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.

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