A Case of Exploding Mangoes

About the book

A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the first novel by Mohammed Hanif, published in June 2008 by Jonathan Cape in Britain, with Knopf publishing it in the United States the same year. Hanif wrote it in English, drawing on his own years as a Pakistan Air Force officer. The novel is a work of political satire and historical fiction at once: it takes one of the most argued over events in Pakistan's history, the death of the country's military ruler in a plane crash whose cause was never established, and rebuilds it as a dark comedy of plots, curses and mangoes.

The real event anchors every page. On 17 August 1988 a Hercules C130 carrying General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's president and army chief, crashed shortly after take off, killing everyone on board, among them the American ambassador Arnold Raphel and senior Pakistani generals including General Akhtar Abdur Rahman. The investigation's findings were never fully released, and theories about the crash have circulated ever since, including the rumour that a crate of mangoes loaded onto the plane carried a bomb. Hanif's novel lines up the would be assassins and lets the reader watch them all move towards the same afternoon.

What happens in A Case of Exploding Mangoes?

The narrator is Ali Shigri, a young Pakistan Air Force officer and silent drill commander of the Fury Squadron at the academy. Ali's father, Colonel Shigri, was found hanged, and the authorities called it suicide. Ali does not believe them, and he blames Zia. Trained to perform a silent sword drill before the president, he coats his sword tip with poison and waits for his moment, knowing his target is the man at the top of the state.

Around Ali the plots multiply, which is the novel's joke and its method. His roommate Obaid, called Baby O, disappears, and Ali is taken away for interrogation, expecting to be blamed. General Akhtar, the intelligence chief, watches his master and, in the novel's telling, has poison gas placed in the presidential plane's air conditioning. A blind woman named Zainab, raped and then jailed for adultery because she cannot identify her attackers, curses Zia, and the crow she feeds carries her curse towards the plane. Crates of mangoes, a gift for the president from a farmers' cooperative whose leader was killed by Zia's men, are loaded on board, and in one of the theories the novel explores they carry gas or a bomb. The book never settles on a single cause: it piles device upon device until the crash feels overdetermined, a whole system flying towards one explosion.

Themes: satire of the Zia years

The Commonwealth judges in 2009 called the novel a startling interrogation of dictatorship, religious fundamentalism and abuse of power, and a trenchant satire, tender and funny. Zia is drawn as paranoid and performatively pious, his generals as corrupt and ambitious, and the air force academy as a place where obedience is drilled into young men until it looks like choreography. Against that machinery Hanif sets small human decencies: Ali's loyalty to his dead father, Obaid's friendship, Zainab's dignity. The comedy is what makes the anger bearable, and the anger is what gives the comedy its weight.

The author

Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, in Punjab, and graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy as a pilot officer before leaving to become a journalist. He moved to London in 1996, became head of the BBC's Urdu service, and took a master's degree in prose fiction at the University of East Anglia in 2005. A Case of Exploding Mangoes, his debut, appeared three years later. He has since written Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011), The Baloch Who Is Not Missing and Others Who Are (2013) and Red Birds (2018), and he returned to live in Pakistan in 2008. Few novelists have written about a military establishment from inside its own parade ground, and that insider's ear is the book's distinction.

Reception and legacy

The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. It won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2008, and in May 2009, at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, it won the overall Best First Book award at the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, chosen from the regional winners and worth 5,000 pounds. Reviewers abroad praised its nerve and its jokes in equal measure, and it has stayed in print as the outstanding novel of the Zia period.

Its afterlife in Pakistan has been more complicated. An Urdu translation by Syed Kashif Raza was published in Karachi in late 2019. In December 2019 General Zia's son Ijaz ul-Haq sent a defamation notice to the author, the translator and the publisher. On 6 January 2020, according to Hanif and his publisher, men who said they were from the Inter-Services Intelligence, but showed no identification, took about 250 copies of the Urdu edition from the publisher's Karachi offices, and Hanif said bookshops in Islamabad and Lahore were also raided. An unnamed official dismissed his account to the Associated Press as a cheap attempt to gain popularity, and no official ban was announced. PEN America and Amnesty International criticised the seizures as an attack on free expression, and the English edition stayed on sale. The episode confirmed the novel's own argument: in Pakistan, the Zia years are not finished history, and a comedy about them can still cause trouble more than a decade after it was written.