Illustration by Abro
The publication of a Mohammed Hanif novel should be nothing short of a national event. A notification should be issued, giving us three days to consume and exchange notes on his latest offering. His new novel, Red Birds, is most suited to such treatment as it offers the greatest rewards for a nation suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I don’t say this to elicit self-pity, but to understand that “those under assault from outsiders take it out on their own.” This, and many other life lessons delivered by a flea-bitten stray dog called Mutt, allows us to artfully navigate our national impulses through the lens of Hanif’s lacerating humour.
Red Birds, Hanif’s third novel, takes place in an unnamed desert location. I would encourage you to assume it is in Pakistan, as Hanif’s familiarity with the Pakistani psyche can’t but inform his writing. He is in familiar territory here, as the characters emerge from the intersection of the United States’s geopolitical interests and the Near East, much like in A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
Ellie, a US air force pilot (a dying breed in modern-day warfare), has crash-landed in a desert located within what was once enemy territory in a now forgotten war. He wanders aimlessly through the desert, desperately sifting through his racially tinged military training to find something that may assist in his survival.
In his third novel, Mohammed Hanif challenges us to recognise the absurdity of what we have become while making us laugh at our own demise
Mutt, our saviour in mangled form, stumbles across the hapless survivor after escaping a brutal assault brought on by the national impulse mentioned above. This results in a rescue by Mutt’s entrepreneurial teenage owner Momo, resident of a nearby refugee camp and occasional assaulter of stray dogs.
Momo, like most of us, has a low opinion of everyone but himself. “This place is full of thieves,” he says of his own people, reserving his greatest scorn for the “international-aid types, nice smelling do-gooders who obviously were the greatest thieves of them all.” As with many residents of the camp, Momo is missing a family member. He yearns for Brother Ali, who disappeared into a mysterious US facility known as “The Hangar”, often revealing his own sense of inadequacy. Momo’s age and ‘loss’ make him an ideal candidate for trending studies. He relents to being interviewed by a USAID consultant — derisively dubbed Flowerbody by Momo’s grief-stricken mother — under the belief that she would come in handy in future rehabilitation projects that may or may not include a rescue of his brother.
Momo’s family, with whom both Ellie and Flowerbody eventually take up residence, are an unlikely bunch. Father Dear is an obsequious collaborator with whatever occupying force happens to take interest, whilst Mother Dear is driven by grief, talking truth to power when faced with Flowerbody’s appalling cognitive dissonance: “First they bomb our houses, then they take away my son and now you are here to make us feel alright.”
“Things happen on both sides,” is Flowerbody’s unfailing response. Nicely done, Hanif.