ISLAMABAD, June 24: Novelist Mohammad Hanif at his debut appearance here on Tuesday evening to launch his scandalous fiction, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, about Gen Ziaul Haq’s plane crash on August 17, 1988 made quite an impression on the capital’s English speaking audience of mostly youngsters.

He read to them two sections from his book, one about his lock up with a friend when they were gentlemen cadets at the Air Force academy on being caught red handed helping an examinee in his test, and the other about the military dictator’s first corps commanders conference after the coup. The latter was a very visual recapitulation of an imagined scene that could have actually taken place. The scene is conceived with a journalist’s eye and a dramatist’s sense of timing.

The first incident at the Air Force academy sounded somewhat contrived and a bit crude in its attempted openness but new authors have to introduce these vulgar props to keep in line with what book reviewers think the run of the mill readership wants. Hanif was quite candid about his own need for things to keep happening in his book. Those who have yet to read his book would want the narrative keeps close to plausibility as shocking contrivances ultimately weaken the reader’s faith in the writer’s credibility.

The book fictionalises the causes of the plane crash spinning theories about the smoking gun including the curses of a scorned First Lady and a crow overfed on mangoes. The hilarious account of the conspiracy and its concordance with an actual happening create, in the view of some critics, a ‘satirical wallop’ with the famous Catch 22. It is a far-fetched comparison. It has been mentioned in a Kafkaesque context also but sale agents could do with lesser names.

In his interaction with the audience, Haneef was not reticent or tight lipped or even diplomatic. He said the book had nothing to do with recent events as he had been working on it for some four or five years now. He admitted he made little effort to investigate the causes of the crash or the alleged conspiracy to kill Zia. In fact there was little to go on. Journalist Epstein’s article was probably the best effort to know the truth. That too led nowhere. He thought he was entitled to flesh the probabilities with fiction. But what happened on the way resulted in the humanisation of Gen Zia who is customarily treated as some kind of a demon.

Some would question the licence of fiction being employed here to distort real personalities who cannot themselves answer or defend their real persona. Haneef thinks it is permissible. To my mind he was not very honest in his answer when I asked him if, had he not used the Zia crash to spin his story around, would it still have been as marketable?— Mushir Anwar