and chat. Among them is the local C.I.A. chief who, after swapping a few words, bids him farewell: “Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up.”

Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His new book, “The Wild Places,” will be published this month.

On 17 August 1988, a plane carrying General Zia ul-Haq, the military ruler of Pakistan since 1977 and America's staunchest ally in the first Afghan war, went down in flames, killing everybody on board. Zia was accompanied by some of his senior generals, the US ambassador to Pakistan and the head of the US military aid mission to Pakistan, all of whom died. There was no real investigation and no culprit was ever identified or, at any rate, announced. Conspiracy theories abound, implicating the CIA, the Bhutto family, Indian intelligence, rogue elements within the Pakistan Army or the Soviet Union. In this entertaining novel, Mohammed Hanif, a former Pakistan Air Force officer, now head of the BBC's Urdu Service, imagines what might have happened and why. It begins with Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri being hauled for interrogation. Shigri's room-mate, the poetry-loving cadet Obaid, has gone Awol and, reportedly, tried to fly off using Shigri's call-sign. When the local bosses fail to get anything out of Shigri, the under officer is put in a dungeon under Lahore Fort and threatened with torture.

Meanwhile, General Zia, suspecting that Allah had sent him a message through the Qur'an that his life is in danger, raises his security level to red. The Afghan war is almost over and Zia, dreaming of the Nobel Peace Prize, knows he is surrounded by enemies. (He also has a severe rectal itch, which isn't improving his temper.) General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the ambitious head of Inter-Services Intelligence, is happy to enhance the general's already heavy security.

Hanif's novel is really a series of darkly comic vignettes about the investigation of Obaid's disappearance and the preoccupations of General Zia and his generals. There are sharply observed sketches of toadying ministers, mindlessly efficient security chiefs, filthy prison cells, sex-mad Arab sheikhs and erudite communist prisoners (who hate Maoists more than mullahs). Zia's limited intelligence and unlimited paranoia are portrayed with great glee. The only women of any significance are Zia's wife (who, after seeing a picture of her husband gazing into the cleavage of an American journalist, declares that he is dead to her) and a blind prisoner, sentenced to death by stoning because she had been raped. There is also a rather interesting mango-loving crow, who might have had something to do with several events.

Although framed as a mystery and ending with rational explanations for Obaid's disappearance and Zia's plane crash, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is less Le Carr (who praises the author's "lovely eye... and even better ear") than Private Eye. The tension does not build up until the final chapters and is then released far too quickly. The novel spends far more time exposing the stupidity, brutality and hypocrisy of Pakistan's military rulers. Whether such revelations can shock any longer is, of course, doubtful but as a piece of political satire, A Case of Exploding Mangoes deserves a high mark.

The story starts several weeks before the crash, and introduces us to the soon-to-be-dead General Zia and his close associates, as well as to a pair of Pakistani Air Force cadets (one of whom is the main narrator), the U.S. Ambassador, a CIA agent, and a whole host of lesser characters (including, in a very brief but historically plausible cameo, Osama Bin Laden). Despite the relatively large cast of characters, almost all spring to life with remarkable vitality. From the barracks laundryman "Uncle Starchy," to an imprisoned enemy of the state (the head of the All Pakistan Street Cleaners Union), to General Zia's paratrooper bodyguard, and many others. This is no small achievement, and a vitally important one for a plot that brings together so many disparate motives and agendas.

Indeed, the plot is too complicated to fully describe, but basically General Zia has grown increasingly paranoid, and rightfully so, as a number of different people want him dead. To mention who or how or why would be to spoil the fun, suffice to say that the story focuses on two particularly devious plots, while other possibilities materialize out of carefully calibrated subplots. So, in a sense, this is a thriller -- even though the results are already known. However, it's also a black comedy in which the author has drawn deeply on his own experience as a Pakistani Air Force cadet in order to create a rich satire of the Pakistani military. Furthermore, the author's years as a journalist makes him particularly well-suited to aim his satire at the men of state, their machinations, and those good old days when the U.S. was funding the Afghan resistance to the Soviets. While a lot of this history is so tragic and inept you have to laugh, Hanif has the writing skills to create some moments of real comedy and fine wordplay as well.

The last several years has seen a resurgence of interest in this era, in books such as Steve Coll's excellent Ghost Wars or George Crile's Charley Wilson's War. Coll also wrote a much earlier book called On the Grand Trunk Road, based on his years as the South Asia correspondent for the Washington Post, which has a 25 page chapter devoted to his investigation of the crash. It's nice to be able to get some perspective from the Pakistani side, albeit in fictional form.

The Sunday Times review by Andrew Holgate: an ambitious fictional attempt to explain the mysterious death of General Zia ul-Haq

This fanciful piece of fiction is based on solid historical fact — the death in a 1988 plane crash of the Pakistan dictator General Zia ul-Haq. Dozens of different theories have been put forward over the last 20 years to explain this mysterious event. So far, though, no culprits have been collared, no satisfactory explanation provided. Depending on your point of view, the guilty parties could be the CIA, the KGB, Benazir Bhutto, the Afghans or Mossad.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a debut novel by a former Pakistan airforce pilot turned journalist and playwright, has its own theory to peddle about the crash, one involving overambitious generals and CIA operatives, plus a wandering crow, several crates of suspicious mangoes and a disgruntled airforce cadet. If this rich stew of disparate ingredients puts you in mind of Salman Rushdie, you wouldn’t be far from the truth. His work, along with that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Joseph Heller, is a low-key but persistent influence.

The novel begins with a confession of sorts by a young trainee airforce officer called Ali Shigri, who claims to have been involved in the dictator’s death. “I was the only one who boarded that plane and survived,” he boasts. The exact nature of Shigri’s complicity isn’t apparent at this stage, but his motivation as we venture back in time is soon established — the supposed suicide of his father (a shadowy army officer) and the brutal treatment meted out to Shigri himself following the disappearance of his lover and fellow cadet, Obaid.

As the novel begins its countdown to Zia’s death, Shigri’s story of maltreatment alternates with events within the president’s inner circle. Zia himself, a bumbling figure of almost comic-book ineptitude, has had premonitions about his demise, and is locked away behind rings of guards, feverishly consulting the Koran as to his fate. His closest advisers, meanwhile, jostle for influence, swear undying loyalty to their leader and plot tirelessly against each other.

Despite the space Mohammed Hanif devotes to his sometimes ingenious plot, it becomes clear over the course of the novel that establishing the validity of his theory is not his main priority. Instead, he seems more interested in taking satirical swipes at a number of rather large and obvious targets — Pakistan’s political system, its military, American meddling in the region, local religious zeal. To make the parallels with today more obvious, there is even a walk-on part for someone called OBL, a Saudi businessman looking for the limelight and being courted in a rather half-hearted fashion by the Americans.

Some fuss has been generated about this novel in the lead-up to publication — Hanif is, after all, a graduate of the University of East Anglia creative writing programme, and his subject has unmistakable modern resonances. Sadly, his book feels only half-formed, an early draft that should have been taken away for serious surgery. The plot simply isn’t defined enough, the characterisation isn’t rich enough, the structure isn’t robust enough, and, above all, the satire really isn’t sharp enough to carry the reader or the book. Even the magical realism introduced at various points in the narrative feels half-hearted, while the attempts at political analysis can sometimes be embarrassingly naive. Hanif may show undoubted promise as a writer, but he really should have allowed himself more time to develop this novel properly.

Mohammed Hanif on his experience in the Pakistan Air Force Academy

Once upon a time, when I was eighteen, I found myself locked up in Pakistan Air Force Academy’s cell along with my friend and partner-in-crime, Khalid Saifullah. We had thought we were doing charity work but the Academy officers obviously didn’t share our ideals. We had been caught trying to help out another class mate pass his chemistry exam, something he had failed to do twice already and this was his last chance to save himself from being expelled. The logistics of our rescue effort involved a wireless set improvised in the Sunday Hobbies Club, a microphone concealed in a crap bandage around the left elbow of our academically challenged friend, and a Sanyo FM radio receiver. We were running our operation from the roof top of a building next to the examination hall. We were caught red-handed whispering reversible chemical equation into the transistor.

We were in breach of every single standard operating procedure in the Academy rule book, and faced certain expulsion. We had just started our glorious careers and now we faced the prospects of being sent home and having to explain to our parents that how, instead of training to become gentlemen-officers, we were running an exam-cheating-mafia from the rooftop of the most well-disciplined training institute in the country.

For two days, while we waited in that cell to find out about our fate, we planned our future. Khalid, always the world-wise in this outfit, immediately decided that he was going to join the merchant navy and travel the world. I tried hard to think what I would do. I came from a farming family where even the most adventurous members of our clan had only managed to branch out into planting sugarcane instead of potatoes. Education, jobs, careers were absolutely alien concepts. The Academy was supposed to be my escape from a lifetime that revolved around wildly fluctuating potato crop cycles. And here I was, already a prisoner of sorts, facing a journey back to a life I thought I had left behind.

“Maybe I’ll become a teacher,” I said vaguely. The farmers in my village used to show some vague respect to teachers in the primary school I attended. “Or a mechanic.” I was a member of the car-maintenance club in the hobbies club after all. It was considered an elite club since there was no car to maintain. It was basically a hobbies club for people who hated hobbies.

“You can’t even change a bloody tyre,”Khalid reminded me.

We managed to stave off the impending expulsion through a combination of confession and denial: we lied (we were listening to cricket commentary on the transistor radio), we grovelled (we were ashamed, ashamed, ashamed of our un-officer like behaviour) and we pleaded our undying passion for defending the borders of our motherland. They looked at our relatively clean record, our sterling academic achievements and let us off the hook and awarded us a punishment considered just short of expulsion. We were barred from entering the Academy’s TV room--and walking. For forty-one days. During the punishment period, we had to stay in uniform from dawn till dusk and when ever we were required to go from point a to b we had to run. Khalid went on to become a fairly good marathon runner (before, years later, dying in an air crash, while trying to pull a spectacular but impossible manoeuvre in Mirage fighter plane). I discovered Academy’s library.

I had barely noticed that the college had a very well stocked library. We knew it was there, we occasionally used it as a quite corner to hatch conspiracies but I had never noticed that the long rambling hall was lined with cupboards full of books. All the cupboards were locked but you could see pristine untouchable books behind their glass doors. The librarian, an eagle-nosed old civilian, walked around with a large bunch of jangling keys although his wares were not in any danger of being stolen. I was to find out later that he was quite a professional. The library was immaculately catalogued. You could of course go to him, fill out a form and request a book. But I never actually saw anybody fill out a form. I spent some afternoons staring at the books from behind the glass doors as my classmates watched videos in the TV room (including the fellow who had scraped through his chemistry exam and survived but would die years later in our current president’s General Pervez Musharraf’s moronic military adventure in Kargil on India-Pakistan border).

How do you ask for a book when you are eighteen, and have been brought up in a household where the only book was the Quran and the only reading material an occasional old newspaper left behind by a visitor from the city. “I want that book,” I asked the librarian pointing tentatively towards a cupboard which contained a thick volume of something call The Great Escapes. The librarian, relieved at having found a customer, took out his bunch of keys, removed a key and asked me to go get it myself. I took my time and browsed for a long time before filling out the form and borrowing the book. So grateful was I for getting that book that I brought him a samosa and cup of tea next day. That turned out to be a very good investment as the librarian handed me the bunch of his keys as soon as I entered. I browsed randomly, recklessly, read first paragraphs, author’s bios and made naïve judgments. The Cross of Iron wasn’t a religious thriller but a war novel. Crime and Punishment had very little crime in it. Was Rushdie related to the famous pop singer Ahmed Rushdie? Mario Puzo and Mario Vargas Llosa. The strange covers of Borges. Abdullah Hussain, I had heard of. A whole shelf devoted to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chronicle. Was that little book about the wrecked ship really a true story? I didn’t know which one was a thriller and which one was literary. As I lay Dying, sounds like a nice title so let’s read it. So does Valley of the Dolls. It is probably not the right way to read.

Discovering books was like a discovering second adolescence. I discovered new sensations in my body. It was even better. It was guilt free and I could show off.

Not that anyone except my librarian friend was impressed.

Outside the library, the world revolved around parade square, hockey fields and series of punishments and rewards that didn’t seem very different from each other. The vocabulary used to run the Academy life comprised of about fifty words, half of which were variations on the word ‘balls.’. Every order began or ended with balls, it was used as verb, adjective, qualifier or just simply a howl. Balls to you. Balls to mother, my balls, I’ll cut your balls…. Every order, every threat, every compliment was a variation on the same testicular theme. Now that I look back at, it is quite obvious that this place was drowning in its own testosterone.

From outside life could seem orderly. Uniforms were starched, rifles were oiled and sessions on the parade square hard and long. I yearned for that jangling of the keys in the library corridors. Once I was caught in my Navigation class reading Notes From Underground hidden under a map that I was supposed to be studying.

After our second year in the Academy, there were sudden attempts to turn us into good Muslims. Compulsory prayers. Quran lectures. Islamic Studies classes. In the third year we were caught stealing oranges from a neighbourhood orchard and as a punishment we were sent out to a mosque outside the Academy where Muslim cousins of Jehovah’s Witnesses taught us how to knock on random doors and preach Islam.

“But they are all Muslims,” I had protested.

“So are you,” came the reply. “And look at yourself.”

At that time I didn’t realise that we were an experiment in Islamisation of the whole society. General Zia was a distant presence. He was our commander-in-chief and the permanent president of Pakistan. He thought he was never going to die. So did we.

Years later sitting in the officers’ mess of a Karachi air base, we heard about the plane crash that killed him and several other generals. We were sad about the pilots and the crew of the plane. To drown our sorrows we pooled our meagre savings, ordered a bottle of Black Label whiskey, and instead of hiding in our bachelor quarters as we normally did, we opened the bottle in the officers’ mess TV room and discussed our future. I left the air force a month later.

Summary

What kind of read is this?
It is not a challenging book in terms of its length and the writing, but it is an absolutely unique and hilarious book. It is a political satire and it is historical fiction, but with some important modern messages.

Do I recommend this book?
Absolutely. There are not many books that I could recommend more highly.

Do I recommend that you buy this book?
Yes, this is one that I am proud to have on my shelf, and one that I know will stand up to lots of re-reading. Ali is irreverent, lazy and raspingly sardonic, and his obvious fictional predecessor is Joseph Heller's Yossarian. Indeed, like "Catch-22," "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" is best understood as a satire of militarism, regulation and piety. Much of Hanif's novel is set in the Pakistani Air Force Academy, an institution staffed by crazies and incompetents who could have walked straight out of Heller's novel. Among them are Lieutenant Bannon, known as Loot, a languorous American drill instructor who douses himself in Old Spice, and Uncle Starchy, the squadron's laundryman, who - as we witness in a fine scene - self-medicates with snake venom, using a live krait as his syringe. The academy cadets, meanwhile, are so maddened by celibacy that they have sex with holes in their mattresses, and so erotically sensitized that copies of Reader's Digest circulate as substitutes for pornographic magazines.

In the midst of all this lunacy is Ali Shigri: sane, if not entirely so, and bent on revenge. Ali is convinced that his father, Col. Quli Shigri, was killed on the orders of General Zia. By way of retribution, Ali develops an intricate assassination plot, which involves Loot Bannon, Starchy's snake and "Baby O" Obaid. Baby O is Ali's best friend and occasional lover. His idea of relaxation is to watch "The Guns of Navarone" while wearing Poison perfume, and he occasionally imagines himself to be the avian hero of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull."The novel cuts cleverly between Shigri's self-told story of his assassination plans and third-person scenes from the last months of the man he is trying to murder, General Zia. Zia's depiction is one of the book's great achievements. Hanif summons all his satirical disdain for this pious and violent man, whose years of power have left him "fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia." At morning prayer one day, Hanif writes, 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 jokes start early in "A Case of Exploding Mangoes," and they keep on coming. There are times when the novel feels just a touch too fond of its own one-liners. Satire is, after all, a comic mode that asks to be taken seriously. Certainly, this
novel doesn't have the sustained black anger of "Catch-22," a book that - as an early reviewer observed - seemed to have been "shouted onto paper." But there are shocking scenes in Hanif's novel, and the shock they deliver is greater because they occur as interludes to the comedy. One subplot involves Zainab, a blind woman who is to be stoned to death for adultery, even though this alleged offense occurred while she was being gang-raped. Shigri himself is arrested and incarcerated in a torture center in Lahore Fort. From his cell, he listens to the screams of other prisoners being branded with Philips irons, and communicates through a hole in the wall with a man who has been in solitary confinement for nine years.

During Shigri's time in Lahore, it emerges that his father was responsible for converting the fort into a torture center. "Nice work, Dad," Shigri observes wryly. "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" is full of such topsy-turvy moments or incidents of farcical reversal. Absurdity operates as a scalable quality in Hanif's vision of the world: it is visible in tiny details and
geopolitical shifts alike. The largest of these reversals concerns America's foreign-policy relationship with radical Islam. For as Hanif reminds us, America enthusiastically collaborated with General Zia to finance, train and supply the Afghan mujahideen in their insurgency against the Russians during the 1980s. It was Zia who permitted the shipment of American arms and billions of American dollars to the rebels, and who allowed the border regions of Pakistan to be used by them as a haven and training base.

Hanif has written a historical novel with an eerie timeliness. It arrives as NATO troops battle the Taliban insurgency in
Afghanistan; as General Musharraf fights Islamic extremism within his own country; as Pakistan assimilates yet another
unsolved assassination; and as the menace of Al Qaeda persists worldwide. The most darkly funny scene in "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" imagines a Fourth of July party in Islamabad in 1988, hosted by Arnold Raphel. The American guests dress up in flowing turbans, tribal gowns and shalwar kameez suits, by way of ridiculous homage to the Afghan fighters. Among the invited guests is a young bearded Saudi known as "OBL," who works for "Laden and Co. Constructions." As OBL moves through the throng, various people stop to greet him and chat. Among them is the local C.I.A. chief who, after swapping a few words, bids him farewell: "Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up."

Characters/People

General Zia ul Haq: Military dictator of Pakistan in the 1980s. Based on a real-life person, his literary persona is a deeply self-centred person and increasingly paranoid ruler.

Ali Shigri: Our narrator, a Junior Under Officer, who has become entangled in events that far out-rank him.
The central character of the novel is Ali Shigri, an Air Force Junior Officer, in the Pakistani Military. Ali Shigri's father, has committed suicide.Ali however believes that he was actually murdered by General Zia. Ali wants to kill the General and hence plans for the same.There are other people too in the plot who have motives to assassinate the General and all of them come together nicely at the end which is very impressive

The protagonist, Ali Shigri, is an army cadet whose outlook towards life has a lot to do with his father, Colonel Shigri’s, alleged suicide. His compatriot, Obaid, is a fragile dreamer and clearly a misfit in the army. General Akhtar is the second most powerful man, heading the ISI and keeping a watch on everything of importance in his country. Then there is the US Ambassador, running his own games to fufill their motives beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan’s borders.
The people who would like Zia dead are quite a few in this fast-paced explosive novel. Who actually does it, and whether you come to know of it is something you need to dive into its pages to find out. Ali Shigri’s ponderings on life’s nuances and its unpleasantries are noteworthy in the context of the proceedings.
The Case of Exploding Mangoes might not be a literary achievement (perhaps because it does not wander its cause on topics like humanities and the war suffering?) but it more than surely is a read that leaves you thrilled on having witnessed (from the inside) one of history’s better kept secrets – the death of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

Baby O: Shigiri's roommate and friend, Baby O goes AWOL as the novel opens. Shigiri is motivated by locating his good friend.

Loot Bannon: An American friend of Shigiri and Baby O.

General Akhtar: Responsible for the Generals security, Akhtar is his anchor is a frightening world.

Major Kiyani: One of the most interesting characters in the novel is Major Kiyani. He is the un-official hitman of ISI and shows no emotions in killing or torturing anti-nationals. According to the novel he is on the plane that crashes killing everyone on board including General Zia.

Blind Zainab: Imprisoned unjustly, Blind Zainab immense patience eventually runs out and she curses the General.

Brigadier TM

Obaid

Arnold Raphel

Allah

Tony Singh

Bill Casey

Coogan

Bruce Lee

Ceausescu

Nancy

Prince Naif

Fayyaz

Jonah

Arnie

Lufkin

Lata

Bhutto

Ronald Reagan

Setting & Locations

edit

| see section history

Islamabad

Pakistan Air Force Academy

Afghanistan

Shigri Hill

Cessna

Mecca

Washington

Urdu

Saudi Arabia

Bahawalpur

Texas

Lahore

India

Khana Kaaba

Corolla

America

Write a summary of the plot or a synopsis of this book.

can't really go into the plot too much for fear of spoiling the fun if you decide to read this book, which I recommend that you do. I will say that the characterisation is extremely rich, every person comes alive before the readers eyes. There is a whole range of fun characters including Lieutenant Bannon, an American who is part of the Pakistan Army, Obaid or Baby O, Shirgri's best and closest friend and Uncle Starchy, the Army Academy's laundryman (who comes to play a significant role).

The story largely plays out in a Pakistani Airforce Academy, and begins when Shigri is being blamed for Obaid's disappearance in an Airforce plane. It is evtually revealed that Shigri has developed an assassination plot, because he believes that General Zia is responsible for the death of his father. At the very beginning we are suspicious of Shigri's true involvement in General Zia's downfall, particularly after he proudly states: "The only witness to that televised walk, the only one to have walked that walk, would be completely ignored. Because if you missed that clip, you probably missed me. Like history itself, I was the one who got away." This quote gives you a good insight into the tone of the book, and Shigri's feelings toward the role he played in the death of Zia.

Ultimately, it is not important who killed General Zia. This book is a political satire, it satirises the military using caricature and very clever one-liners, like "You can blame our men in uniform for anything, but you can never blame them or being imaginative" and "By the time it comes down to the questions about whether I would rescue my best friend's kitten drowning in a river or tell myself that cats can swim, I have begun to enjoy the test, and my pencil ticks the squares with the flourish of someone celebrating their own sanity."

Amoungst all the fun though, Hanif makes some important statements about the role of military in controling the State, the role of religion in government and the way in which governments can manipulate the population for their own benefit.

If you are looking for something fun, unique and thoughtful, the A Case of Exploding Mangoes is for you.

Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
His new book, "The Wild Places," will be published this month.

 In the midst of all this lunacy is Ali Shigri: sane, if not entirely so, and bent on revenge. Ali is convinced that his father, Col. Quli Shigri, was killed on the orders of General Zia. By way of retribution, Ali develops an intricate assassination plot, which involves Loot Bannon, Starchy's snake and "Baby O" Obaid. Baby O is Ali's best friend and occasional lover. His idea of relaxation is to watch "The Guns of Navarone" while wearing Poison perfume, and he occasionally imagines himself to be the avian hero of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull." The novel cuts cleverly between Shigri's self-told story of his assassination plans and third-person scenes from the last months of the man he is trying to murder, General Zia. Zia's depiction is one of the book's great achievements. Hanif summons all his satirical disdain for this pious and violent man, whose years of power have left him "fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia." At morning prayer one day, Hanif writes, 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."