A Case of Exploding Mangoes By Mohammed Hanif, Random House, Rs 395

In August 1988, General Zia-ul-Haq boarded a C-130 aircraft, which crashed minutes after the takeoff. The aircraft also carried Pakistan’s top military officers, the American ambassador, and a crate of mangoes. In his debut novel, Mohammed Hanif uses these unalterable facts to give us the ‘truth’, which he claims did not come to light before because “this was the biggest cover-up in aviation history since the last biggest cover-up”.

The novel has two parallel plots that collide in the moments before the plane crash — one is about General Zia, who is grappling with intimations of mortality and murder, and has imprisoned himself in his Army House. Among those who wish him dead are army generals who are growing old and impatient, a blind woman sentenced to stoning, a crow who has heard her curses and must carry out her wishes, a Maoist secretary-general of a sweepers’ union and a junior officer who is avenging the mysterious death of his father. Adding to General Zia’s woes is the First Lady who considers her husband dead the moment she sees him in a photograph peering down the cleavage of a foreign correspondent.

The other plot is about an air force cadet, Ali Shigri, and his elaborate and improbable plans. His abettors are his co-trainee, Obaid, who is also his lover, and Lieutenant Bannon, who lapses from post-Vietnam trauma to marijuana reverie.

Hanif manages to hold all these varied strands together in this remarkably well-structured novel. And while the conclusion is already known, the twists and turns the plot takes are unpredictable and often hilarious, reminiscent of Catch-22 in many ways. Hanif has confessed to reading and rereading Joseph Heller’s famous novel when he was young, and while his plot is entirely and delightfully original, the tone, language, paradoxes and repetitions give A Case of Exploding Mangoes a Catch-22 feel.

The fact that Hanif has been part of the armed forces has served him well in this book. Being a former Air Force officer, he has recreated the life of a cadet with ease. The universality of modern training in the armed forces is evident in the passages of the book. The discipline, the delight in breaking the discipline, the ragging and camaraderie come alive through the experiences of young Ali Shigri and Obaid.

While General Zia has been lampooned mercilessly and reduced to a caricature, complete with a moustache that has a life of its own, the Pakistan military and the Americans who used the mujahedins to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan are not spared either. The American ambassador throws a party for the jihadis fighting alongside the Marines, and all the American guests come dressed in Afghan attire. The Afghans, of course, arrive in suits. The party dress code veers from the elaborate to the blasphemous, with a cultural attaché turning up in “one of those flowing shuttlecocks tucked halfway over her head to reveal the plunging neckline of her shimmering turquoise dress.” Another guest at this party is OBL of Laden and Co. Constructions, who hangs around with the Americans, even though they don’t seem to be particularly interested in what he is saying.

The jokes that keep coming up are a little disconcerting to begin with, but once the plot starts unfolding through the words of the irreverent narrator, it’s easy to get into the mood of the novel. Armed with a sardonic eye for detail, Hanif takes us through some of the more grim aspects of Zia’s regime as well. The cells of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the sinister citadel beneath the Lahore Fort and the stoning of a gang-rape victim are crucial to the novel. Life is cheap and expendable under the military regime, with the army killing and pardoning according to its whims.

The highlight of the novel, however, is General Zia. Writings on dead leaders are either academic in nature, or veer towards hagiography. Hanif remorselessly reduces Zia to a pathetic cartoon of a man, who is constantly nagged and whose piety, instead of redeeming him, only makes him seem more comical. In fact, there is a strong critique at the start of the novel of the policy of mixing politics with religion, a policy that Hanif holds Zia responsible for.

Dictators do not have a support base or a legion of admirers, and clearly, General Zia is no exception. He is seen sharing notes about hanging onto power with Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, another dictator who came to a sticky end.

The novel also pokes fun at the omnipresence of the ISI in Zia’s time. Zia’s security chief is surprised when Mohammed Ali Jinnah winks at him from a portrait in Zia’s study. Upon further investigation, a hidden camera is discovered behind the eye of the founder of Pakistan. Even Jinnah is reduced to a device in an intelligence surveillance system.

While the satire and humour make for an enjoyable and gripping work, which can best be described as a political thriller with a twist, one cannot lose sight of the courage that Hanif must have mustered to write such a novel and get it published in Pakistan. The book relentlessly ridicules not only Zia but also the anarchy and mistrust in the top brass of the armed forces, the smugness of the Americans based in Pakistan and just about everybody who comprised the powerful elite in Pakistan during the late Eighties.