“A Case of Exploding Mangoes” is set in the months before and the days after the crash. Far from coming to a conclusion about the cause of Zia’s death, Hanif gleefully thickens the stew of conspiracy theories, introducing at least six other possible suspects, including a blind woman under sentence of death, a Marxist-Maoist street cleaner, a snake, a crow, an army of tapeworms and a junior trainee officer in the Pakistani Air Force named Ali Shigri, who is also the novel’s main narrator.

Image Credit... Henning Wagenbreth

Ali is irreverent, lazy and raspingly sardonic, and his obvious fictional predecessor is Joseph Heller’s Yossarian. Indeed, like “Catch-22,” “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” is best understood as a satire of militarism, regulation and piety. Much of Hanif’s novel is set in the Pakistani Air Force Academy, an institution staffed by crazies and incompetents who could have walked straight out of Heller’s novel. Among them are Lieutenant Bannon, known as Loot, a languorous American drill instructor who douses himself in Old Spice, and Uncle Starchy, the squadron’s laundryman, who  as we witness in a fine scene  self-medicates with snake venom, using a live krait as his syringe. The academy cadets, meanwhile, are so maddened by celibacy that they have sex with holes in their mattresses, and so erotically sensitized that copies of Reader’s Digest circulate as substitutes for pornographic magazines.

In the midst of all this lunacy is Ali Shigri: sane, if not entirely so, and bent on revenge. Ali is convinced that his father, Col. Quli Shigri, was killed on the orders of General Zia. By way of retribution, Ali develops an intricate assassination plot, which involves Loot Bannon, Starchy’s snake and “Baby O” Obaid. Baby O is Ali’s best friend and occasional lover. His idea of relaxation is to watch “The Guns of Navarone” while wearing Poison perfume, and he occasionally imagines himself to be the avian hero of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”

The novel cuts cleverly between Shigri’s self-told story of his assassination plans and third-person scenes from the last months of the man he is trying to murder, General Zia. Zia’s depiction is one of the book’s great achievements. Hanif summons all his satirical disdain for this pious and violent man, whose years of power have left him “fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia.” At morning prayer one day, Hanif writes, Zia “broke into violent sobs. The other worshipers continued with their prayers; they were used to General Zia crying during his prayers. They were never sure if it was due to the intensity of his devotion, the matters of state that occupied his mind or another tongue-lashing from the first lady.”