A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

The Barnes & Noble Review

One of the funniest passages in Mohammed Hanif's acidly satirical novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, is the official statement of a Pakistani cadet facing interrogation by his superiors. "When I asked whether I was under detention [the guard] laughed and made a joke about the cell mattress having too many holes. The joke cannot be reproduced in this report. 2nd OIC arrived half an hour later and informed me that I was under close arrest... if I didn't tell him the truth he'd hand me over to Inter Services Intelligence and they would hang me by my testicles…2nd OIC made a joke about two marines and a bar of soap in a Fort Bragg bathroom. I didn't think I was supposed to laugh and I didn't."

The soldier is Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, the country is Pakistan in the 1980s. The deadpan tone, however, could be that of Evelyn Waugh, Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Swejk), Spike Milligan, Joseph Heller, or any fine satirist of the military. Hanif certainly belongs in such exalted company, and his young officer, Ali Shigri, is instantly recognizable as the seemingly innocent yet secretly cunning underling who can subvert any regime.

Ali tells lies, of course, but only when he must, and never to us. Through his keen eyes, we perceive the absurd world of the Pakistani armed forces orbiting the larger absurd world of the late General Zia ul-Haq's appalling dictatorship. "The guilty commit the crime, the innocent are punished. That's the world we live in," Ali explains as the novel opens with the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed General Zia, his head of Inter Services Intelligence and the US ambassador among others. Observing the doomed party as it boards Pak One, Ali knows that he is "saluting a bunch of dead men. But if you are in uniform, you salute. That's all there is to it."

How does Ali know? Is the crash the work of Pakistani Intelligence? Of the CIA? And what part could mangoes possibly play? The answers to these and other questions shimmer mirage-like throughout the cleverly constructed novel as it winds backwards -- and often sideways -- from the assassination to its origins, churning up flotsam such as spymaster William Casey, Osama bin Laden, American "advisers" and Afghani mujahideen along the way.

"The ambassador had reasons to be inclusive," Hanif writes of the US embassy's Fourth of July party in Islamabad at which even Osama bin Laden appears. "[D]ozens of American agencies ran their own little jihads against the Soviets along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. There were those avenging Vietnam and there were those doing God's work…." In this anarchic and deadly playground, General Zia may ogle the breasts of Texan socialite and jihad-sponsor Joanne Herring while an American drill sergeant on loan to Ali Shigri's squad can dream up his own little coup.

Hanif wisely shrinks this larger context -- the Soviet/Afghanistan/ Pakistan/U.S. imbroglio of the 1980s -- concentrating instead on Ali's drama and that of the increasingly paranoid General Zia. The dictator's skewed reality is brilliantly conveyed. At Zia's fortress, for example, as dawn approaches, "The commandos on the night shift were flicking back the safety catches on the Kalashnikovs…. a team of gardeners was being body-searched…. [and] General Zia's personal batman was pinning seven identical sets of medals to seven different uniforms." Despite all this, the general can be panicked by an ominous verse from the Qaran and is hardly reassured when his bodyguard, an aerial stuntman, tells him, "Life is in Allah's hands, but I pack my own parachute."

This vain and jittery Zia is a wonderful creation, and Hanif surrounds him with boldly sketched thugs and flunkies. (Guarding Zia, "Brigadier TM navigated the crowd effortlessly, his elbows working like the oars of a skilled rower as if the milling crowd was nothing but dead water in a still lake.") It is Ali, however, who demands not only our attention but also our sympathy as the novel's heart and its conscience. Sardonic, cocky, tough but occasionally terrified, he is the son of a venerated general who committed suicide to become, as Ali puts it, "a legend hanging from a ceiling fan." Like a hardboiled Hamlet, this brooding son cannot rid himself of his father and, more urgently, of the suspicion that his "suicide" was murder. General Shigri's death, after all, occurred just after he had retrieved millions of US dollars from a dead Pakistani agent in Afghanistan.

Avenging his father's murder may be Ali's obsession, but in the meantime his heart belongs to a fellow cadet, sweet-natured Obaid-ul-Ilah, who is partial to the poems of Rilke and a dab of St. Laurent's "Poison" on the wrists. This whimsical character might well have derailed or at least diluted Hanif's potent satire (remember Breakfast on Pluto, Patrick McCabe's lame attempt to subvert Irish paramilitary myth with cross-dressing camp?). But Obaid is the perfect innocent to have wandering through such a murky plot; the kind of innocent, in fact, who is tougher than any veteran, as Ali discovers to his horror when he is invited to sip tea with sadistic Major Kiyani in the Palace gardens. Here shackled enemies of the state are paraded. "The prisoners circle the marble fountain outside the Palace of Mirrors, their shaved heads bobbing up and down behind the manicured hedges covered in purple bougainvillea," Ali notes. "They look like betrayed promises; broken and then put together from memory, obscure names crossed out of habeas corpus petitions, forgotten faces that will never make it to Amnesty International's hall of fame." Among the ruined group Ali suddenly recognizes…well, never mind.

That shock is one of many exquisitely timed jolts in a novel that succeeds by teasing rather than telling. There is nothing coy, however, about Hanif's satisfying plot or his portrait of a world he clearly knows intimately and describes with tactile immediacy. In the US ambassador's residence, the beers chill "in the morgue-size fridge." The day after General Zia's coup, the conference room of General Headquarters, sprayed with rose-scented air freshener, smells "like a freshly sealed coffin." In Hanif's hands, even the exploding mangoes are plausible. --Anna Mundow

Anna Mundow writes "The Interview" and the "Historical Novels" columns for The Boston Globe and is a contributor to The Irish Times.

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
"The guilty commit the crime, the innocent are punished. That's the world we live in." In 1988, Pakistani dictator General Zia died in a mysterious plane crash. Debut novelist Hanif has seized upon this unsolved mystery and spun a darkly satirical explanation by way of this tale -- that Zia's plane crash was the result of not one but two assassination attempts.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a sly, riotous send-up of Mideast politics, the unintended and often disastrous consequences of American foreign policy, the hypocrisy of Islamic fundamentalism, and last but not least, the far, if not lighter, side of tyranny and torture. Even Osama bin Laden makes a cameo appearance, but at the time, he was our ally in the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and 9/11 was just a date in the future.

It might be hard to imagine how a writer could spin gold from this straw, but Hanif has, delivering a frolicking and shocking political satire. A Case of Exploding Mangoes will have readers laughing -- and thinking that though truth is said to be stranger than fiction, this novel may just have the ring of truth to it. (Summer 2008 Selection)

From the Publisher

A first novel of the first order—provocative, exuberant, wickedly clever—that reimagines the conspiracies and coincidences leading to the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistan’s dictator General Zia ul-Haq.

At the center is Ali Shigri: Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of Fury Squadron. His father, one of Zia’s colonels, committed suicide under suspicious circumstances. Ali is determined to understand what or who pushed his father to such desperation—and to avenge his death.

What he quickly discovers is a snarl of events: Americans in Pakistan, Soviets in Afghanistan, dollars in every hand. But Ali remains patient, determined, a touch world-weary (“You want freedom and they give you chicken korma”), and unsurprised at finding Zia at every turn. He mounts an elaborate plot for revenge with an ever-changing crew (willing and not) that includes his silk-underwear-and-cologne-wearing roommate; a hash-smoking American lieutenant with questionable motives; the chief of Pakistan’s secret police, who mistakenly believes he’s in cahoots with the CIA; a blind woman imprisoned for fornication; Uncle Starchy, the squadron’s laundryman; and, not least of all, a mango-besotted crow. General Zia—devout Muslim and leering admirer of non-Muslim cleavage—begins every day by asking his chief of security: “Who’s trying to kill me?” and the answer lies in a conspiracy trying its damnedest to happen . . .
Intrigue and subterfuge combine with misstep and luck in this darkly comic book about love, betrayal, tyranny, family—and a world thatunexpectedly resembles our own.

The New York Times - Robert Macfarlane

Far from coming to a conclusion about the cause of Zia's death, Hanif gleefully thickens the stew of conspiracy theories, introducing at least six other possible suspects, including a blind woman under sentence of death, a Marxist-Maoist street cleaner, a snake, a crow, an army of tapeworms and a junior trainee officer in the Pakistani Air Force named Ali Shigri, who is also the novel's main narrator. Ali is irreverent, lazy and raspingly sardonic, and his obvious fictional predecessor is Joseph Heller's Yossarian. Indeed, like Catch-22, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is best understood as a satire of militarism, regulation and piety. Much of Hanif's novel is set in the Pakistani Air Force Academy, an institution staffed by crazies and incompetents who could have walked straight out of Heller's novel…Hanif has written a historical novel with an eerie timeliness.

The Washington Post - Julia Slavin

…insanely brilliant…even as Hanif eviscerates, he writes with great generosity and depth…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.

Publishers Weekly

Pakistan's ongoing political turmoil adds a piquant edge to this fact-based farce spun from the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed General Zia, the dictator who toppled Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto. Two parallel assassination plots converge in Hanif's darkly comic debut: Air Force Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, sure that his renowned military father's alleged suicide was actually a murder, hopes to kill Zia, who he holds responsible. Meanwhile, disgruntled Zia underlings scheme to release poison gas into the ventilation system of the general's plane. Supporting characters include Bannon, a hash-smoking CIA officer posing as an American drill instructor; Obaid, Shigri's Rilke-reading, perfume-wearing barracks pal, whose friendship sometimes segues into sex; and, in a foreboding cameo, a "lanky man with a flowing beard," identified as OBL, who is among the guests at a Felliniesque party at the American ambassador's residence. The Pakistan-born author served in his nation's air force for several years, which adds daffy verisimilitude to his depiction of military foibles that recalls the satirical wallop of Catch 22, as well as some heft to the sagely absurd depiction of his homeland's history of political conspiracies and corruption. (May)

Jim Coan - Library Journal

Set in Pakistan in the 1980s, this first novel revolves around the events leading up to the plane crash that killed General Zia, then president of the country. The crash has been the subject of all sorts of rumors, and the author energetically seizes upon them and adds several of his own. The novel centers on Ali Shigri, a junior under officer in the Pakistani air force and son of a high-ranking commander who apparently committed suicide years earlier but whose death is beginning to look more like a political execution. When General Zia comes upon a passage in the Qur'an that he thinks foretells his death, he expands his already severe dictatorship by calling for heightened security. Shigri is taken into custody and given the full interrogation treatment but is eventually released. He then prepares for a demonstration of a military drill with his squad in front of the president himself. In keeping with the novel's somewhat surrealistic approach, a crow that has overheard a blind woman curse the president has flown several thousand miles to intersect with the flight route of the presidential party. Entertainingly bizarre and still seriously literate, this novel is recommended for larger fiction collections.

Kirkus Reviews

Journalist Hanif's first novel is a darkly witty imagining of the circumstances surrounding the mysterious plane crash that killed Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia, in August 1988. The central figure is a young military officer named Ali Shigri whose much-decorated father was found hanging from a ceiling fan, an alleged suicide. Ali knows, however, that his father's death was something more sinister, and he sets out first to identify the responsible party, Zia, and then-by way of a loopy plan involving swordsmanship and obscure pharmacology-to exact revenge. The book's omniscient narrator gets into the heads of multiple characters, including that of the General himself; his ambitious second-in-command, General Akhtar; a smooth torturer named Major Kiyani; a communist street sweeper who for a time occupies a prison cell near Ali's; a blind rape victim who has been imprisoned for fornication; and a wayward and sugar-drunk crow. Even Osama bin Laden has a cameo, at a Fourth of July bash. But plot summary misleads; the novel has less in common with the sober literature of fact than it does with Latin American magical realism (especially novels about mythic dictators such as Gabriel Garc'a Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch) and absurdist military comedy (like Joseph Heller's Catch-22). Hanif adopts a playful, exuberant voice that's almost a parody of old-fashioned omniscience, as competing theories and assassination plots are ingeniously combined and overlaid. Uneasy rests the head that wears the General's famous twirled mustache-everybody's out to get him. A sure-footed, inventive debut that deftly undercuts its moral rage with comedy and deepens its comedy with moral rage. Agent: ClareAlexander/Gillon Aitken Associates

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Form PD 4059
Record of Absentees Without Leave or Disappearances
Without Justifiable Causes
Appendix I
Statement by Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri,
Pak No. 898245
Subject: Investigation into the circumstances in
which Cadet Obaid-ul-llah went AWOL
Location where statement was recorded: Cell No. 2,
Main Guardroom, Cadets' Mess, PAF Academy

I, Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, son of the late Colonel Quli Shigri, do hereby solemnly affirm and declare that, at the reveille on the morning of 31 May 1988, I was the duty officer. I arrived at 0630 hours sharp to inspect Fury Squadron. As I was inspecting the second row, I realised that the sash on my sword belt was loose. I tried to tighten it. The sash came off in my hand. I ran towards my barracks to get a replacement and shouted at Cadet Atiq to take charge. I ordered the squadron to mark time. I could not find my spare sash in my own cupboard; I noticed that Cadet Obaid's cupboard was open. His sash was lying where it is supposed to be, on the first shelf, right-hand corner, behind his golden-braided peaked cap. Because I was in a hurry, I didn't notice anything unlawful in the cupboard. I did, however, notice that the poem on the inside of the door of his cupboard was missing. I do not have much interest in poetry, but since Obaid was my dorm mate, I knew that every month he liked to post a new poem in his cupboard but always removed it before the weekly cupboard inspection. Since the Academy's standard operating procedures do not touch upon the subject of posting poetry in dorm cupboards, I had not reported this matter earlier. I arrived back at 0643, to find that the entire squadron was in Indian position. I immediately told them to stand up and come to attention and reminded Cadet Atiq that the Indian position was unlawful as a punishment and as an acting squadron commander he should have known the rules. Later, I recommended Cadet Atiq for a red strip, copy of which can be provided as an appendix to this appendix.

I didn't have the time for a roll call at this point, as we had only seventeen minutes left before it was time to report to the parade ground. Instead of marching Fury Squadron to the mess hall, I ordered them to move on the double. Although I was wearing my sword for that day's silent drill practice and was not supposed to move on the double, I ran with the last file, holding the scabbard six inches from my body. The second officer in command saw us from his Yamaha and slowed down when passing us. I ordered the squadron to salute, but the 2nd OIC did not return my salute and made a joke about my sword and two legs. The joke cannot be reproduced in this statement, but I mention this fact because some doubts were raised in the interrogation about whether I had accompanied the squadron at all.

I gave Fury Squadron four minutes for breakfast and I myself waited on the steps leading to the dining hall. During this time I stood at ease and in my head went through the commands for the day's drill. This is an exercise that the drill instructor on secondment, Lieutenant Bannon, has taught me. Although there are no verbal commands in the silent drill, the commander's inner voice must remain at strength 5. It should obviously not be audible to the person standing next to him. I was still practising my silent cadence when the squadron began to assemble outside the dining hall. I carried out a quick inspection of the squadron and caught one first-termer with a slice of French toast in his uniform shirt pocket. I stuffed the toast into his mouth and ordered him to start front-rolling and keep pace with the squadron as I marched them to the parade square. I handed over command to the sergeant of the day, who marched the boys to the armoury to get their rifles. It was only after the Quran recitation and the national anthem were over, and the Silent Drill Squad was dividing into two formations, that the sergeant of the day came to ask me why Cadet Obaid had not reported for duty. He was supposed to be the file leader for that day's drill rehearsal. I was surprised because I had thought all along that he was in the squadron that I had just handed over to the sergeant.

"Is he on sick parade?" he asked me.

"No, Sergeant," I said. "Or if he is, I don't know about it."

"And who is supposed to know?"

I shrugged my shoulders, and before the sergeant could say anything, Lieutenant Bannon announced that silent zone was in effect. I must put it on record that most of our Academy drill sergeants do not appreciate the efforts of Lieutenant Bannon in trying to establish our own Silent Drill Squad. They resent his drill techniques. They do not understand that there is nothing that impresses civilians more than a silent drill display, and we have much to learn from Lieutenant Bannon's experience as the chief drill instructor at Fort Bragg.

After the drill, I went to the sick bay to check if Cadet Obaid had reported sick. I didn't find him there. As I was coming out of the sick bay, I saw the first-termer from my squadron sitting in the waiting area with bits of vomited toast on his uniform shirt's front. He stood up to salute me; I told him to keep sitting and stop disgracing himself further.

As the Character Building lecture had already started, instead of going to the classroom, I returned to my dorm. I asked our washerman, Uncle Starchy, to fix my belt, and I rested for a while on my bed. I also searched Obaid's bed, his side table, and his cupboard to find any clues as to where he might be. I did not notice anything untoward in these areas. Cadet Obaid has been winning the Inter-Squadron Cupboard Competition since his first term at the Academy, and everything was arranged according to the dorm cupboard manual. I attended all the rest of the classes that day. I was marked present in those classes. In Regional Studies we were taught about Tajikistan and the resurgence of Islam. In Islamic Studies we were ordered to do self-study because our teacher, Maulana Hidayatullah, was angry with us, since when he entered the class, some cadets were singing a dirty variation on a folk wedding song. It was during the afternoon drill rehearsal that I got my summons from the 2nd OIC's office. I was asked to report on the double and I reported there in uniform.

The 2nd OIC asked me why I had not marked Cadet Obaid absent in the morning inspection when he wasn't there.

I told him that I had not taken the roll call.

He asked me if I knew where he was.

I said I didn't know.

He asked me where I had disappeared to between the sick bay and the Character Building lecture.

I told him the truth.

He asked me to report to the guardroom.

When I arrived at the guardroom, the guardroom duty cadet told me to wait in the cell.

When I asked him whether I was under detention, he laughed and made a joke about the cell mattress having too many holes. The joke cannot be reproduced in this statement.

Half an hour later, the 2nd OIC arrived and informed me that I was under close arrest and that he wanted to ask me some questions about the disappearance of Cadet Obaid. He told me that if I didn't tell him the truth, he'd hand me over to Inter-Services Intelligence and they would hang me by my testicles.

I assured him of my full cooperation. The 2nd OIC questioned me for one hour and forty minutes about Obaid's activities, my friendship with him, and whether I had noticed anything strange in his behaviour in what he described as "the days leading up to his disappearance."

I told him all I knew. He went out of the cell at the end of the question-answer session and came back five minutes later with some sheets of paper and a pen and asked me to write everything that had happened in the morning and describe in detail where and when I had last seen Cadet Obaid. Before leaving the cell, he asked me if I had any questions. I asked him whether I'd be able to attend the silent drill rehearsal, as we were preparing for the president's annual inspection. I requested the 2nd OIC to inform Lieutenant Bannon that I could continue to work on my silent cadence in the cell. The 2nd OIC made a joke about two marines and a bar of soap in a Fort Bragg bathroom. I didn't think I was supposed to laugh, and I didn't.

I hereby declare that I saw Cadet Obaid last when he was lying in his bed reading a book of poetry in English the night before his disappearance. The book had a red cover and what looked like a lengthened shadow of a man. I don't remember the name of the book. After lights-out, I heard him sing an old Indian song in a low voice. I asked him to shut up. The last thing I remember before going to sleep is that he was still humming the same song.

I did not see him in the morning, and I have described my day's activities accurately in this statement in the presence of the undersigned. In closing I would like to state that in the days leading up to Cadet Obaid absenting himself without any plausible cause, I did not notice anything unusual about his conduct. Only three days before going AWOL he had received his fourth green strip for taking active part in After-Dinner Lit- erary Activities (ADLA). He had made plans to take me out at the weekend for ice cream and to watch Where Eagles Dare. If he had any plans about absenting himself without any justifiable cause, he never shared them with me or anyone else as far as I know.

I also wish to humbly request that my close arrest is uncalled for and that if I cannot be allowed to return to my dorm, I should be allowed to keep the command of my Silent Drill Squad, because tomorrow's battles are won in today's practice.

Statement signed and witnessed by:
Squadron Leader Karimullah,
2nd OIC, PAF Academy

"Sir, I swear to God I have no knowledge of Cadet Obaid's whereabouts," I say, trying to tread the elusive line between grovelling and spitting in his face.