Hurase baar
Bwisagni
Mwdwm aw gusu suhab hwfwiyw
Sanjanifrai
Labw faiyw lwgwaw
Bwisag ni torthingse thorthingnwi
Jub jub okha...
Gwjangsriw hwfwiyw
Bwswr gwdwn ni gwrlwi deha.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Bwisagni baar
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Ice Candy Man
Ice-Candy
man -- a love story or a partition novel
The Iceman
speaketh?. I roam in the city as the Ice-Candy wallah, with an icebox of sweet
ice candies. Hounded by little children and their mothers, I bring a little
cool relief in the hot summer. The
business is good
when the day is hot, but I try to save a few for a sweet little child, who is
unfortunate to be afflicted by polio, but fortunate to have the lovely ayah. I
long for a sight of the ayah all day, I long for a few moments of flirtatious
fun, the sight of her draws my attention, like a fly drawn towards a lamp. She
is the apple of my eye, but she accepts the apple of another, I have a good
mind to massage his body to pulp, but alas he is my friend too. Everytime I see
her with him, the fire of jealousy burns higher within me. The anguish of
seeing her in his arms, wounds me more than any weapon the world can offer. A
lamp can set a palace ablaze, what is one man?s soul before the evil flames? In
my foolish rage I destroy the lives of those near and dear friends. I pluck the
most beautiful rose from God?s garden, tear its beautiful petals apart in my
rage, and I adorn it with fake appendages, believing it to be mine forever.
The ice candy man (icm) is shown in the novel as an extremely passionate character who tries to get the girl he wants by hook or by crook. The novel does not show the love of the icm till the end of the text, when we see the passion that he is capable of. We see the icm as a betrayer when he uses Lenny to betray Ayah to the mob. At this point, the reader would be shocked as the icm till then is shown as a nice person who has some feelings for Ayah. The murder of the Masseur and way his body was put in a gunny bag near Lenny?s house would now seem to be the icm?s deed. Later, in the novel, when Godmother discovers Ayah, and when the icm explains his deeds, one is able to empathise with him but not sympathise with him.
If the novel is a love story, then why is the narrator Lenny? If the narrator was the icm himself, then it would be a propaganda novel of the icm explaining his deeds and the reader would sympathise with him. One would see all the emotional turmoil the icm experiences, but the deeds of the icm are evil, and sympathizing with his deeds is not what the author wants the reader to do. So why not Ayah as the narrator? Ayah would be the other end of the spectrum, one who is unaware of the intensity of the love of the icm, who is raped and ravaged by the mob led by the icm. A narrative from Ayah?s perspective would inevitably make the novel totally anti-icm, which would then mask the icm?s perspective. So, why a child? An adult narrator would be influenced by the ethics and morals of the society, and also by his/her own biases. Also, an adult would probably have not observed the intimacy between Ayah and the Masseur, as the two would not have openly displayed it. Adults are more expressive and feel more secure about their privacy in the presence of a child than in the presence of other adults. A child?s narrative would be more objective than an adult?s without the biases of social and ethical order.
For example, if the narrator had been Lenny?s Godmother, it would have been heavily biased by the ethical disruption caused by the kidnapping of Ayah and the last chapter would not have revealed the intensity of emotions of the icm. The reader would be made to despise the icm for his deeds and his motivations would not have been revealed. There is a danger of choosing a child narrator. A child would not be able to fathom love and sexuality, as he/she would be naïve regarding these matters. In that light, a child narrator would not understand the emotions of the icm for Ayah, or the emotions of Ayah and the Masseur for eachother. The author solves this problem using Lenny?s cousin. Lenny learns about sexuality and the feelings of love from her cousin. Cousin, who is shown to be infatuated with Lenny from the start, helps Lenny understand the meaning of love and emotional turmoil that entails when love is not returned. He also shows Lenny how love can be very possessive. These lessons learnt by Lenny through her personal experiences with Cousin later helps her to empathise with the icm. I particularly liked this idea of the author very much. How is it a partition novel? The novel has the Partition of India in the background of the story. The partition also serves to give the icm a leeway for his heinous deeds.
The novel describes the horrors of the Partition very well and the reader is drawn into the tale. The fears, the insecurity, and the hatred that was bred in the people by the politicians of that time for their own vested interests is very caricatured in the novel. The changing loyalties of the circle of friends who in the end become fiends brings forth the true horror of Partition when friends became traitors. The description of the massacre of Ranna?s village shows how humans behaved like savages, killing their own countrymen. The icm?s sees a perfect opportunity to claim what he thinks is his. The Partition also psychologically affects the icm as his family is murdered brutally on the train. It turns him into a cruel person, he then joins in the fray and kills Hindus, some of them his friends. All in all the icm is very much affected by the Partition and he uses the violence as a machanism to claim Ayah but it backfires.
A sad tale of Partition is shown, where the crimes of the people killed the national spirit and no matter what was tried, it still remains as a deep scar on the psyche of the people. As Jinnah himself put it, ?Pakistan has been the biggest mistake of my life.? Partition of India is truly the sorest point in the sub-continent?s history, when a new nation was born amidst humungous turmoil and violence that later both countries have regretted and will do so for the rest of their existence. So will the icm regret his deeds for the rest of his miserable life.
The Ice Candy man shows us the naked human emotions that are revealed whenever passions run high and it also shows how they can be good and evil in the same person. The novel has a simple narrative, enhanced by the use of humour, which effectively tells us the story of the Ice candy man.
The ice candy man (icm) is shown in the novel as an extremely passionate character who tries to get the girl he wants by hook or by crook. The novel does not show the love of the icm till the end of the text, when we see the passion that he is capable of. We see the icm as a betrayer when he uses Lenny to betray Ayah to the mob. At this point, the reader would be shocked as the icm till then is shown as a nice person who has some feelings for Ayah. The murder of the Masseur and way his body was put in a gunny bag near Lenny?s house would now seem to be the icm?s deed. Later, in the novel, when Godmother discovers Ayah, and when the icm explains his deeds, one is able to empathise with him but not sympathise with him.
If the novel is a love story, then why is the narrator Lenny? If the narrator was the icm himself, then it would be a propaganda novel of the icm explaining his deeds and the reader would sympathise with him. One would see all the emotional turmoil the icm experiences, but the deeds of the icm are evil, and sympathizing with his deeds is not what the author wants the reader to do. So why not Ayah as the narrator? Ayah would be the other end of the spectrum, one who is unaware of the intensity of the love of the icm, who is raped and ravaged by the mob led by the icm. A narrative from Ayah?s perspective would inevitably make the novel totally anti-icm, which would then mask the icm?s perspective. So, why a child? An adult narrator would be influenced by the ethics and morals of the society, and also by his/her own biases. Also, an adult would probably have not observed the intimacy between Ayah and the Masseur, as the two would not have openly displayed it. Adults are more expressive and feel more secure about their privacy in the presence of a child than in the presence of other adults. A child?s narrative would be more objective than an adult?s without the biases of social and ethical order.
For example, if the narrator had been Lenny?s Godmother, it would have been heavily biased by the ethical disruption caused by the kidnapping of Ayah and the last chapter would not have revealed the intensity of emotions of the icm. The reader would be made to despise the icm for his deeds and his motivations would not have been revealed. There is a danger of choosing a child narrator. A child would not be able to fathom love and sexuality, as he/she would be naïve regarding these matters. In that light, a child narrator would not understand the emotions of the icm for Ayah, or the emotions of Ayah and the Masseur for eachother. The author solves this problem using Lenny?s cousin. Lenny learns about sexuality and the feelings of love from her cousin. Cousin, who is shown to be infatuated with Lenny from the start, helps Lenny understand the meaning of love and emotional turmoil that entails when love is not returned. He also shows Lenny how love can be very possessive. These lessons learnt by Lenny through her personal experiences with Cousin later helps her to empathise with the icm. I particularly liked this idea of the author very much. How is it a partition novel? The novel has the Partition of India in the background of the story. The partition also serves to give the icm a leeway for his heinous deeds.
The novel describes the horrors of the Partition very well and the reader is drawn into the tale. The fears, the insecurity, and the hatred that was bred in the people by the politicians of that time for their own vested interests is very caricatured in the novel. The changing loyalties of the circle of friends who in the end become fiends brings forth the true horror of Partition when friends became traitors. The description of the massacre of Ranna?s village shows how humans behaved like savages, killing their own countrymen. The icm?s sees a perfect opportunity to claim what he thinks is his. The Partition also psychologically affects the icm as his family is murdered brutally on the train. It turns him into a cruel person, he then joins in the fray and kills Hindus, some of them his friends. All in all the icm is very much affected by the Partition and he uses the violence as a machanism to claim Ayah but it backfires.
A sad tale of Partition is shown, where the crimes of the people killed the national spirit and no matter what was tried, it still remains as a deep scar on the psyche of the people. As Jinnah himself put it, ?Pakistan has been the biggest mistake of my life.? Partition of India is truly the sorest point in the sub-continent?s history, when a new nation was born amidst humungous turmoil and violence that later both countries have regretted and will do so for the rest of their existence. So will the icm regret his deeds for the rest of his miserable life.
The Ice Candy man shows us the naked human emotions that are revealed whenever passions run high and it also shows how they can be good and evil in the same person. The novel has a simple narrative, enhanced by the use of humour, which effectively tells us the story of the Ice candy man.
Review:
"Bapsi Sidhwa has turned her gaze upon the domestic comedy of a Pakistani family in the 1940s and somehow managed to evoke the great political upheavals of the age ... and I am particularly touched by the way she has held the wicked world up to the mirror of a young girl's mind and caught so much that is lyrical and significant ... a mysterious and wonderful novel." Richard Ryan in Washington Post
"Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man is like foraging through a tableful of discounted Swatch watches, and finding a gold Rolex......it illustrates the power of good fiction: a historical tragedy comes alive, yielding insight into both the past and the subcontinent's turbulent present." Deidre Donahue in USA Today
"Bapsi Sidhwa has turned her gaze upon the domestic comedy of a Pakistani family in the 1940s and somehow managed to evoke the great political upheavals of the age ... and I am particularly touched by the way she has held the wicked world up to the mirror of a young girl's mind and caught so much that is lyrical and significant ... a mysterious and wonderful novel." Richard Ryan in Washington Post
"Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man is like foraging through a tableful of discounted Swatch watches, and finding a gold Rolex......it illustrates the power of good fiction: a historical tragedy comes alive, yielding insight into both the past and the subcontinent's turbulent present." Deidre Donahue in USA Today
Throughout,
the novel sustains the vitality of Lenny's world with a series of wonderfully
comic scenes. Highly recommended for all libraries." J. Sudrann in Library
Journal.
"Like
all Sidhwa's work, the novel contains a rich undercurrent of legend and
folklore. It combines Sidhwa's affectionate admiration for her own community
with a compassion for the dispossessed. Her own childhood memories give the
novel further depth and resonance." The Oxford Companion To
Twentieth-Century Literature in English
"The novel is about the slow awaking of the child heroine both to sexuality and grown-up pains and pleasures and to the particular historical disaster that overwhelm her world... compulsively readable." Observer
"Ice-Candy-Man deserves to be ranked as amongst the most authentic and best on the partition of India ... Sidhwa has blossomed into Pakistani's best writer of fiction in English." Khushwant Singh, The Tribune
Sidhwa's triumph lies in creating characters so rich in hilarious and accurate detail, so alive and active, that long after one has closed the book, they continue to perform their extraordinary and wonderful feats before our eyes." Anita Desai in Dawn
"The novel is about the slow awaking of the child heroine both to sexuality and grown-up pains and pleasures and to the particular historical disaster that overwhelm her world... compulsively readable." Observer
"Ice-Candy-Man deserves to be ranked as amongst the most authentic and best on the partition of India ... Sidhwa has blossomed into Pakistani's best writer of fiction in English." Khushwant Singh, The Tribune
Sidhwa's triumph lies in creating characters so rich in hilarious and accurate detail, so alive and active, that long after one has closed the book, they continue to perform their extraordinary and wonderful feats before our eyes." Anita Desai in Dawn
Book Summary of Ice Candy Man
Now Filmed as 1947, a motion picture by Deepa Mehta Few novels
have caught the turmoil of the Indian subcontinent during Partition with such
immediacy, such wit and tragic power. Bapsi Sidhwa s lce-Candy Man is an
intimate glimpse into events as they tear apart the world of Lenny, a young
Parsee girl growing up in the pungent, busybodying city of Lahore. Ice-Candy
Man deserves to be ranked amongst the most authentic and best [books] on the
partition of India. Khushwant Singh Bapsi Sidhwa s capacity for bringing an
assortment of characters vividly to life is enviable. She has given us in
Ice-Candy Man a memorable book, one that confirms her reputation as Pakistan s
finest English language novelist. The New York Times Book Review [Sidhwa] has
told a sweet and amusing tale filled with the worst atrocities imaginable; she
has concocted a girlishly romantic love story which is driven by the most
militant feminism; above all, she has turned her gaze upon the domestic comedy
of a Pakistani family in the 1940s and somehow managed to evoke the great
political upheavals of the age. The Washington Post
Book Reviews of Ice Candy Man
The
Dlectics of the Minorities
Review by Dr V. Pala Prasa Rao, JKC College,
Guntur
Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice-Candy Man
recaptures the ominous reverberations of the traumatic experience of partition
after forty years. She presents a brilliant close-up of communal violence
during the times of partition and the aftermath of it which tore apart the
world of Lenny, a young Parsee girl growing up in the city of Lahore. She
slowly awakened to the historical disaster and gained ‘poisonous insight’ as
the multi-religious throng of her beautiful ayah’s (mid servant) admirers began
to indulge in internecine quarrels with regard to issues related to partition.
Ice-Candy Man is a penetrative study of minority complex- “the fear of being deprived, surpassed, losing out, threatened, dominated, suppressed, beaten down, exterminated and of losing one’s identity and even life”1. All the minorities dreaded that they would be hounded to death if Pakistan came into a reality. The Parsis of Lahore were aware of the fact that in the surcharged atmosphere where passions bound to rule reason that their survival was under threat. They knew that they, owing to the vulnerability and the lack of numerical strength, could not afford fighting a pitched battle against any section of society. Nor could they cherish any fond hope of siding any party because there was possibility of “ not one but two-or three-new nations!”2. Col. Bharucha warned Parsis that should be very cautious lest they might find themselves championing the wrong side.
If we’re stuck with the Hindus, they’ll swipe
Our business from under our noses …….. If we’re
Stuck with Muslims they’ll convert us by the
sword! And God can help us if we’re stuck with
the Sikhs! (p-59)
The Parsis of Lahore were not’ stupid enough to court trouble’ by backing up any community because they have something against everybody. They would not like to take an active part in politics because they dreaded that by ‘Jumping into the middle’ they would be ‘mangled into chutney’. They knew that ‘it was not easy to be accepted into a country unless some ingenious norms for living with other communities were worked out.
Let whoever rule!. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh,
Christian!. We will abide by the rules of their Land, (p-39)
The success of Parsis lies in the fact that by evolving certain workable norms to live amiably with the majority, they tided over the problem of being driven out of Pakistan. They remained infact and prospered even under ‘Muslim Moguls’ simply because they continued to conduct their ‘lives quietly’ (p-127). As ‘a smart and civilized people’ they wanted to sweeten ‘to sweeten the lives’ of others. They did never engage themselves in proselytization; nor did they present ‘threat to anybody’. It was resolved to a man that Parsis should be neutral in the tug of war among the three major communities, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. The neutral attitude of the narrator character, Lenny had its roots in the racial psychology of the Parsis. Even the Parsis’ children, Lenny and Adi, taking the cue from their elders, shouted themselves hoarse crying, ‘Jai Hindu!. Or ‘Pakistan Zindabad!. Depending on the whim or the allegiance of the principal crier.
In the final analysis this policy turns out to be very beneficial. While the Parsis were in harmony with the Muslims, the other minorities, Hindus and Sikhs were uprooted from their homes and hearths and subjected to atrocities unimaginable.
The book is basically a cerebral study of the dynamics of minorities. 1947 figures prominently in the recent edition since the writer seeks to give an inkling about the work.
Ice-Candy Man is a penetrative study of minority complex- “the fear of being deprived, surpassed, losing out, threatened, dominated, suppressed, beaten down, exterminated and of losing one’s identity and even life”1. All the minorities dreaded that they would be hounded to death if Pakistan came into a reality. The Parsis of Lahore were aware of the fact that in the surcharged atmosphere where passions bound to rule reason that their survival was under threat. They knew that they, owing to the vulnerability and the lack of numerical strength, could not afford fighting a pitched battle against any section of society. Nor could they cherish any fond hope of siding any party because there was possibility of “ not one but two-or three-new nations!”2. Col. Bharucha warned Parsis that should be very cautious lest they might find themselves championing the wrong side.
If we’re stuck with the Hindus, they’ll swipe
Our business from under our noses …….. If we’re
Stuck with Muslims they’ll convert us by the
sword! And God can help us if we’re stuck with
the Sikhs! (p-59)
The Parsis of Lahore were not’ stupid enough to court trouble’ by backing up any community because they have something against everybody. They would not like to take an active part in politics because they dreaded that by ‘Jumping into the middle’ they would be ‘mangled into chutney’. They knew that ‘it was not easy to be accepted into a country unless some ingenious norms for living with other communities were worked out.
Let whoever rule!. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh,
Christian!. We will abide by the rules of their Land, (p-39)
The success of Parsis lies in the fact that by evolving certain workable norms to live amiably with the majority, they tided over the problem of being driven out of Pakistan. They remained infact and prospered even under ‘Muslim Moguls’ simply because they continued to conduct their ‘lives quietly’ (p-127). As ‘a smart and civilized people’ they wanted to sweeten ‘to sweeten the lives’ of others. They did never engage themselves in proselytization; nor did they present ‘threat to anybody’. It was resolved to a man that Parsis should be neutral in the tug of war among the three major communities, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. The neutral attitude of the narrator character, Lenny had its roots in the racial psychology of the Parsis. Even the Parsis’ children, Lenny and Adi, taking the cue from their elders, shouted themselves hoarse crying, ‘Jai Hindu!. Or ‘Pakistan Zindabad!. Depending on the whim or the allegiance of the principal crier.
In the final analysis this policy turns out to be very beneficial. While the Parsis were in harmony with the Muslims, the other minorities, Hindus and Sikhs were uprooted from their homes and hearths and subjected to atrocities unimaginable.
The book is basically a cerebral study of the dynamics of minorities. 1947 figures prominently in the recent edition since the writer seeks to give an inkling about the work.
One of
the most symbolistic novels on partition
Ice Candy Man Bapsi Sidhwa
In Ice Candy Man, Bapsi Sidhwa describes the communal violence and the turmoil during the partition through the eyes of Lenny - an eight year old young Parsi girl from Lahore. Lenny‘s comprehension of the horror and pity hovering over the city of Lahore is told through the story of what happens to her beloved Hindu Ayah- Shanta. Lenny is lame and helpless. Ayah looks after her as her sister and takes care of all her needs. She takes her outside in the pram on Waris road and Jail road frequently. Ayah‘s sexuality attracts men of varying occupations and religions. Of these suitors, Masseur and Dilnawaz (the Ice Candy Man) have strong rivalry against each other to win the favors of Ayah.
Lenny is eye witness to the amorous advances of Ayah towards her suitors. She is also becoming conscious about the changing environment around her. The rumours of the division of India are in the air. Political gatherings are very common raising slogans against the British Raj while demanding an independent homeland for the Muslims.
One day the riots breakout in Lahore in a locality far away from Lenny‘s house. This leads to the killing of innocent people on both sides. The news of bloodshed spreads like wild fire. Soon the entire Punjab province is seen burning in the fire of hatred and communal violence.
In the meanwhile, Ice Candy Man, out of sheer hatred and jealousy, manages to kill Masseur and paves his way to get Ayah. One day he waits for his sisters on Lahore railway station. When the train arrives from Gurdaspur, everyone on the platform is shocked to see the ghastly sight. The train is loaded with mutilated bodies of Muslim passengers. There is no woman on board but sacks full of the beasts.
This ugly sight turns friendly Dilnwaz into a person possessed with frenzy and a desire to kill all the Hindus. He loves Ayah from the core of his heart but this train scene makes him forget all his loyalties and devotion for Ayah. He abducts Ayah and takes her to the Hira Mandi of Lahore. Ayah is forced to offer her body to appease the sensual desires of the visitors and Ice Candy Man plays the pimp. She is just Hindu for Ice Candy Man. After a few months, Ayah is forced to embrace Islam and Ice Candy Man marries her as he is in true love with her. Only the urge for vengeance transforms him into beast and the killer.
Later with the help of Lenny‘s relatives, Ayah is rescued from the prostitution house and she reaches the relief camp at Amritsar. Ice Candy Man also follows her across the Wahga border into India. Lenny‘s delicate mind is shocked to see all this happening before her very eyes and she is unable to shun all these abominable realities.
Mohammed Hanif and A Case Of Exploding Mangoes
Mohammed Hanif (born 1964) is a Pakistani writer and journalist. He was born in Okara. He graduated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as a pilot officer but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. He initially worked for Newsline, The Washington Post and India Today. In 1996, he moved to
Dictators have long exercised the literary imagination. Shame, Salman Rushdie's novel of a land that "is and is not Pakistan", gave us the buccaneering Raza Hyder, a thinly veiled depiction of General Zia-ul-Haq. Paranoid, cruel and insecure, Zia appears again in Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a debut novel shaped as much by the subcontinent's fascination with history and historical figures as by political thrillers in the tradition of Forsyth and Le Carré.
Despite a shaky start, with overkill on the familiar imaginative topography of Pakistan - deserts, generals, spies, explosions and cover-ups - Hanif's narrative deftly explores the various possibilities suggested by Zia's death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash. Along the way, there's plenty of humour and slapstick. The obligatory but satisfying satirical inversions are typified by the dictator's head resting on a Pakistani flag while his buttocks are pointed at a Saudi doctor's probing fingers.
Zia's frenzied readings of the Koran cause consternation among his subordinates, while there are multiple possibilities for attempts on his life. One is a curse pronounced by Zainab, a blind rape victim sentenced to death by stoning under new ordinances ("mixing religion with the business of running a country" is Zia's innovation). As various plots hatch, the crow carrying Zainab's curse flies inexorably towards its quarry.
As a thriller, the novel has plenty of reassuringly familiar characters, such as the intelligence agent who "runs the world with a packet of Dunhills, a gold lighter and an unregistered car". Military aircraft stunts provide gizmo glamour (Hanif is a trained airforce pilot). In this account of his botched missions, Junior Officer Ali Shigri, would-be assassin, is a convincingly klutzy semi-hero. Cadet life is entertainingly evoked, overflowing with japes, jerk-offs, hashish highs and liquored lows.
It is as a serious novel of Pakistan's difficult recent history that Mangoes doesn't take wing, despite its ambitions. Like the Islamabad it depicts as "a whirl of conspiracies and dinner parties", it opts for the thrilling veneer over complex layers. Though its historical context is that pivotal moment when Reagan's US brought together religion and arms to fight its Soviet foe in Afghanistan, it offers few insights into what that disastrous intervention - which included the creation of the Taliban - has meant for Pakistan and its people. It treats its American characters with gentle, even warm-hearted, irony.
In the end, what we get is a story about a few bad men rather than a far-reaching and complicated political alliance whose global legacy shapes our lives. Perhaps "dictator novels" inevitably collude with us in evading reflections on human complicity. In Rushdie's words, "if it is just a question of King Kong and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down - then the rest of us are excused".
Fed on a steady diet of cultural oppositions, we've become less resistant to syndicated morality tales than we might be. Perhaps we want some places to function as ciphers - blighted landscapes of fundamentalism, despotism, un-freedom, mirrors to our satisfied sense of self. Reality is messier: these are ordinary societies and human beings at the receiving end of brutal historical agendas. The most unexpected aspect of Mangoes is also its most compelling - the wryly told story of a love affair between two cadets. The incisive work that remains unwritten inside Hanif's promising novel can only emerge when we become more demanding readers of other places. In this case that would be a Pakistan not reducible to generals, jets and jihadis.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a novel based on a real event in August 1988: an American-made C-130 airplane crashed soon after takeoff from a Pakistani air base, killing president Zia ul-Haq, along with several other VIPs including the U.S. ambassador Arnold Raphel. Foul play was immediately suspected, but the reasons for the crash are still unknown, and it is considered one of the great unsolved assassinations in history.
At the time, the author, Mohammed Hanif, was in the Pakistan air force, soon to quit and take up journalism. Today he lives in London where he heads the BBC's Urdu service.
Hanif is quoted in the Times of London: "I was trying to capture the period and at the same time tell a story which you want to keep reading. I aimed to write a thriller with jokes."
"A thriller with jokes" is an excellent summary, and he has succeeded in weaving three storylines that hook you in and keep you on the edge of your chair, while delivering laughs through biting satire of a very unhappy time period in Pakistan.
The main thread of the novel is a first-person account by an imaginary young air force officer-in-training, Ali Shigri. The training academy is its own world, with an American CIA agent acting as a drill instructor, Uncle Starchy, a laundry man who can supply you with stuff more potent than heroin, and "Baby O" Obaid, who is Shigri's fellow cadet, roommmate, and much more. This setup yields many Catch-22 moments, but the only similarity of this book to Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" is its sense of anger and distortion of justice, and that it is set in a military milieu. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is much more compact and focused, and its jokes work because they are authentic Pakistan military.
We gradually learn that Ali Shigri nurses a private grudge for the death of his father Colonel Shigri. He carefully plans an assassination with his sword as part of his drill routine. But suddenly, Shigri's friend Obaid goes AWOL, presumably with a very expensive airplane, and Shigri finds himself arrested and thrown into a dungeon under a Mughal-era fort by a sinister but funny ISI Major who "doesn't even wear a uniform."
The second storyline is the obvious, political one. In those days, Zia ul-Haq was a dictator with many enemies. An army chief who overthrew Zulfikar Bhutto and later hanged him, Zia ruled Pakistan with an iron hand. When he died, Bhutto's daughter Benazir told reporters, "I do not regret the death of Zia." Within his own military government, powerful disaffected generals included the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI. The country was crawling with Americans, and suitcases full of dollars were being funneled to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.
All of this material is mined for this novel, with most characters real, including a civil engineer named OBL from Bin Laden Constructions who is invited to the ambassador's July 4th party, and a few imagined.
Zia himself gets many scenes as a paranoid and increasingly superstitious ruler turning to excessive piety and using the Koran as a fortune cookie, now deciding to cloister himself in Army House, now giving out alms to poor widows on television. Zia finds himself attracted to a white woman reporter's cleavage, a source of considerable irritation to his wife the first lady, who throws him out of their bedroom.
The third strand, about a poor, blind woman who was raped and is sentenced to death for fornication, since she could not possibly identify her attackers as required by law, is also based on a true incident. While the blind woman is powerless, her heart-felt curses perhaps have the power to transmit themselves through a crow that can fly long distances, crossing borders and finding their target.
These three strands come together in the end where the exact causes for the airplane crash are explained, sort of.
The most attractive feature of the novel is an authentic portrayal of this time period in Pakistan's history. This was at the height of the Cold War, the Soviets were being driven out of Afghanistan by the Afghan jihad, and it was a period of triumph for the religious warriors in the United States and in Pakistan who were supplying them---see George Crile's book Charley Wilson's War, which is acknowledged by the author.
At the same time, the Pakistani state was increasingly dysfunctional. The military, which was running the country, regarded itself as a savior of the nation and was completely isolated from society. Thrown in a dark dungeon under Lahore Fort, Ali Shigri is unable to communicate with a fellow prisoner in the next cell, because, as he puts it:
"How the hell am I supposed to
know about civilians or what they think? All I know about them is from
television and newspapers. They never
tell you about the nutters who want to spit on you."
The author has found a rich seam to mine, one that keeps on
giving. Last year, now ex-president Pervez Musharraf gave a televised speech
imposing martial law on the country. The speech was in two parts: one in
English, which was written by speechwriters, and the other in Urdu, which was
his own. Mohammed Hanif commented on the speech, and he said of the second
part:tell you about the nutters who want to spit on you."
And when he said, "Extremists
have gone very extreme," it suddenly occurred to me why his speech pattern
seemed so familiar. He was that uncle that you get stranded with at a family
gathering when everybody else has gone to sleep but there is still some whisky
left in the bottle. And uncle thinks he is about to say something very profound
-- if you would only pour him one last one.
The most authentic fact about the novel, which raises it from
being a good historical satire to also being a commentary on today's world, is
that the jokes are still good in today's Pakistan.
Mohammed
Hanif : Facing facts, fiction and fruit
Sara Veal,
Contributor, Jakarta | Sun, 11/22/2009 2:40 PM | Life
|
Mohammed
Hanif has had a diverse career that many would envy: fighter pilot, political
journalist, BBC correspondent, playwright, screenwriter and now bestselling
author.
His 2008 debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes
receives much critical acclaim, including being long-listed for the 2008 Man
Booker prize and
winning the 2009 Commonwealth Best First Book Prize.
However,
when speaking at the Singapore Writers Festival earlier this month, at a
Q&A and to The Jakarta Post, the Pakistani novelist seemed unaffected by
his accomplishments, describing his life as "pretty dull so far",
without a hint of false modesty, while simultaneously infusing his comments and
recollections with the same wry, dark humor that makes his first novel such a
delight to read.
"When
I was a teenager, I boasted that I wanted to make a play or a movie in Punjabi
and I want to write a novel in English... As it happens, that's how life turned
out to be. You read and read, and one day you get delusional and think, I also
can actually do this," he says.
Aside
from these teenage dreams, his main priority was simply to get out of his
hometown, a small Pakistani village where he says life "revolved around
potato crops and weddings" and "one didn't know anything about
anything" unless guests from the city left a newspaper behind. So when at
16 years old, he saw in one of these rare newspapers that the air force was
recruiting fighter pilots, he decided to apply.
"It
seemed a very glamorous thing... but, as soon as I got in, I realized I had
left one closed community for another, one with gates and guns," he says.
Although
the army proved to be an awkward fit - "I wasn't very good at anything,
especially the things officers are supposed to do" - he endured seven
years, gaining a military education and finding solace in the surprisingly
well-stocked army library, reading everything from Frederick Forsyth to
Dostoevsky.
When
he left, as he was "only good at reading and writing", he found
himself "drifting" toward journalism.
"I
had a friend who was freelancing for various magazines, and I thought he wrote
pretty badly, so I thought if he could do it, I could do it too," he says.
Based
in Karachi, Hanif made his name interviewing fashion models and writing
entertainment reviews. He soon branched out, when struggling actor and director
friends begged him to try his hand at writing plays and scripts.
He was
also approached by a small, "fiercely democratic" political magazine
run by women, where he worked for around seven years as the only male
journalist, marrying a colleague (and "closet actress"), until 1997,
when the BBC offered him a job in London as an special Urdu correspondent.
While
in London he began to take his first steps toward literary greatness. Although
he admits he tends to be one of those people who'd "pick up a book and
say, *this is a creative writing product', and then put it aside", he
became interested in studying a Master's degree at the University of East
Anglia (UEA), which boasts one of the UK's most respected creative writing
programs.
"One
of the things that I'd lacked in my life was that I'd never been to a proper
university. The only education I'd had was at the military academy, and
military academies all over the world are not known for their intellectual
rigor," he says.
UEA
was especially appealing as one of his favorite novelists, Patricia Duncker (Hallucinating
Foucault), taught there.
"I
spoke to her for five minutes and I thought it would be nice to occasionally
talk to this person and the only way to do that was if you were in that
department."
Although
he claims he was much older than his classmates (late 30s to their
early-mid-20s), he says he thoroughly enjoyed the university experience, from
the cheap beer in the student union to the mad sorts that eternally haunted the
campus, as well as the fact of being surrounded by like-minded wannabe writers,
which gave him the confidence to be more open about his novelist aspirations.
"I
became quite shameless, telling people I'm writing a book, so what?" he
says.
The
subject of this book was one he had in his mind some time: the enduring mystery
of the 1988 airplane crash that killed Pakistan's then dictator, General Zia ul
Haq, along with several other top army generals and an American ambassador.
"I
grew up during his time, and he was one of those typical boring dictators whose
face was always stuck on the TV, this constant drone that goes on in the
background," he says.
Hanif
says he was intrigued that nobody in Pakistan ever seemed interested in finding
out who might have done the deed, despite the obvious suspiciousness of the
incident.
"More
than the murder mystery, I think that kind of attitude, that sort of *he's
dead, good riddance, let's get on with our lives' - that attitude intrigued me
more than the mystery itself."
Writing
the book was a 30-month process that involved much scribbling in cafes and
pubs, wrestling with his "short-attention span" and a sticky Internet
research incident on an American army website where he accidentally implied
that he was planning a terrorist attack.
"I
had registered myself as Mohammed, and said *Can someone tell me the preflight
checks for the *Hercules C130, the plane General Zia died in*? I mean, I didn't
think of it at all... within 10 minutes there was so much abuse; I was sitting
in my house, thinking what the hell have I done?... That cured me of any more
research."
Once
it was completed, he says he managed to get it published in the UK by lying.
"I
contacted *the agent* and said *I met you last year'. Which I hadn't. But we
were in the same building, so we could have, and if I'd had the guts, I could
have gone up to her and said hello. So I said last year, we met, now I've
finished my book, could you read it? So she said, yeah, send it."
Evidently,
she liked what she read, as she found him publishers in the UK, USA and Canada.
However,
getting published in Pakistan was another story. Hanif says he sent it to four
publishers without any luck, with most admitting the book's subjects - foolish
dictators, homosexual romance - were too controversial.
"The
publishers were scared... and they were wrong. They are small businesses, why
would I expect somebody to risk their livelihood for a trifling little novel?
So that is understandable. But they all want to publish my second book!"
he says, adding that the novel topped the bestseller lists in Pakistan for more
than a year.
Hanif,
who returned to Karachi last year with his wife and son, notes that the tense
political situation in Pakistan was probably why his book failed to ignite much
controversy, as the publishers had feared.
"By
the time the book came out, Pakistan had such huge problems that nobody was
going to worry about a book."
While
he dismisses the fact the international media often places Pakistan at the top
of "most-dangerous countries" lists - "If you were going to make
a list by popular consensus of the top 10 most dangerous countries then
probably most people would include the USA" - he says his homeland is in a
lot of trouble, facing similar problems to Indonesia, just "multiplied by
10": too many years of military rule; a dynastic approach to democracy
(thanks to the systematic martyrdom of the Bhuttos); and increasing Islam
extremism, none of which he feels reflects popular attitudes.
"It's
always been a Muslim country, and there's never been any real problems
before... whether you wanted to go to the mosque or get smashed in the
evening... it's all your own business... the state and the society was open
enough for both to exist side by side."
He
adds democracy in Pakistan has yet to have a chance to develop and flourish.
"In
62 years we've only had one parliament which completed its run... even that
ended in tragedy."
But
while he's a cynic by nature, he retains a basic optimism that things will
improve, saying he would have no justification for remaining in the country if
he didn't.
In the
meantime, he's working on his second novel, a "civilian" love story
set in Pakistan.
Although
the focus is once again Pakistan, Hanif says he remains open to all genres,
topics and settings.
"There's
always outer space!"
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.
Sara Wajid
What caused the mysterious plane crash in August
1988 that killed the military dictator Zia ul-Haq, several of his senior
generals and the United States ambassador to Islamabad? It is one of the great
unanswered questions of Pakistan's violent history. At the time, some
suspicious, phosphorus-covered mango seeds discovered in the wreckage sparked
countless conspiracy theories. Did the CIA spike the fruit with VX gas to
eliminate the increasingly unstable Zia once he had neutralised the Soviet
threat in Afghanis tan? Was it death by lethal mango?
Mohammed Hanif's
fabulist reimagining of Zia's assassination ends my long wait (since Rushdie's Shame in 1983) for an
unashamedly fun page-turner set in my beleaguered and notoriously un-fun
homeland. Three murder plots (including a mischievous riff on the "mango
theory") compete for their target until the last, suspenseful page. Along
the way, A Case of Exploding Mangoes outlines how Zia's cynical
collusion with the US in Afghanistan during the 1980s turned Pakistan into the
dangerously leaky condom between the west and political Islam that it is today.
Osama Bin Laden pops up in a diverting cameo at the US embassy party to
celebrate the defeat of the Soviets by US-sponsored mujahedin in Afghanistan.
This brassy,
savvy, comic debut is the latest in the thrilling new wave of Pakistani English
literature - including Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke, Nadeem Aslam's Season of the
Rainbirds and Kamila
Shamsie's Kartography - that places Pakistan, rather than its
relationship with the west, confidently at the centre of the action. These new
writers are in no sense the literary children of empire. The influences
apparent in Hanif's prose include the grotesque, scatological, surrealist
political satire and theatre of the absurd of Wole Soyinka's Madmen and
Specialists, John le
Carré's spy novels and Joseph Heller's classic parody of military bureaucracy, Catch-22.
The novel is
refreshingly free of post-colonial literary flourishes. As the London-based
Iraqi playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak mischievously observed in his 2007 play Baghdad Wedding, "The English only
give Booker Prizes to Indians if their books contain local colour - someone
slicing a mango or someone running through some luscious forest, or hovering on
a carpet carried by invisible waves of magic realism." Hanif is mesmerised
instead by the landscape of naff 1980s popular culture. Loving descriptions of
Toyota Corollas, Baywatch, Levis, Avanti, Top Gun sunglasses, fake Poison
cologne, Where Eagles Dare and Coca-Cola bottle tops pepper his prose.
But it is the
unashamedly populist timbre, the defiantly silly, knockabout humour and the
sheer brio of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, that mark it out as a new
departure in Pakistani writing and a bold cultural intervention in British
publishing. It is probably the first English novel about Pakistan with
ambitions to cross over from literary to popular fiction. Hanif combines a
journalist's gift for concise, punchy storytelling (he is head of the BBC World
Service Urdu section and trained as a pilot in the Pakistani army during Zia's
rule) with an affable, laconic, breezy, believable protagonist, Junior Under
Officer Ali Shigri, who leads us into hard-to-reach corners of Pakistani
society: the presidential bedroom, army barracks, prisons and torture chambers.
As the critic
Muneeza Shamsie has written, "The tyrannical nature of Pakistan's various
governments has not been conducive to freedom of expression in any language.
But there has always been an oversensitivity to English writing, particularly
if it is deemed as 'creating a bad impression' of the country
internationally." This burden of representation, combined with Pakistan's
current position on the geopolitical knife edge and under the west's close and
fearful watch, has not left much creative breathing room for fictional Pakistanis.
Which is why
the three - dimensional characterisation of silly, sexy, righteous,
convincingly young-at-heart Ali Shigri is pathetically gratifying. His voice
rings true whether he's having sex with his Rilke-reading roomie and lover,
Obaid ("my starched khaki trousers suddenly felt very tight"),
muttering to his neighbour in the depths of a Mughal torture chamber, or having
a bad trip on Chitrali hashish. Shigri on spycraft: "The US of A has got
satellites with cameras so powerful they can count the exact number of hairs on
your bum. Bannon showed us a picture of this satellite and claimed that he had
seen bum pictures taken from space but couldn't show them to us because they
were classified."
The portrayal
of Zia's last, hyper-paranoid, megalomaniacal days self-imprisoned in the
presidential home is merciless. The final image of him leaking blood from his
tapeworm- ravaged innards while trying to maintain appearances for the US
ambassador is particularly unforgettable. But a dead and discredited dictator
is an unsatisfyingly soft target. The excoriation of Zia's rule is more
cathartic than dangerous, as is the lampooning of the cast of corrupt generals,
secret service goons and US soldiers and diplomats. Their legacy is best
illustrated by the constant intrusion of the ghosts of the silenced or the
disappeared and dispossessed whom Shigri encounters in the military dungeon.
Finally, it
is the parallels between General Zia and President Musharraf that give the
novel its political force. In Zia we see Musharraf, whom Hanif has described as
being like "Zia on speed, a kind of chest-thumping instead of
hand-wringing version of Zia". The self-justifying generals repeat the
mantra, "I am one of ten men standing between the US and the
Soviets." For Soviets, we now inevitably read al-Qaeda.
Francesca Mari :At some point growing up I
had an epiphany: The lies I told were always better, safer, if I added an odd
detail or two. If I was going to lie about spending the night at Katie's, I
might as well add that their calico climbed up into the microwave in the middle
of the night and marked its territory, a mark announced throughout the house
the next morning when we microwaved water for our tea.
The comedy that unfolds in
Mohammed Hanif's highly anticipated first novel operates similarly. "A
Case of the Exploding Mangoes" imagines several converging conspiracies
and coincidences leading up to the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed Gen.
Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. He was the Pakistani dictator who overthrew Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto, who was herself assassinated in December. A
graduate of the Pakistan Air Force Academy and head of the BBC's Urdu service,
Hanif presumably stored more than enough material for his sprightly satire and
embellishes from there.
"General Zia,"
Hanif writes early in his book, "had taken to reading the English
translation of the Quran before his morning prayers." Why? "[B]ecause
it helped him prepare for his acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize presentation
ceremony." A dictator actually thinks he might win the Nobel Prize? Why
yes! "General Zia thought maybe he should deliver his speech in Urdu. ...
Then he thought of his good friend Ronald Reagan fidgeting with his headphones,
getting restless, and decided to stick to English." And so each fib is
corroborated by another; the humor ricochets.
But darkly comic the novel
is not. No matter how dismal the ensuing events - an iron seared into a scalp,
the shooting, point-blank, of a prisoner approaching to thank the man he
believes has just set him free - dread never sets in. Darkness, in order to
take hold, demands of its characters density, furls of human contradiction, and
Hanif's parade of characters are as blithe as balloons. Blond bimbo, Rilke
reader, Ray-Ban bureaucrat: They can be reduced to types and will pop if
pressed.
The most developed of these
caricatures - for that is what they are - is Air Force Junior Under Officer Ali
Shigri, son of a famous colonel who allegedly committed suicide after a
mishandling of money. But even young Shigri is so stoic, so singular in his
quest to avenge his father's death that one has a difficult time believing him
human. Like Hanif's other caricatures, Shigri lives most intensely in the
book's omissions - in the beliefs a reader ascribes to him. After a steamy
scene between Shigri and his cologned bunkmate, the reader envisions a stifled
sexuality seething beneath Shigri's determined demeanor. Similarly, the reader
reads seething ambition into the depictions of Zia's intelligent underlings.
How else could they sustain catering to the fanatical whims of a sniveling
dictator?
What keeps the reader
engaged is neither Hanif's humor nor his characters but his scope as the book
vivisects an alien and topical military dictatorship. And so much happens!
Widows are herded together at random and given checks on "national
holidays" staged for television, Osama bin Laden (called OBL) gets the
cold shoulder at a party in Texas, bunkmates exchange oral sex (or, well, at
least once), and a major runs across a tarmac in his slippers to stop a plane
with poisoned air freshener.
A playwright at heart,
Hanif ensures that, in the end, all plots are tied into a neat knot. "A
Case of Exploding Mangoes" is clever, choreographed. And the reader is
amused, skipping right along, until, suddenly, the emotional arc finishes and
... nothing. It doesn't affect. The reader looks up and realizes that he
doesn't feel because he's not sure he believes in the situations, or, more
problematically, in the characters themselves.
Disbelief inevitably
encroaches: Did Zia really circle typos in newspapers and send them back to
their editors? Did he really round up widows? I could suspend disbelief for the
magical realism of a crow delivering a curse. But when the rubble on the
third-to-last page offered "the charred pages of a slim book, a hand
gripping the spine, a thumb with a half-grown nail inserted firmly into the
last page," the answer I arrived at was "probably not." The
novel delivers on the entertainment promised. It never claims to deal in truth.
It's just the unfortunate consequence of a fascinating subject that a bit of
truth is what I want. {sbox}
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
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.
Related Links
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.
Mohammad Hanif lands on
his feet
Giles Whittell
talks to former pilot and journalist Mohammed Hanif about Pakistan, the Zia
era, and his book A Case of Exploding Mangoes
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE a society in which young men might
find it unremarkable to be flying fast jets before learning to drive.
California could conceivably do it in, say, 50 years' time, but only if climate
change turns out to be a hoax. North Korea in a national emergency? East
Germany circa 1970?
In Pakistan in the 1980s it actually happened. Mohammed
Hanif, fresh from his parents' farm in the Punjab and barely an adult himself,
had not been in command of any land-born vehicle more powerful than a bicycle
when, high over Karachi, he took control of an American-built T-37 trainer in
the colours of the Pakistan Air Force and vomited into his oxygen mask.
He didn't like flying much. The newspaper ad that had
induced him to approach the Air Force had made the training seem “like an
incredibly exciting thing to do”. It turned out not to be. It was nine parts
square-bashing to one part flying and even that was “hard work without any
interest”. He had terrible eustachian tube trouble, and quickly learnt that “if
you throw up into those oxygen masks you are truly f***ed.”
Hanif the tousled metropolitan journalist - for that is
what he now is - giggles extravagantly. That he was a flyer at all, he adds,
has made it into the publicity material for his dazzling first novel, A Case of
Exploding Mangoes, only because publicists need stories to tell about authors
who in reality “are just boring journalists like you and me”.
Related Links
At this I'm brought up short, not because of the shared
slight but because his flying is actually entirely relevant to any discussion
of his book. It sets the surreal tone and provides a pleasing aerobatic
sequence halfway through (Hanif's aerial barfing experience is fully deployed).
It is what brings the protagonist and his best friend together for shared
torment, poetry and eroticism in an elite Air Force barracks. More broadly, the
flying provides a getaway plane for the friend, whose disappearance drives the
plot, and serves as Hanif's entrée into the top tier of Pakistan's
frighteningly unhinged military government in the age of General Zia ul-Haq
(left).
It does not spoil the story to add that Hanif takes
readers where no fiction writer of any nationality has taken them before: into
the corkscrewing C-130 Hercules in which General Zia and the US Ambassador to
Pakistan at the time died in a spectacular and still unexplained crash on
August 12, 1988; and, with the help of a monosyllabic doctor and a rubber
glove, up Zia's inflamed and excrucicating rectum.
“It will probably offend a couple of people,” Hanif
allows with magnificent understatement. “Maybe the families...” He is referring
to the families of General Zia and General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, General Zia's
intelligence chief, who also looms large in the book and whose son was a
near-permanent feature of Pakistan's Government until this year.
In fact it has already offended more than a couple of
people. “I was probably quite naive,” Hanif says, implausibly. “There are not
too many Zia-lovers left in Pakistan and friends and colleagues who've lived
and worked there - some have read it and seem to think it's all right; no big
deal, nothing saying you can't write stuff like this.” But mainstream Pakistani
publishers have begged to differ. None of them have dared to print the book. A
Karachi news magazine for which Hanif once worked was enthusiastic and planned
to publish it as a one-off, but its chosen printer took the trouble to read it
before switching on the presses and at the last minute decided against.
So, like The Gulag Archipelago, A Case of Exploding
Mangoes will debut outside its author's home country. He doesn't seem too
bothered. London has been his adopted home for a decade and seems more likely
than Islamabad to receive his book in the spirit that he intends.
More than an up-yours to the regime he left behind, it's
an evocation of a resolutely crazy time and place in which a military dictator
with a pencil moustache worthy of Grandpa Potts was falling hard for
fundamentalism in search of his legacy while also serving as Washington's chief
ally in its proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Hence a terrific
scene in which the doomed American ambassador is dragged from his fortified
residence late at night by a phonecall from General Zia because Bill Casey, the
legendary cold warrior and CIA chief, and Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, the
Saudi Interior Minister, have just raced each other to Islamabad from Riyadh in
their respective private jets, and they want company. Later, we encounter a
thriving civil engineer named Osama bin Laden at a July 4 barbeque at the US
Embassy. Imagined? Yes. Conceivable? Absolutely.
This is such fertile territory for fiction that you
wonder why it hasn't been ploughed more often. “I just went with what I knew,”
says Hanif, who is much less rakish and insolent than his narrator, and much
more the self-effacing workaholic that you might expect to find holding down
the job of head of the BBC World Service's Urdu service - which he does - even
as he skewers the icons of contemporary history after long days in Bush House.
“I was trying to capture the period and at the same time tell a story which you
want to keep reading. I aimed to write a thriller with jokes.”
It's certainly funny. It's also a long sigh of
frustration.
When he moved to London in 1996 there was, he says, “a
consensus among political pundits in Pakistan that you could not have more
martial law, that you could not have another dictatorship. This was the view of
senior journalists, colleagues of mine, regardless of their political leanings.
And look what happened. This guy [Pervez Musharraf, whom Hanif has dissed in a
New York Times comment piece as a “garden variety dictator”] came in and he's
basically still there.
“For 9½ years Musharraf was the all-powerful, slightly
macho version of General Zia, doing exactly the same things but in reverse,
trying to undo what Zia had done, and making the same mistakes. General Zia was
basically the godfather of modern, multinational jihad. Before him, we didn't
have it. And now Musharraf is going around picking up jihadists in the name of
Allah and sending them to Guantanamo.” He laughs again, but ruefully. “So I
think there's a lot of anger that might have fed into the book.”
Hanif left the Air Force a month after General Zia's
death. He then spent seven years as a journalist in Pakistan before joining the
BBC. In all it has taken 17 years - though only two years' actual writing - for
his experiences as a cadet to percolate through his anger over Pakistan's
permanent political crisis and produce this book.
With Musharraf now shorn of his army uniform and most of
his power, Hanif hopes to return to Karachi as a correspondent. Does that mean
a London novel will eventually follow? I do hope so. No politician's rectum
will be safe.
Chandrahas Choudhury
reviews A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif Whenever someone famous dies in mysterious circumstances, conspiracy theories proliferate; meanings rush in to fill the void. The insight of Mohammed Hanif's funny and anarchic first novel is that the wild explanations proffered in such instances may not be all false; instead, they might all be equally true.
Hanif's book is about the Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq - a proponent of Islamicisation, an ally of America in the Cold War - who died when his private plane went down in August 1988. In his narrative, all kinds of forces - the machinations of generals, the resentment of a junior army officer, the curse of a blind woman, the wrath of a Communist group - have their sights trained on Zia, so that when he dies it is not possible to establish the immediate cause, as it were, in this field of possible causes.
The Zia of the novel is a suspicious old man hobbled by age and care, hostage to both delusions of grandeur and paranoia about his safety. He opens to a page of the Koran every day to look for signals from the Almighty, 'as if it was not the word of God but his daily horoscope on the back page of the Pakistan Times'. Like many strongmen, General Zia is the ruler of a kingdom but not of a home: he is repeatedly insulted by his own wife, who is disgusted by his lechery.
The irreverent language and set-ups of Hanif's novel relentlessly puncture the pretensions of power. In one marvellous scene, the First Lady heads for her husband's office in a fit of rage, is shooed into a line of widows waiting for alms from the General, and, reaching the top of the line, declares to her astonished husband that from this day she, too, is a widow. In another, General Zia, dressed as a commoner, teeters out into his kingdom on a bicycle, and is picked up and humiliated by a constable.
Among the best walk-on parts is that of? 'a lanky man with a flowing beard' who arrives at an American party to celebrate the success of the Afghans against the Soviets, introduces himself vainly as 'OBL', and gets no attention from anyone. Even as it answers some questions, then, Hanif's novel raises the delicious possibility that the rage of the world's most feared terrorist stems from not being made the centre of a group photograph.
Patrick Skene Catling reviews A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
Mohammed Hanif's first novel is as grimly, intelligently comic as if written by an Asian Joseph Heller.
"Who is trying to kill me?" General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the president of Pakistan, keeps asking his chief of security. "Everyone," replies Brigadier Tahir Mehdi.
It is true. In the 11 years after Zia executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the dictator's superstitious paranoia became fully justified. To know him was to fear and hate him. There were many willing assassins.
Hanif, who graduated as a pilot from Pakistan's Air Force Academy but now lives in relative safety as the head of the BBC's Urdu service in London, seeks to reveal in fiction the possible identity of Zia's killer and has great fun doing so.
What caused Pak One, Zia's C-130 cargo plane, to crash in the desert near Bahawalpur, killing him, his general staff and the US ambassador, after a farcical demonstration of newly donated American tanks and a big Fourth of July party? Should the CIA be blamed? It usually is.
Did the pilots succumb to VX gas in the plane's ventilation system? Did a blind woman prisoner of the regime fatally curse the president? Was a crow responsible, blundering into an engine? Or did a case of mangoes, presented to Zia by the Left-wing Pakistan Mango Farmers Cooperative, contain explosives?
Did General Akhtar, resentful because Zia had promoted him away from command of Inter-Services Intelligence, know what was going to happen, but did not warn his chief, and yet, perversely loyal, stayed by his side to the end? The motives and chances remain inextricable.
Hanif's depiction of the life of a Pakistani air cadet might be a caricature, but probably isn't an unduly grotesque one. The narrator of the novel, Under Officer Ali Shigri, conjures up the authentic smell of military discipline.
Hanif displays the universal sameness of militarism at its most virulent, citing, for example, "weird US military-speak", the use of torture to aid interrogation, and expenditure of vast sums of money to make the world a more dangerous place.
The Pakistani saluting style is very Sandhurst, but the only military progress in Pakistan, according to Hanif/Shigri, is that the generals grow fatter and have more medals: "The 40th Independence Day medal. The Squadron Anniversary medal. Today-I-did-not-jerk-off medal... One for organising a squash tournament, another for the great battle that was tree-planting week." Shigri's squadron leader went on "a freebie to Mecca and is wearing a hajj medal too".
Zia consults the Koran every morning as his personal horoscope, while Shigri and his friend, Under Officer Obaid-ul-llah, derive intellectual stimulus from the condensed version of Escape from Colditz in Reader's Digest and surrogate sex from Playboy.
The two cadets are so close that when Obaid disappears from the barracks and a plane goes missing, the authorities assume that Shigri is in collusion with him. Shigri claims ignorance and is cast into a dungeon in the Mughals' 16th-century Lahore Fort.
He communicates with the prisoner next door, the secretary general of the All Pakistan Sweepers Union, who exerts significant influence on the mango farmers and was behind the failed plan to put a bomb in the gutter that Zia was scheduled to sweep to inaugurate National Cleanliness Week.
Shigri is mysteriously pardoned and welcomed to freedom, perhaps because his father was a celebrated colonel who frequently penetrated deep into Afghan territory and handled large numbers of dollars.
Hanif acknowledges Charlie Wilson's War and uses it to good effect, reporting Zia's visit to Congressman Wilson's constituency in Texas. Zia was one of the principal opportunists and heroes of the Cold War, serving as a conduit for billions of dollars of `covert aid to the mujahedin in their victorious campaign against the Soviet invasion, before freedom fighters became terrorists.
The University of East Anglia can really boost a would-be writer's creativity. Hanif has produced literature his alma mater should be proud of - a funny novel that persuasively promotes pacifism.
Mohammed Hanif Sorts Through
a Complicated Pakistan
Exploding Magoes: Something richer than
a conspiracy thriller
Comments
By Brian
Francis Slattery Tuesday, May 27 2008
"You want freedom and they give you chicken
korma," says Ali
Shigri, an officer in the Pakistani
Air Force and the protagonist of A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
Mohammed
Hanif's debut novel examines the circumstances surrounding the death
of Pakistan's former
president, General
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, in a plane crash in 1988. Even at the time,
many believed the crash to have been a well-orchestrated assassination—a
"criminal act of sabotage," an investigation said.
Details
A Case of
Exploding Mangoes
By Mohammed Hanif
Random House, 336 pp., $24
By Mohammed Hanif
Random House, 336 pp., $24
As a journalist, playwright, and former member of
the Pakistani Air Force himself, Hanif is well-positioned to speculate on who
did Zia in, and the book's opening promises a conspiracy thriller. If the plot
isn't quite taut enough to deliver on that, it does give us something richer:
Narrated in alternating chapters by Shigri and an omniscient narrator, Mangoes
is a fascinating look into the Cold War concerns and rising Islamism that drove
Pakistan's politics in the late 1980s. Even more, it sardonically examines the
workings of the Pakistani state, which comes off like a Third World Brazil imagined
by Raymond
Chandler.
What really drives Mangoes, however, is
Hanif's sharp writing and considerable wit. His characters are ultimately
pragmatists, trying to reconcile their own desires with the strict rules of
both Islam and the government, while also wondering if it isn't too much to ask
that there be something decent on the state-controlled television. Even as it
dooms many of its characters to untimely deaths, the book is profoundly
humanist; as one of Zia's brigadier generals says: "Life is in Allah's
hands, but I pack my own parachute."
History, no doubt, takes
the long view, an observation borne out by Mohammed Hanif's insanely brilliant,
satirical first novel, based on suspicious circumstances that led to the 1988
plane crash that killed Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq and U.S.
Ambassador Arnold Raphel. "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" was already
in production when former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated
in Rawalpindi. And even now the lawyers' movement continues to pressure the
crumbling presidency of Pervez Musharraf. At this epochal moment, Pakistan
continues to write new history. It took courage for Hanif to put anything in
print about a country that's changing by the minute, but "A Case of
Exploding Mangoes" is as familiar and relevant this hour as any.
At the core is Ali Shigri,
a do-or-die air force pilot who, to avenge the covered-up murder of his father,
conspires to kill Zia, the dictator who overthrew and later executed Prime
Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Enlisting the help of his barracks mate and
lover, Obaid, a hash-dealing laundryman and a hash-smoking CIA operative,
Shigri sets out to kill the president. But he has to get in line behind a host
of Zia's would-be assassins. Shigri's poison-tipped sword seems positively
old-school next to the chief of intelligence's plan to release poison gas into
the ventilation system of Zia's plane.
If rage is the mother's
milk of satire, then Hanif has plenty. He takes out his fury on a hapless
President Zia, plaguing him with worms, a seemingly eternal rectal examination
and a longing for Caucasian cleavage. Eventually, Zia is reduced to nothing
more than an outgrowth of his mustache, which Hanif has imbued with near-human
properties. When we first meet Zia, he has become so victimized by his own
paranoia that he has locked himself in the palace, passing his time
interpreting the Koran as a daily horoscope.
But perhaps nothing frightens him as much as the first lady, who,
after discovering a damning photo of her husband leering at the breasts of a
Texas reporter, has vowed to turn her back on him forever. As if he didn't have
enough problems, he is now under pressure from human rights groups to release a
blind woman accused of fornication (she was raped by four men) and condemned to
death by stoning. He turns to his spiritual adviser, who keeps a flat in Mecca.
The stoning must go forward, he's advised. The Doctrine of Necessity, the same
law that justified overthrowing the Bhutto government, will be employed.
"The guilty commit the crime," Hanif writes. "The innocent are
punished. That's the world we live in."
When Hanif plays the book
for comedy, he scores. Take, for example, a party at the U.S. Embassy at which
strange bedfellows show up as if attending a Rotarian costume ball. "The
local CIA chief, Chuck Coogan, one of the first guests to arrive, sported a
Karakul cap, and an embroidered leather holster. . . . The U.S. cultural
attaché came wearing an Afghan burka, one of those flowing shuttlecocks that
she had tucked halfway over her head to reveal the plunging neckline."
When a military bouncer objects to the epaulet on a University of Nebraska
professor's camouflage outfit, the guest shrugs, "Well, we are at war.
Ain't we?" In walks "a lanky man with a flowing beard" named OBL
-- think about it -- who quickly tires of an uninterested reporter and moves on
to the next guest. "How's business, brother?" Gen. Akhtar, chief of
Pakistan intelligence, asks after thanking him for his help in booting the
Soviets. "There is no business like the construction business in times of
war," OBL replies. The role is only a cameo. Hanif doesn't need to tie
loose ends; we have history for that.
But even as Hanif
eviscerates, he writes with great generosity and depth. And perhaps he is at
his best when he describes the relationship between Shigri and Obaid. Released
from prison where they were tortured for information on their assassination
plot, the two retreat to Shigri's boyhood mango-farm home. Obaid admits that
under torture (his head was ironed) he gave up Shigri and his plan to kill the
president. Shigri has done the same to Obaid. Still, the bond between the two
endures, defying their mutual betrayal.
Hanif shifts points of view
seamlessly, from Shigri to Zia, from Gen. Akhtar to the blind condemned woman,
from Ambassador Raphel to his wife. There's even a mango-eating bird that makes
a foreboding wrong turn at the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and an
appearance by former CIA Chief Bill Casey, portrayed as an airplane-racing
drunk.
Hanif graduated from the
Pakistan Air Force Academy, which gives this military farce a firm grounding.
"A Case of Exploding Mangoes" belongs in a tradition that includes
"Catch-22," but it also calls to mind the biting comedy of Philip
Roth, the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and the feverish nightmares of
Kafka. But trying to compare his work to his predecessors is like trying to
compare apples to, well, mangoes, because Hanif has his own story to tell, one
that defies expectations at every turn.
Mohammed Hanif's 'A Case of
Exploding Mangoes'
By Robert MacFarlane
o
o
A Case
of Exploding Mangoes By Mohammed Hanif. 323 pages. $24, Alfred A. Knopf; £12.99, Jonathan Cape
Assassination has long been an
appealing subject for male novelists. Geoffrey Household's "Rogue
Male" (1939), Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate" (1959),
Frederick Forsyth's "Day of the Jackal" (1971), Don DeLillo's
"Libra" (1988) and James Ellroy's "American Tabloid"
(1995): all are fictions plotted by men about men plotting to murder other men.
Mohammed Hanif's exuberant
first novel, "A Case of Exploding Mangoes," extends this tradition of
assassination fiction and shifts it east to Pakistan Pakistan
Zia's fate is one of Pakistan Islamabad Pakistan
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
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 America America Pakistan
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 Islamabad
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008:
On August 17, 1988, Pak One, the airplane carrying Pakistani dictator General
Zia and several top generals, crashed, killing all on board --and despite
continued investigation, a smoking gun--mechanical or conspiratorial--has yet
to be found. Mohammed Hanif's outrageous debut novel, A Case of Exploding
Mangoes, tracks at least two (and as many as a half-dozen) assassination
vectors to their convergence in the plane crash, incorporating elements as
diverse as venom-tipped sabers, poison gas, the curses of a scorned First Lady,
and a crow impaired by an overindulgence of ripe mangoes. The book has been
aptly compared to Catch-22 for its hilarious
(though not quite as madcap) skewering of the Pakistani military and
intelligence infrastructure, but it also can trace its lineage to Don DeLillo,
doing for Pakistan what Libra did for JFK
conspiracy theory, and Kafka's The Trial, with its
paranoid-but-true take on pathological bureaucracy. Recent events pushing Pakistan into the worst kind of headlines make A
Case of Exploding Mangoes a timely and entertaining read, and when a
mysterious bearded man called "OBL" makes an appearance at a Fourth
of July party for U.S.
Mohammed Hanif on his experience in thePakistan 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
another classmate 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. Mohammed Hanif on his experience in the
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 prospect of being sent home and having to explain to our parents 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 tire," 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 unofficer 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 from 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 quiet 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 called 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, reading first paragraphs and author 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 a 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 the 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
Years later, sitting in the officers' mess of a
--Mohammed Hanif
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Pakistan
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From the Reviews:
·
"Mohammed Hanif
confidently tackles "'the biggest cover-up in aviation history since the
last biggest cover-up, ; bringing absurdist humor and surprising warmth to A
Case of Exploding Mangoes." - Katharine
Critchlow, Entertainment Weeekly
·
"Despite a shaky start,
with overkill on the familiar imaginative topography of Pakistan Pakistan Islamabad
·
"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). (…) 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 Carré (…) than
Private Eye. The tension does not build up until the final chapters and
is then released far too quickly." - Chandak
Sengoopta, The Independent
·
"But it is the
unashamedly populist timbre, the defiantly silly, knockabout humour and the
sheer brio of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, that mark it out as a new
departure in Pakistani writing and a bold cultural intervention in British
publishing. It is probably the first English novel about Pakistan
·
"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. (…) Hanif has written
a historical novel with an eerie timeliness." - Robert
Macfarlane, The New York Times Book Review
·
"A playwright at heart,
Hanif ensures that, in the end, all plots are tied into a neat knot. A Case
of Exploding Mangoes is clever, choreographed. And the reader is amused, skipping
right along, until, suddenly, the emotional arc finishes and … nothing. It
doesn't affect. The reader looks up and realizes that he doesn't feel because
he's not sure he believes in the situations, or, more problematically, in the
characters themselves." - Francesca Mari, San
Francisco Chronicle
·
"The abuse of Brigadier
TM exemplifies the contempt for Pakistan Afghanistan Pakistan
·
"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
·
"The irreverent
language and set-ups of Hanif's novel relentlessly puncture the pretensions of
power." - Chandrahas Choudhury, The Telegraph
·
"Mohammed Hanif's first
novel is as grimly, intelligently comic as if written by an Asian Joseph
Heller. (…) The University
of East Anglia
·
"A Case of Exploding
Mangoes is enjoyably satirical about Pakistan US Pakistan
·
"What really drives Mangoes,
however, is Hanif's sharp writing and considerable wit. His characters are
ultimately pragmatists, trying to reconcile their own desires with the strict
rules of both Islam and the government, while also wondering if it isn't too
much to ask that there be something decent on the state-controlled
television." - Brian Francis Slattery, The Village
Voice
·
"When Hanif plays the book
for comedy, he scores. (…) A Case of Exploding Mangoes belongs in a
tradition that includes Catch-22, but it also calls to mind the biting
comedy of Philip Roth, the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and the feverish
nightmares of Kafka. But trying to compare his work to his predecessors is like
trying to compare apples to, well, mangoes, because Hanif has his own story to
tell, one that defies expectations at every turn." - Julia Slavin, The Washington
A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES – the new Pakistani novel
“When was the last time we heard that what
this country needs is another Zia?”
- Mohammed Hanif
By Nadir Hassan
Born in Okara in 1965, Mohammed Hanif served in the
Pakistan Air Force before deciding to take up a career as a journalist. Hanif
worked as a reporter for Newsline for six years and is now the head of the
BBC’s Urdu World Service. He also graduated from the creative writing programme
at the University
of East Anglia
Q: As a first-time novelist, was it hard to find a publisher in Britain Pakistan
A: I know it is notoriously difficult to find a publisher for a first time
novel, even more so for a so-called literary novel (“a gamble against destiny”
as someone put it) but I have to say that luckily it proved to be quite simple
in my case. I guess the trick is to get an agent who believes in the book and
in whose judgment the publishers have trust. After I signed up with my agent,
the publishers were literally lining up, which was a bit surreal. She made the
first sale within 48 hours of submitting in Canada
I
don’t think there are very many Zia-lovers left in the country. When was the
last time we heard that what this country needs is another Zia? I am talking to
a couple of publishers in Pakistan
Q:
Do you think Ejaz-ul-Haq is more likely to lob a libel suit or hand grenade
your way after he reads the book?
A:
We all know that Ejaz-ul-Haq is a peace-loving politician, so let’s not incite
him into violence. Ain’t there enough blasts in our country that now you are
encouraging people to go after poor writers? This is a work of fiction and
comes with a disclaimer, and that, lawyers tell me, should make it libel-proof.
But some friends who, like me, grew up during the Zia era and have just read
the book have actually accused me of turning Zia into a sympathetic character.
Also, do you think the younger Haq is much of a reader?
Q: Were the characters of Ali Shigri or Obaid based on your own experiences in
the military (excluding the homosexuality, of course)?
A: Of course not. Everyone knows that military life is incredibly dull and
nothing much happens there. Why do you think the army keeps barging into
civilian affairs? Because it’s much more fun running the country than marching
up and down a parade square. It’s all made up. If my life in the army had been
remotely interesting, I would have probably stuck around. Homosexuality in the
army? That is unthinkable. It’s about two boys who are in a bit of trouble.
Q:
Was writing a novel more difficult than your work as a journalist or is it
easier to make stuff up rather than rely strictly on facts?
A: I think you use a different muscle. We have all seen many journalists who
come up with improbable fiction every day. And we have seen novelists who can
conjure up incredibly realistic worlds. I think the main difference is that you
have to learn to live within a book for a very long time, whereas with
journalism you file your copy and you are done. You get instant gratification.
Or someone writes a letter to the editor. As someone said, it’s the difference
between a one-night stand and a marriage. Also, a good editor can fix a badly
written journalistic piece but no fiction editor is likely to go beyond the
third page if they are not hooked. Basically working in a fictional world, you
are pretty much on your own.
Q:
Do you feel it is easier for a Pakistani novelist to be published if his work
is political, given the interest the western media has in terrorism of the
Islamic variety?
A: I don’t think Exploding Mangoes has anything to do with terrorism of any
variety. And I don’t think it has become any easier. People who write in
English, people like Amir Hussain, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and Nadeem
Aslam, have been writing since the last century. Back then, terrorism was a vaguely
romantic term that not very many publishers were interested in. There is
another book of short stories coming out next year by Daniyal Mueenudin, I have
read two stories and there isn’t a single beard or bomb in there.
I
work in the media and I know we journalists are desperate to spot a trend. I
wish it was easier for Pakistani writers to get published but I am afraid it
isn’t. I am sure it’s not very different in Urdu fiction either. I think the
only recent Urdu novel that has really dazzled me is Mirza Athar Beg’s Ghulam
Bagh. The one before that was Abdullah Hussain’s Nadaar Log, which came out
about a decade ago. I have heard that there has been some brilliant fiction in
Sindhi recently but we don’t have many translations. So I would say there are
not enough good novels, in Urdu or English or any other language in Pakistan Pakistan
Q:
Should we be awaiting a second novel? And will it tell us who killed Benazir
Bhutto?
A: I thought we all knew who killed Benazir Bhutto. Wasn’t it the man with the
dark glasses? I guess one could start a mini-genre by writing books about all
the unsolved mysteries in Pakistan
People should know what they are talking about before
they put down words for the world see and read. It is bizarre to see people
commenting on a book they have not read, and yet have the audacity to call its
author a pseudo-intellectual and a cocksucker? With such aficionados, no wonder
Pakistan
Here are my two cents on MH’s absolutely beautiful book.
It is a satire – not a history, not a documentation – about Pak army (the
Military Inc.?) and its absolutely crazy former supremo Zia ul Haq. It is
hilarious to the point that I found myself roaring in laughter inside the E
train, drawing curious glances. Most importantly, with brutal honesty, it piece
together a picture of an army that can best be described as a nightmare and
national misfortune.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
A shorter version of this piece appeared
last weekend in the Sunday
Telegraph.
Whenever someone famous dies in mysterious
circumstances, conspiracy theories proliferate; meanings rush in to fill the
void. The insight of Mohammed Hanif’s funny and anarchic novel A Case of
Exploding Mangoes – a properly fictional insight – is that the wild
explanations proffered in such instances may not be all false, but, remarkably,
may all be true. The reasoning at the root of Hanif’s story is something like
this: Conspiracy theories are almost by definition false. Therefore they are
all equally untrue. If we hold that even one of them is true, it pretty much
amounts to saying that any or all of them are true. And indeed, if we are
prepared to consider one of them, might we not consider that all of them
somehow are true?
Hanif’s book is about the mendacious
Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq
– a proponent of Islamicization, an ally of America
The Zia of the novel is a suspicious old
man hobbled by age and care, nurturing both delusions of grandeur and paranoia
about his safety. He opens to a page of the Quran every day to look for signals
from the Almighty, “as if it was not the word of God but his daily horoscope on
the back page of the Pakistan Times”. Like many strongmen, General Zia is the
ruler of a kingdom but not of a home: he is repeatedly insulted by his own
wife, who is disgusted by his lechery.
The irreverent language and set-ups of
Hanif’s novel relentlessly puncture the pretensions of power. In one marvellous
scene, the First Lady heads for her husband’s office in a fit of rage, but
abruptly finds herself shooed into a line of widows waiting for alms from the
General. Reaching the top of the line, she declares to her astonished husband
that from this day she too is a widow. In another, General Zia, dressed as a
commoner, teeters out into his kingdom on a bicycle, and is picked up and
humiliated by a constable.
Among the best walk-on parts is that of “a
lanky man with a flowing beard” who arrives at a party hosted by the American
consulate to celebrate the success of the Afghans against the Soviets,
introduces himself as “OBL”, and gets very little attention from the
dignitaries present. Even as it entertainingly answers the questions still
asked about Zia’s death, then, Hanif’s novel raises the delicious possibility
that the rage and rancour of America's most intransigent opponent first erupted
when he was not invited into a group photograph.
And two old posts, one on a Pakistani
dictator and the other on a lanky man with a flowing beard: "On the
memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan" and "On
Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens".
Posted by Chandrahas at 2:48 PM 
Labels: Asian fiction,
Pakistani
writing
Amit said...
This is a real Alfonso of a novel.
Interestingly, you don't mention much about the voice. The voice came across to
me as not just irreverant and funny, but also as smart and real cool. It made me
wonder about the aspect of voice in subcontinental novels - those published in
the West most often possess a distinct one, while those published here most
often don't. Have you ever wondered why western publishers are so obsessed with
voice while Indian publishers aren't? Is it a reflection of the white society's
obsession with individualism?
Chandrahas
said...
Amit - Wow, you're really keeping pace with
your reading. Were it not for reviewing I think I would read new books
extremely selectively, so I am always surprised by people like you who seem to
have already read everything I've just put back.
I think, though, that while your point about voice is true at one level - books with "voice" provide a hook that's useful while making a sale, even when that voice may be inconsistent or problematic - I would not go as far as to make the generalisation about western and Indian publishing you are making. I would imagine that Indian publishers would be really excited about voice too, but the best of them might make a more complex judgment of the strengths and flaws of the work in relation to its engagement with Indian reality.
Nor would I simply call the West "the white society" any more, even though it is true that our notion of the individual today is heavily influenced by ideas thought up in past centuries by white men. Indeed, your phrase "obsession with individualism" in the West might not actually be as negative as you mean it to be when you compare that obssession with, say, the disregard for the rights and freedoms of the individual in many Indian situations. And after all, the historical roots of the novel form itself are in the birth of inidvidualism. So perhaps we might think about what consitutes a balanced individualism (in both life and in literature), and where individualism spills over into mere selfishness and egocentrism (and in literature into a demand for "voice" in narrative over other essential aspects of writerly craft).
I think, though, that while your point about voice is true at one level - books with "voice" provide a hook that's useful while making a sale, even when that voice may be inconsistent or problematic - I would not go as far as to make the generalisation about western and Indian publishing you are making. I would imagine that Indian publishers would be really excited about voice too, but the best of them might make a more complex judgment of the strengths and flaws of the work in relation to its engagement with Indian reality.
Nor would I simply call the West "the white society" any more, even though it is true that our notion of the individual today is heavily influenced by ideas thought up in past centuries by white men. Indeed, your phrase "obsession with individualism" in the West might not actually be as negative as you mean it to be when you compare that obssession with, say, the disregard for the rights and freedoms of the individual in many Indian situations. And after all, the historical roots of the novel form itself are in the birth of inidvidualism. So perhaps we might think about what consitutes a balanced individualism (in both life and in literature), and where individualism spills over into mere selfishness and egocentrism (and in literature into a demand for "voice" in narrative over other essential aspects of writerly craft).
H R Venkatesh
said...
Hi Chandrahas,Having read the book, I too, have a few thoughts, or rather questions, about the role of 'voice'.
To me, it did seem like a Pakistani air force officer was the narrator, even though there's hardly any urduspeak in the book.
Can anyone writing in English in the subcontinent come across as speaking in an authentic voice, even if there's no regional patois or language in his/her writing? I wonder...
Book
Summary of A Case Of Exploding Mangoes
Teasing, provocative, and very funny, Mohammed Hanif s debut novel
takes one of the subcontinent s enduring mysteries and out if it spins a tale
as rich and colourful as a beggar s dream. Why did a Hercules C130, the world s
sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan
Book
Reviews of A Case Of Exploding Mangoes
Page Turner: A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Review by Dhimant
Parekh
Two young army cadets wanting to break the ranks. One smart, the
other a romantic. Two powerful army generals gambolling in power. One is the
country’s president, and the other touted as the “second most powerful” person.
The country is Pakistan , and
in the backdrop is the war between the USSR ,
Afghanistan and the USA
The president, General Zia, dies in a plane crash. Pak One smoulders on its final journey into a blast and a whimper. Who killed General Zia? The young army cadets? The second most powerful man? The CIA? The ISI? A crate of mangoes? Did blind Zainab have anything to do with it? Or the crow that flits acrossIndia and Pakistan
Mohammed Hanif’s The Case of Exploding Mangoes is a thrilling page-turner. 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 theUS
Ambassador, running his own games to fufill their motives beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan
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.
The president, General Zia, dies in a plane crash. Pak One smoulders on its final journey into a blast and a whimper. Who killed General Zia? The young army cadets? The second most powerful man? The CIA? The ISI? A crate of mangoes? Did blind Zainab have anything to do with it? Or the crow that flits across
Mohammed Hanif’s The Case of Exploding Mangoes is a thrilling page-turner. 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
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.
Was this review helpful? Report Abusive
Goodreads Reviews of A
Case Of Exploding Mangoes
Having read a review of this book in the NYT, we promptly
purchased it. Not the kind of thing we normally do but Sorayya needed to read
it for professional reasons -- her own current book takes place in an adjacent
time period and the same place. I will give you her impressions after I give
mine. ...more...
I picked this book up because it is written by a Pakistani
Journalist about Pakistan
Meh. Definitely not bad (especially for a random airport grab.
Word to the wise - the Hong Kong airport has a
pretty decent bookstore! Maybe I shouldn't be surprised?). But the book lost me
about 3/4 of the way through when I was already sort of wondering if I cared to
finish it and it dropped an ex...more...
I am not a great lover of satirical novels - to be quite honest I
often don't get them! - but this one was topical, being set in the Indian
subcontinent, and full of funny oneliners. The descriptions of the Americans
arriving for the Texas
|
weRead Reviews
|
Powered
by
 |
Enjoyed more than I expected. Took a while to get into. Loved all
the threads coming together. Comic more than funny. Didn't so much care about
the characters as enjoy watching them weave their various intrigues in the
unusual historical context. All in all satisfying but not breathtaking.
Dark and funny at the same time. Great read!
Quirky. The historical background was not familiar, and is a
necessary base to understand where history is played with and facts are fudged.
The almost a-historical setting, despite the obvious context, tells a deeper
story that doesn't get bogged down in obvious political protest.
Bit of a slow burner at first, but eventually draws you into the
tangled web... good read
What do you think about this product? Write
a Review
A Case
of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif
Mangoes meet mullahs in a fine political satire
Friday, 30 May 2008
On 17 August 1988, a
plane carrying General Zia ul-Haq, the military ruler of Pakistan since 1977 and America US
ambassador to Pakistan and
the head of the US military
aid mission to Pakistan 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
Chandak
Sengoopta teaches history at Birkbeck College, London
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)