History records that on August 17 1988 a Hercules C-130 aircraft crashed in Pakistan killing its occupants including the President of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq. No reasons were given for the crash. Was it an accident or, as this novel suggests, an assassination?
If so, we must ask the question: whodunit? Was it the result of a curse of a blind woman, a rape victim awaiting execution under Sharia law? Was it a bomb, possibly hidden in a case of fresh mangoes brought on board for Zia and his distinguished guests — including his former security chief who displayed reluctance to get on board in the film footage recorded before take-off? Or was it simply the crow that flew into one of the C-130’s engines? Or would Zia have died anyway, at the hands of Ali Shigri, an airforce officer who blamed him for his father’s suicide?
Told in part from Shigri’s point of view, the novel starts two months before with Under Officer Ali Shigri being arrested as part of an inquiry into the disappearance of one of his men, Cadet Obaid-ul-llah, with an aeroplane. Why did Obaid go absent without leave? Where did he go? And, the investigators ask, what was the relationship between Shigri and Obaid?
Intercut with Shigri’s sojourn in a series of incredibly dirty prison cells, his encounters with military and the feared security service, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), and his attempts to avoid torture or worse, we are presented with a picture of Zia and the cabal of military officers, of the varying degrees of hard-line Islamism that constitute his inner circle of government, his rather suspicious and domineering wife and the network of United States diplomats, military advisers and spooks that gravitate towards him. This is, after all, the Eighties: Pakistan, whatever its own human rights record, is a close United States ally in the war between the Soviets and Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.
In detention Shigri plays his trump card: he is the son of a decorated hero of Pakistan to whom everyone in the high command seems for some reason indebted. Something about his father’s death, a somewhat hushed-up suicide, has the ability to recall in the brass’ minds old debts. It opens doors, at least lines of communication. Shigri hopes it will open his prison cell.
Amid cabinet meetings and diplomatic functions (including one attended by a Saudi contractor turned guerrilla known only as OBL), wrangles over the application of Sharia law and bitter remarks from Mrs Zia about her husband’s eagerness to be interviewed by attractive American women journalists, tensions in the inner circle are brewing. General Akhtar, chief of the ISI, is feeling increasingly isolated from the centre of power — and not liking it a bit —
Fact and fiction blur in this novel. Historical figures such as Zia ul-Haq vie for our attention with (presumably) fictitious figures such as Shigri and Obain. Similarly famous walk-on characters include CIA director William Casey and OBL (no prize for guessing who this is), the latter literally walking around at a diplomatic reception. Similarly, plots and conspiracies blur into each other in such a way that I wondered how much of Shigri’s part in the unfolding events is part of his vivid imagination.
This is Mohammed Hanif’s first novel. A graduate of the Pakistan Air Force Academy and of the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme, it is not surprising that the author now lives in Britain. With its at times wickedly funny satire on the pomposity of dictators, the posturing of the military and certain quirks in Sharia law (among other things), it is not likely to win him friends back home, certainly in many influential circles.
Highly entertaining while containing a strongly anti-authoritarian message, the novel is also in some ways an attempt perhaps to send up the hugely popular genre of ”faction” — fiction posing as fact. The author so blurs the boundaries, leaving us with a range of possibilities by the end that it seems to say that taken to its logical conclusion — into the realm of satire — such a genre might end up a bit like this. There may be a plot, there may be many plots. Or we may never know.
So, whodunit? Who cares, so long as one enjoys the ride? But perhaps we should check those mangoes before take-off.