A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Hardcover)

by Mohammed Hanif (Author)
Key Phrases: mango party, black sherwani, garrison mess, General Zia, General Akhtar, Major Kiyani (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: On August 17, 1988, Pak One, the airplane carrying Pakistani dictator General Zia and several top generals, crashed, killing all on board --and despite continued investigation, a smoking gun--mechanical or conspiratorial--has yet to be found. Mohammed Hanif's outrageous debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, tracks at least two (and as many as a half-dozen) assassination vectors to their convergence in the plane crash, incorporating elements as diverse as venom-tipped sabers, poison gas, the curses of a scorned First Lady, and a crow impaired by an overindulgence of ripe mangoes. The book has been aptly compared to Catch-22 for its hilarious (though not quite as madcap) skewering of the Pakistani military and intelligence infrastructure, but it also can trace its lineage to Don DeLillo, doing for Pakistan what Libra did for JFK conspiracy theory, and Kafka's The Trial, with its paranoid-but-true take on pathological bureaucracy. Recent events pushing Pakistan into the worst kind of headlines make A Case of Exploding Mangoes a timely and entertaining read, and when a mysterious bearded man called "OBL" makes an appearance at a Fourth of July party for U.S. military brass, we're coolly reminded of the fickleness of opportunistic policy in unpredictable lands. --Jon Foro

Mohammed Hanif on his experience in the Pakistan Air Force Academy

Once upon a time, when I was eighteen, I found myself locked up in Pakistan Air Force Academy's cell along with my friend and partner-in-crime, Khalid Saifullah. We had thought we were doing charity work but the Academy officers obviously didn't share our ideals. We had been caught trying to help another classmate pass his chemistry exam, something he had failed to do twice already and this was his last chance to save himself from being expelled. The logistics of our rescue effort involved a wireless set improvised in the Sunday Hobbies Club, a microphone concealed in a crap bandage around the left elbow of our academically challenged friend, and a Sanyo FM radio receiver. We were running our operation from the roof top of a building next to the examination hall. We were caught red-handed whispering reversible chemical equation into the transistor.

We were in breach of every single standard operating procedure in the Academy rule book, and faced certain expulsion. We had just started our glorious careers and now we faced the prospect of being sent home and having to explain to our parents how, instead of training to become gentlemen-officers, we were running an exam-cheating-mafia from the rooftop of the most well-disciplined training institute in the country.

For two days, while we waited in that cell to find out about our fate, we planned our future. Khalid, always the world-wise in this outfit, immediately decided that he was going to join the merchant navy and travel the world. I tried hard to think what I would do. I came from a farming family where even the most adventurous members of our clan had only managed to branch out into planting sugarcane instead of potatoes. Education, jobs, careers were absolutely alien concepts. The Academy was supposed to be my escape from a lifetime that revolved around wildly fluctuating potato crop cycles. And here I was, already a prisoner of sorts, facing a journey back to a life I thought I had left behind.

"Maybe I’ll become a teacher," I said vaguely. The farmers in my village used to show some vague respect to teachers in the primary school I attended. "Or a mechanic." I was a member of the car-maintenance club in the hobbies club after all. It was considered an elite club since there was no car to maintain. It was basically a hobbies club for people who hated hobbies.

"You can’t even change a bloody tire," Khalid reminded me.

We managed to stave off the impending expulsion through a combination of confession and denial: we lied (we were listening to cricket commentary on the transistor radio), we grovelled (we were ashamed, ashamed, ashamed of our unofficer like behaviour) and we pleaded our undying passion for defending the borders of our motherland. They looked at our relatively clean record, our sterling academic achievements and let us off the hook and awarded us a punishment considered just short of expulsion. We were barred from entering the Academy’s TV room--and from walking. For forty-one days. During the punishment period, we had to stay in uniform from dawn till dusk and when ever we were required to go from point a to b we had to run. Khalid went on to become a fairly good marathon runner (before, years later, dying in an air crash, while trying to pull a spectacular but impossible manoeuvre in Mirage fighter plane). I discovered Academy's library. I had barely noticed that the college had a very well-stocked library. We knew it was there, we occasionally used it as a quiet corner to hatch conspiracies but I had never noticed that the long rambling hall was lined with cupboards full of books. All the cupboards were locked, but you could see pristine untouchable books behind their glass doors. The librarian, an eagle-nosed old civilian, walked around with a large bunch of jangling keys although his wares were not in any danger of being stolen. I was to find out later that he was quite a professional. The library was immaculately catalogued. You could of course go to him, fill out a form and request a book. But I never actually saw anybody fill out a form. I spent some afternoons staring at the books from behind the glass doors as my classmates watched videos in the TV room (including the fellow who had scraped through his chemistry exam and survived but would die years later in our current president's General Pervez Musharraf’s moronic military adventure in Kargil on India-Pakistan border).

How do you ask for a book when you are eighteen and have been brought up in a household where the only book was the Quran and the only reading material an occasional old newspaper left behind by a visitor from the city? "I want that book," I asked the librarian pointing tentatively towards a cupboard which contained a thick volume of something called The Great Escapes. The librarian, relieved at having found a customer, took out his bunch of keys, removed a key and asked me to go get it myself. I took my time and browsed for a long time before filling out the form and borrowing the book. So grateful was I for getting that book that I brought him a samosa and cup of tea next day. That turned out to be a very good investment as the librarian handed me the bunch of his keys as soon as I entered. I browsed randomly, recklessly, reading first paragraphs and author bios, and made naïve judgments. The Cross of Iron wasn’t a religious thriller but a war novel. Crime and Punishment had very little crime in it. Was Rushdie related to the famous pop singer Ahmed Rushdie? Mario Puzo and Mario Vargas Llosa. The strange covers of Borges. Abdullah Hussain, I had heard of. A whole shelf devoted to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chronicle. Was that little book about the wrecked ship really a true story? I didn’t know which one was a thriller and which one was literary. As I Lay Dying--sounds like a nice title so let’s read it. So does Valley of the Dolls. It is probably not the right way to read. Discovering books was like a discovering a second adolescence. I discovered new sensations in my body. It was even better. It was guilt-free and I could show off. Not that anyone except my librarian friend was impressed.

Outside the library, the world revolved around parade square, hockey fields and series of punishments and rewards that didn’t seem very different from each other. The vocabulary used to run the Academy life comprised of about fifty words, half of which were variations on the word 'balls.' Every order began or ended with balls, it was used as verb, adjective, qualifier or just simply a howl. Balls to you. Balls to mother, my balls, I'll cut your balls.... Every order, every threat, every compliment was a variation on the same testicular theme. Now that I look back at, it is quite obvious that this place was drowning in its own testosterone.

From outside, life could seem orderly. Uniforms were starched, rifles were oiled and sessions on the parade square hard and long. I yearned for that jangling of the keys in the library corridors. Once I was caught in my Navigation class reading Notes from the Underground hidden under a map that I was supposed to be studying. After our second year in the Academy, there were sudden attempts to turn us into good Muslims. Compulsory prayers. Quran lectures. Islamic Studies classes. In the third year we were caught stealing oranges from a neighbourhood orchard and as a punishment we were sent out to a mosque outside the Academy where Muslim cousins of Jehovah's Witnesses taught us how to knock on random doors and preach Islam.

"But they are all Muslims," I had protested.

"So are you," came the reply. "And look at yourself."

At that time I didn’t realise that we were an experiment in Islamisation of the whole society. General Zia was a distant presence. He was our commander-in-chief and the permanent president of Pakistan. He thought he was never going to die. So did we.

Years later, sitting in the officers' mess of a Karachi air base, we heard about the plane crash that killed him and several other generals. We were sad about the pilots and the crew of the plane. To drown our sorrows we pooled our meagre savings, ordered a bottle of Black Label whiskey, and instead of hiding in our bachelor quarters as we normally did, we opened the bottle in the officers' mess TV room and discussed our future. I left the air force a month later.

--Mohammed Hanif

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (May 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307268071
• ISBN-13: 978-0307268075
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #144,198 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4.5 out of 5: A humorous, colorful, whirlwind of a book, August 9, 2008

By	Gwendolyn Dawson "Literary License" (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This whirlwind of a book follows Junior Officer Ali Shigri of the Pakistan Air Force as he entangles himself in the complicated world of national politics. A host of colorful characters all seem to be working against each other, seeking revenge, glory, power, and sometimes even love. Throughout the mayhem, Mohammed Hanif sprinkles a generous amount of satire. Military medals are "fruit salad" on a uniform shirt and the Quran becomes a fortune-telling tool, for example. Although the action unfolds far from the U.S., many of this book's themes will resonate with U.S. readers.

This is a political thriller told on a very personal level. I connected with many of the characters, and this connection is what kept me quickly turning the pages even though I don't typically enjoy political books. Despite the complicated, interwoven plot lines and the many characters, this is not a messy, sprawling book but rather a tightly controlled performance. I had no difficulty following the action, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Highly recommended.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A funny, witty, startling novel and a great joy to read, June 16, 2008

By	Yesh Prabhu, author of The Beech Tree (Plainsboro, New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This debut novel by Mohammed Hanif is witty, humorous and entertaining. What is astonishing about this novel is that many of its characters are real; a few of its important characters were alive until a decade ago, but have since departed. Also, many of the incidents and events narrated in this novel actually happened, and so those are based on fact; but the author has chosen to interpret these actions and events with humor, and painted them with unabashed sarcasm, and colored them with prodigious wit, and thereby he has transformed the grave incidents into very funny vignettes.

At the center of the novel is the death of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who was president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988. On August 17, 1988, a C-130 Hercules plane carrying Zia ul-Haq crashes. On board were several Pakistani army generals, Arnold Raphel, the US Ambassador to Pakistan and the head of the US military aid mission to Pakistan, and all of them perish. They were returning to Islamabad from Punjab, where they had been to witness a tank demonstration. A few crates of ripe mangoes were loaded onto the plane before take off. Did one of the crates contain a canister of poison gas? The author wonders.

The main narrator of the novel is Ali Shigri, an Air Force Junior Officer, in the Pakistani Military. Ali Shigri's father, Col. Quili Shigri, has committed suicide, but Ali is convinced that his father did not commit suicide, and that he was actually murdered by General Zia. And so quite determined to kill the general, Ali hatches an elaborate plan to carry it.

In a very funny vignette, a lanky, bearded young man named OBL from Saudi Arabia attends a Fourth of July party given by Arnold Raphel in Islamabad. (He was invited to the party by the Americans!) OBL works for "Laden and Co. Constructions." Among the invited guests is the local C.I.A. chief, who tells Osama, "Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up."

There is also an astonishing vignette about Zainab, a blind woman who is convicted of the crime of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning, even though the adultery occurred when she was gang-raped. (I have read a similar incident in another Islamic country. There was international protest when the woman who was raped was sentenced to death by stoning.)

Mohammed Hanif's prose is spare but lucid. Even though it lacks the grandeur and splendor of Yann Martel's or Salman Rushdie's prose, it is spontaneous and highly readable:

"Anybody who breaks down at the sheer volume of this should stay in his little village and tend his father's goats or should study biology and become a doctor, and then they can have all the bloody peace and quiet they want. Because as a soldier, noise is the first thing you learn to defend yourself against, and as an officer, noise is the first weapon of attack you learn to use."

Because the author worked for the Pakistani Air Force for several years, his descriptions of army life and how Pakistan's army officers behave sound realistic and authentic.

This magnificent novel is born of an enormously talented writer. I understand that he is already working on his second novel. Reading "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" was a great joy.

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put it down, June 9, 2008

By	R. K. Brar (CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A fascinating fictional account of the real and mysterious plane crash that killed Pakistan's president Zia in the late 80s. Imaginative, clever, dark, funny, and kept me guessing all the way through.