The Fruits Of Tyranny.(Books)(A Case of Exploding Mangoes)(Book review)

Byline: Fasih Ahmed

In his witty first novel, a journalist takes on the regime of Pakistan's despised former dictator Zia.

No one knows exactly what caused the 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistan's president and ruling military leader, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. But in his irreverent debut novel, "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" (323 pages. Alfred A. Knopf), Mohammed Hanif serves up a delicious smorgasbord of conspiracies, treachery and final coincidences aimed at cracking the 20-year-old mystery. The novel is a witty, lyrical mix of hearsay and history that, in effect, reifies and rationalizes suspicions toward the United States and Pakistan's own intelligence apparatus.

Hanif borrows his title from the widely held theory that a bomb or canister of nerve gas hidden inside a gift of mangoes was responsible for bringing down the C-130 that carried the despised dictator. His line-up of suspects stretches beyond the usual--the CIA, the ISI and amorphous Jewish and Indian lobbies--to include a gang-raped blind woman on death row under Zia's draconian adultery laws, a non-Muslim janitor jailed for almost a decade and the novel's sardonic narrator, Air Force officer Ali Shigri, who is seeking to come to terms with his decorated father's apparent suicide.

Hanif knows the incident well: he was working as a journalist in Karachi at the time. He was having beers with friends when news of Zia's plane crash broke. After initial moments of disbelief, they switched to Scotch. "We still know nothing about the incident," says Hanif, 42, speaking by phone from London, where he has lived for 11 years and works as the head of the BBC's Urdu service. "We know the make of the aircraft, we know the passengers who were onboard and we know that four minutes after it was confirmed, there was a wave of relief across Pakistan."

For many in Pakistan, Zia's 11-year reign was marked by a period of medievalism that triggered a virulent strain of Islam, prompting young Muslim men to join the jihad in Afghanistan. Hanif recounts these grim, dark years with uproarious disdain in the novel, which covers the days leading up to the crash and cuts between Zia's and Shigri's worlds until they collide in a "monsoon from hell." "The only way to deal with Zia's time was to joke about it," says the author. Though the book has not been published in Pakistan, it is available in bookstores there, and Hanif has been treated like a rock star at readings for his ...