Author Mohammed Hanif. (Random House Canada)

On Aug. 17, 1988, after watching M-1 Abrams tank demonstrations on a remote desert patch outside the city of Bahawalpur, Pakistani leader Gen. Zia ul-Haq stepped onto Pak One, his country’s equivalent of Air Force One. The other passengers on board the C-130 Hercules aircraft included the general’s senior aides, the American ambassador to Pakistan and the head of the U.S. military aid mission to Pakistan. Minutes after takeoff, Pak One took a nosedive into the desert and exploded into flames.

Mohamed Hanif, then a 23-year-old Pakistani air force pilot, was in the officers mess in a Karachi airbase when he heard the news. “For about half an hour, we were really worried what [would] happen,” Hanif says. “And we were obviously worried if anyone we knew was on the plane, or not. So we made a few phone calls.

“After that, we called up our bootlegger. We pooled our savings and ordered a big bottle of Black Label whisky. Normally, we would [surreptitiously] drink in our bachelor quarters,” Hanif says, “but that day, we sat in the TV room of the officers mess and asked waiters to bring us some glasses — and some ice.” A consummate narrator, Hanif begins the story with a sly smile and delivers the punch line with a short burst of laughter.

The late Benazir Bhutto called Zia’s death an “act of God”; her brother Mir Murtaza fought a long campaign of agitation against the general. Zia took power in a bloodless coup in 1977; in 1979, he executed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father. Benazir and her brother, along with the KGB, the CIA, Mossad, India’s secret service and even members of Zia’s inner circle, were all suspects in Zia’s death. The black box recovered from the crash debris suggested the pilots might have been involved in a suicide mission; another theory is that due to lax security, a crate of mangoes carrying a nerve gas canister got on board Pak One. As Mohammed Hanif demonstrates in his dazzling debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, all these allegations make the perfect masala for a political thriller.

I recently caught up with Hanif in the Canadian offices of his publisher, Random House. Dressed casually in jeans, a pink collar peeping out of a lime-green sweater, Hanif is soft-spoken, a trait that emphasizes his dry humour. He confesses that “a case of exploding mangoes” were actually the first words he typed on paper; he says it’s a Pakistani reference to the conspiracy theories surrounding Zia’s death.

The cover for A Case of Exploding Mangoes. (Random House Canada)

“The idea wasn’t to write about Zia strictly speaking,” says Hanif. “I wanted to write about a boy growing up in a certain period and certain environment, and at some point I wanted him to meet Zia. But how does a normal, average citizen come across the dictator president of the country? At some point I just thought, OK: let me see what he was doing a few weeks before his death. That’s how it became a novel about Zia, when I got into his private spaces – into his bedroom and bathroom and wherever he went.”

A Case of Exploding Mangoes is narrated by Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, who is on a mission to avenge another puzzling death — that of his father. Beginning at the end, the whodunit-style story flashes back a few months before Zia’s demise and fills the plot with a mix of real and fictional characters. The book has earned comparisons to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a book Hanif says he devoured as a youngster.

Born in Okara, Pakistan to a potato-farming family, Hanif sought to escape village drudgery after high school. Joining the air force seemed like a ticket to adventure. “At 16, most [Pakistani] boys think of becoming pilots, wrestlers or cricketers, “ he says with a smile. “As I got in, I found out it was not really all fun and games.” After seven years of training, he graduated as a pilot officer.

“Discipline is one thing common in armed forces around the world, and something in me was not disciplined,” Hanif explains. “I would [occasionally] get into trouble jumping the wall at night and going to watch a movie; or renting out a VCR, renting out three movies and setting up little cinema in dorm. First opportunity I got to get away from it, I did.

“I was a big reader, and I wanted to get out of the air force and have a job to do with reading and writing.” He began by penning TV reviews for Glamour magazine during his off-hours in the air force. Soon, he joined Newsline, a muckraking independent magazine that regularly took on the government, local warlords and drug barons. When Newsline founder Razia Bhatti — Hanif’s mentor — died of a brain hemorrhage, Hanif moved to London and got a job with the BBC; he currently heads the broadcaster’s Urdu service.

Caricatured by Salman Rushdie in his 1983 novel Shame, Zia has a notorious legacy. Responsible for introducing sharia and martial law to Pakistan, the general was a conniving conduit between the U.S. administration and the mujahedeen during the 1979-88 Afghanistan war. He helped funnel American arms to Afghan fighters and promoted a pan-Islamic jihad against Communism. (The Taliban are largely a byproduct of that period.) In doing his research, Hanif read paeans written by Zia’s cronies, who portrayed him as a humble soldier of Islam. “He came across as this incredibly dull and boring man, who is obviously of no use to a writer or a reader,” says Hanif. “So I thought I will just write about him as my own creation, rather than a historical figure.”

The mysterious 1988 death of real-life Pakistani leader Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, pictured, propels the plot in A Case of Exploding Mangoes. (Keystone/Getty Images)

Besides the characterization of Gen. Zia as a Quran-consulting paranoiac, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is full of shrewd and comical portrayals of Pakistani bureaucrats, military officers and shady suits like “OBL” (Osama bin Laden). “When [Zia] came into power, he had this notion of turning [Pakistan] into this laboratory to experiment with bizarre laws borrowed from Saudi Arabia,” he says. “I still remember there was this man … caught trying to steal a clock from a mosque. He was sentenced to [have] his hand chopped off. But the funny thing is that the punishment was never carried out, because there wasn’t a single doctor in Pakistan who would do that.

“So, your memories are these really bizarre, alien things which had nothing to do with a country or with its people, and there was just one man who was on this mission to try to make it something it wasn’t.”

Hanif says that one of the reasons Zia’s death was never solved is because so many Pakistanis were simply glad to be rid of him. But Zia’s demise hasn’t made leading the country a less threatening job. While Gen. Pervez Musharraf has dodged several attempts on his life (and finally gave up his military uniform), Benazir Bhutto was assassinated shortly after her return to Pakistan late last year to run in national elections against him. Hanif says admirers and critics alike were in shock after the murder of “Bulletproof Benazir.”

“We all grew up with her,” Hanif says. “We saw her go to prison, get exiled. Her father was hanged, her two brothers shot dead, and she lived her life in public. I remember when she got married, there was a big street party.

“I was telling someone that [Benazir and I] arrived in London within a year and half of each other,” Hanif says. “I don’t like her politics, but there was one thing common between her and me: we both kept on threatening to go back to Pakistan. She has, and I haven’t — but I am going to soon.”

A Case of Exploding Mangoes is in stores now.

Aparita Bhandari is a writer based in Toronto.