A Case of Exploding Mangoes, the first novel by Pakistani journalist Mohammed Hanif is here with a swagger of audacity and self-assurance, that it could change all that. Hanif, who heads the BBC's Urdu service in London, sets his story around the death of Pakistan's military dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq who, after 11 years of misbegotten jihadist rule, perished in a plane crash in August 1988, taking his fellow generals, the US ambassador in Islamabad Arnold Raphel and several crates of luscious mangoes down with him. There have probably been as many conspiracy theories about who killed Gen. Zia as there are sand dunes in the Bahawalpur desert but, till date, as with Benazir Bhutto's assassination or crown prince Dipendra gunning down his family in Kathmandu, or the recent domestic murder of Aarushi Talwar that grips India, no plot or clear motive has been unmasked.
In the hands of a thriller writer of the garden variety the mystery of Gen. Zia's unsolved (and largely unlamented) death, it could have become another whodunit. A Case of Exploding Mangoes turns it into a biting satire on the long, dark night of the generals in Pakistan and a piercingly ironic lament on the frustrations of the rulers and the ruled in a dictatorship. The cast of plotters here include generals competing for succession; a couple of reckless, insolent officers at the air force academy bent on revenge; a blind woman sentenced to death by stoning for fornication and a crow sickened by gorging on too many mangoes.
Hanif mixes invented characters with real-life figures
