Refashioning of the Revenge Mode

My copy of the novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif was published by Random House India from London in 2009. It's a paperback edition consisting of 364 pages, and the yellow cover shows the image of a black crow, not mangoes, being exploded. It's Hanif's debut novel and it received rave reviews from major international newspapers such as the NY Times, Washington Post and the Guardian.

The Wikipedia and Aamzon.com have entered the novel as a comic novel, which is less than justifiable because beneath the comic surface the novel is informed with certain probing questions as how far political expediency, being punctuated by theocratic ideology, can be blended with military regimen when the very basis of power stands on murder (here, distantly President Mohammed Zia ul-Huq's execution of former President of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but more immediately, the murder of Colonel Quli Shigri, who apparently committed suicide by hanging himself, but whose son, a Junior Under Officer in the Pakistan Air Force Academy, Ali Shigri, also the narrator of the novel, believed that his father was actually murdered by General Zia.) From this perspective, Mangoes is a revenge novel spiced up with the features of a spy thriller as much as Hamlet is a revenge tragedy based on spying. In the play, Hamlet seeks the revenge for his father's murder on his uncle, Claudius, and in the novel, son Ali Shigri seeks to avenge his father's death on the President of the country. Strangely enough, not knowing whether the writer was conscious about this striking similarity, in the play the poisoned sword plays a vital role in accomplishing the revenge deed, and so is the case here, Ali Shigri, being in-charge of the Silent Drill Squad, arranges his squad's drill in such a manner that while General Zia is inspecting it, by a moment's confusion he loses his balance and Shigri's poison-tipped sword (poison collected from the laundryman, Uncle Starchy) accidentally hits General Zia ("Accidents in silent drill are rare but not unheard of" (p. 312) and draws a "single drop of blood" (p. 332) from the back of Zia's "flailing hand" (p. 332). Revenge thus is accomplished in the old Hamletean fashion with the help of sword and poison, but there is no knowing actually what brought General Zia to his death.

Hanif is a wily writer and knows the craft of intensifying the storyline with as many subtexts as possible, and since the subject matter is the death of a modern era despot in mysterious circumstances, so he exploits every possibility of filling up the space with conspiracy and counter-conspiracy theories—"cover-ups to cover cover-ups" (p. 3).

General Zia, as portrayed in the novel, is a sick old man, and the tapeworms have eaten up his rectal portion, and immediately before his plane, Pak One, a C130 aircraft, crashes at Bahawalpur in the fateful afternoon on August 17, 1988, the worms, excited by the presence of the sword-inflicted nectar in his blood, travel upward through his esophagus causing him to bleed underside his pants. In the carpet his shoes get soaked with blood, which is being noticed in horror by General Akhter, who masterminded the plot of the crash but a by a twist of fate is forced to join General Zia's mango party aboard C130 aircraft. The Lockheed experts and American secret agencies concluded that the accident of the plane occurred either due to mechanical failure or failure to tackle a rising sand storm, but the Pakistan intelligence agencies sharply differed with this view opining that sabotaging elements were found in the wreckage of the plane. The mango party, which General Zia ushered in other guests to be present on Pak One and enjoy, was held with mangoes supplied in crates, and in one of the crates some incendiary chemicals were found (a clue not used by Hanif), and the second theory was that the VX gas was stuffed into the air-conditioner device (a theory used by Hanif) which caused the two pilots' death minutes before the plane crashed. The CIA, the Russian and Indian connections were also suggested as possible conspiratorial lines, but what makes Hanif's attribution to the conspiratorial jamming process is his fine ability to fictionalize the real characters (General Zia, his wife, the First Lady, General Akhtar, General Beg, with the Top Gun Ray-Bans dark glasses and US Ambassador Arnold Raphel) and realize the fictional characters (such as, Ali Shigri, the protagonist, Obaid, nicknamed Baby O, Zainab, the blind woman, who was charged with fornication and sentenced to be stoned to death by Zia, and who cursed Zia, whose curse is carried symbolically by a mango-eating crow, which unfortunately entered the Code Red Zone and collided with the C130 Pak One, and may well be the cause of the accident, the Secretary General of the All Pakistan Sweepers Association, who had been in prison in the Lahore Fort for nine years, and above all, Major Kiyani, who plays a pivotal role in bringing the murderous plot hatched by General Akhtar to a conclusion by recruiting Ali Shigri to get the job done, but all whose attempts are finally nullified by fate as he also has to accompany the President's entourage into the C130 along with General Akhtar himself) with such believability that fiction and facts freely flow within the structure of the novel, with as much freedom as the worms in General Zia's innards move.

Ali Shigri is a mountain boy, whose four-year long roommate Obaid (Baby O), from the plain lands, poses to be his lover, but both of them were imprisoned in Lahore Fort for nearly three months, a fact unknown to each other, on the charge of Baby O's plan to steal an aircraft to crash into a zone where Zia would be present and kill him, and because of his disappearance Ali Shigri was confined in the Fort as an accomplice to the plot. They are both released after General Akhtar (seemingly posing like Claudius), through Major Kiayni, plots to enlist their support to remove General Zia from the face of the earth.

Released from the jail both friends take a trip to the Shigri Hill where Ali Shigri's paternal house still stands on the ridge of a mountain, and where over the night Ali Shigri reminisces about the night his father had committed suicide. His father, Colonel Quli Shigri was in-charge of funding the Afghan Mujahedeen to fight the Soviets, but at one point he was called back from the front and sent retired home with a dollar-loaded suitcase. "This whole bloody Afghan thing. I have done more than five hundred trips. All deniable missions. And now I end up with this" (p. 300). That is, his very loyal service to Zia was misinterpreted as transactionable with bribe. His ego was hurt, and he made his son burn all the money into the fireplace—except one note which Ali Shigri retained, unknown to his father, in order to help himself remember that what he did the previous night in company with his father was not a dream. So what Hamlet's father was to him is Ali Shigri's father to him, and it's his father's heroic honesty that prompts Ali Shigri, his son to wage the vendetta against General Zia.

With no qualms at heart, Ali Shigri can thus proceed with his swashbuckling idea of killing Zia with a nectar-tipped sword, but what is most to be praised about Hanif's style is his way of enlivening his prose with a pungent sense of humour. Zia gets his buttock examined by a Saudi physician with his head resting in a Pakistani flag stand in his office, or the First Lady's backside is commented upon as more alluring to her husband than her front side—an insidious reference to the prevalence of homoerotic culture in the male-dominated society of Pakistan. Even the cadets regularly perforate their mattresses to get rid of their sexual urge. The American Ambassador Arnold Raphel, with his receding hairline, looks like a homosexual business executive, and it's in his embassy that the Fourth of July celebration is held with all the Americans arriving in exotic Afghan dresses and headgears, and amidst whom appears a lonely bearded figure, a Saudi industrialist by the name of OBL, who finds the conversation with a journalist boring and listlessly saunters to the next visitor.

The book's success lies in the way that the balance is maintained between the paranoid atmosphere created through the sense of insecurity suffered by General Zia and the elemental force of the writer to lighten it by the activities of other characters, mainly Ali Shigri. Thus General Zia, the longest reigning formidable Pakistani military despot is reduced to a panicked chicken kind of stuff, but the reader's interest in his character never wanes.

The reviwer is Vice Chancellor of Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University, Trishal, Mymensingh.