AIR FARCE OPERATION

Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif talks about his debut book, a funny little novel about Zia’s death in a mysterious plane crash

Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif talks about his debut book, a funny little novel about Zia’s death in a mysterious plane crash
If mario vargas llosa hailed from Pakistan, would The Feast of the Goat have been A Case of Exploding Mangoes? Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel traverses the many genres of political fiction, espionage/assassination thriller, Third-World dictator novel, quasi-historical fiction and so on.
When Pakistani president Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq and American ambassador Arnold Raphel died in a mysterious plane crash in August 1988, conspiracy theories abounded. And then, a joint American-Pakistani investigation was inexplicably and abruptly terminated, with its findings confined to the classified domain. Allegedly, the CIA, ISI, RAW, Mossad and Zia’s impatient minnows all wanted him dead. Hanif uses a lot of this history of speculation in A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Random House, Rs 395) but builds the story around Ali Shigri, a fictional semi-hero or anti-hero and junior under officer in the air force, who too wants to kill Zia to avenge his father’s death.
The narrative is punctuated by a restrained black humour, mostly at the expense of the general — he suffers a rectal itch that bleeds him, and the first lady disowns him after his photo appears in a Pakistani paper showing his eyes fixed on an American interviewer’s breasts. Hanif switches the voice back and forth, between the first-person account of Shigri and the third-person omniscient narrator, breaking the chronology and mixing perspectives in the process.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the chronicle of a death foretold. Zia’s death is foretold in the Koranic verse about Jonah (Zun-nus) that the general keeps encountering. It is, of course, not history. Nor is it a traditional thriller. In an e-mail interview, Hanif — who himself was an officer in the Pakistan Air Force until he quit to become a journalist and now head the BBC’s Urdu Service — elaborates on some of the questions his book raises.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes is fiction, but one cannot be faulted for tracing its genesis. How do you respond to reviewers bent on filling in the historical context of your novel?
I think one shouldn’t respond to reviewers. Also, a writer can’t really tell people how to read what he has written. I have written a novel but if someone reads it as history, that is fine by me. It was suggested to me that I should at least change the names of some of the characters. But I was too lazy to do that.

Your research is very detailed.
I read a couple of memoirs by former Pakistani generals, but those were quite useless. I visited a few websites about plane crashes, but mostly I just made it up as I went along. I did try some serious research once: I registered with an open forum run by retired US air force types to get some technical details about aviation procedures. Within minutes I was the target of so much abuse that I felt like the son of Osama. I hadn’t realised that I had registered under my first name. I gave up on research after that.

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Could generals Mirza Aslam Beg and Akhtar Abdur Rahman have been involved in the ‘conspiracy’?
It would be preposterous to think so. There is no Mirza Aslam in the novel, [There is a character who is just called General Beg, and seems a bit too close to the real-life Beg.] and I have only borrowed General Akhtar’s name. I am absolutely sure that none of them could have been involved. If I knew who was involved, I would not have resorted to writing fiction.

How do you place your book in the present Pakistani political context — Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, democracy, threat to Pervez Musharraf?
I started my book much earlier, at a time when Benazir was here in London as an exile and Musharraf was the most well-entrenched military dictator in the world. Now Benazir is gone forever and Musharraf gets a daily dose of humiliation from Pakistani politicians and the media. I wrote the book as a way of escaping from my day job, which is journalism where things like political change, context, etc, are very important. I wanted to get into a world where journalistic principles like balance and impartiality didn’t matter. And that’s how I see it, as a fantasy thriller with some jokes. The only relevance I can see is that General Zia was a military dictator and somebody had to kill him so that our lives could move on. Musharraf was also a military dictator but we’ll probably get rid of him by ridiculing and sneering at him. I think this is a much more civilised option.

Your book has been compared to Catch-22. But one also feels the presence of Llosa and his The Feast of the Goat.
You are spot on. I am almost certain that if Llosa hadn’t written that novel, I would have probably written a different book. I think I learnt from The Feast that it’s okay to write a book about killing a dictator. We had Catch-22 in our library in the Pakistan Air Force Academy and it stayed by my bedside when I was in my early twenties. I could quote passages. But lately, I have also watched a lot of M*A*S*H. I have read a lot of Truman Capote and works of some of the contemporary Urdu writers have really seeped into my writing. Najam Hussain Sayyed, a Punjabi poet, has also been a major influence. I’m sure random headlines and some op-ed rants too influenced me.

It has been difficult for you to find a publisher in Pakistan. There was talk about the book being banned in Pakistan, like Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military Inc.
They did harass Ayesha, and tried to get the bookshops not to sell her book. There was daylong drama about the launch as the intelligence agencies tried to stop it. But I was in Pakistan only last month and Military Inc. is available openly and, from what I hear, is one of the bestselling books there. So even if they tried to ban it, it has not worked. As for my case, Pakistan has far bigger problems than to start worrying about what I believe is a funny little novel.