A Case of Exploding Mangoes By Mohamed Hanif

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohamed Hanif is a pleasure that lasts long after the plane carrying Haq crashes in the desert thereby melting all the ripe mangoes and Baby O reading Marquez’s Chronicle of A Death Foretold. This ambitious novel can safely stand beside Catch 22. A dark tale of conspiracies, foreign policies and history that remains unforgiving and yet indifferent to Pakistan and her people. Afghanistan-Pakistan-USA-USSR circle is where President Zia and his regime established itself and prospered (I hope it is not a wrong word) that ultimately proved too much for the people of Pakistan. Hanif is a smart chronicler albeit a darkly humorous one.

General Zia ul-Haq seized power in a military coup in 1977 and drove the country to embrace Islamic values at the cost of democracy and equality, thereby changing the entire texture of Pakistani life. There were public flogging and stoning and hangings. Some people approved and some were appalled. The Soviet invaded Afghanistan in 1979, cold war ensued between USA and USSR, Pakistan became the lynchpin, the main anchor for America in its war against the commies. Refugees flooded into Pakistan and covert aids from US and Saudi to Afghan mujahideen got underway through Zia and his regime. Things ultimately spiralled out of control and so far we have seen the consequences.

Even if one is not aware of the context against which the novel stands one can enjoy the playfulness of the characters here. Hanif creates a language in the narrative of the novel that regales with funny one-liners and wisecracks and paints its various characters with queer warmth and even affection. Zia becomes a ruler who is surprised everyday to see himself as the most powerful man in the country. The probing finger of Saudi doctor inside his rectum in his office helps to stress the facts.

The main protagonist, if we can call him that, Under Officer Ali Shigri, leader of "Silent Drill Squad", is a boy from hill who wants to avenge the death of his father but he is hardly a Hamlet. He is insane all right, since he wants to kill Zia himself, he is a good friend, a lively companion, even a lovable scamp. The tint of irony and acute awareness of the world around him saturate his whims and ultimately grants him life at the end of the novel.

There is an American drill instructor Lt. "loot" Bannon who hatches the plan to kill Zia with the help of Shigri and Under Officer Obaid "Baby O", a part time lover of Shigri, a part time pilot and a full time poet. There is Zainab—blind rape-victim whom Zia sentences to death, through stoning, for adultery, and who curses Zia. And there is a black crow who carries the blind woman’s curse to Zia on that fateful day when he dies.

One of the most original scenes in the novel is the party hosted by American ambassador at his place on the 4^th of July. People, both American and Pakistani, turn up there wearing flowing turbans, tribal gowns and embroidered shalwar qameez. One of the guests at the party is OBL of ‘Laden and Co. Constructions’, a lanky man with flowing beard, and the only man wearing suit. OBL is thoroughly ignored by everyone and the one corporal who makes fun of his suit chokes on his own beer. This OBL will not let these Americans forget him ever. Hanif creates one of the tongue-in-cheek moments that makes the novel such a joy to read.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, and US interest waned, the Taliban rose. A decade later 9/11 happened and Americans woke up to this OBL who may or may have come to that or any of the party hosted by Americans. But that is not the point. That the terror attack in America would come out of the cold war remains an ignored fact, USSR broke down and so did American swagger.

The comedy in A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the device that makes the narrative go forth. The slogan at the sweepers office reads ‘Cleanliness if half the faith’, since most of the sweepers in Pakistan are either Hindus or Christians. Shigri wonders - What are you supposed to say when someone knocks at your prison door? Or - Is one allowed to open ones eyes in a blindfold?

All the funny lines in the novel hide the sad facts. The fact that a country of 130 million people is governed by an Army General who is paranoid about his personal safety, the funny thing is he is being eaten away by worms from inside while he is worried about stray bullets or poor widows. The fact that religion has taken over the democratic/secular culture, the funny thing is no amount of sacred verse can reveal the truth to a man who has fallen in love with his own greatness. Discovery of an unscathed copy of Quran from the crashed plane that killed Zia makes us believe that Islam can survive without the piety of such despots. 

Reading Millennium Trilogy: Reading Nabokov's Lolita

Reading Millennium Trilogy: Reading Nabokov's Lolita

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Reading Nabokov's Lolita

It is difficult to sum up my feelings after reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I will attempt nonetheless. It is after all a novel that is difficult to conceive, tough to write and impossible to be written like the way it was written by my dear Vladimir. What a piece of art the novel has turned out to be. I remember to have read a book called ‘On the Sublime’ somewhere during my under-graduate days and found the world sublime ridiculously abstract and gratuitously meaningful. I was wrong. I am wrong. Lolita is a sublime piece of art. It’s a novel that combines, much like Keats’ best poems and Shakespeare’s best plays, beauty with something unexplainable, something indescribable, something eternal like the universe with all its suns and moons and sky.

It is, sadly, a misunderstood book, for those who haven’t read it and for those who have heard about it. Lolita, they say, is a story of a paedophile and a pervert – in short- a sex story- a porn stuff. Most of the people in the world who can read, read porn, and they have not read it. Lolita is not porn. Lolita is a book of a lifetime.

Story of Lolita is sad, funny, unpretentious and unapologetic. It is a confession of middle-aged man Humbert Humbert, a pseudonym of a pseudonym of a pseudonym, of his obsession with 12-year old ‘nymphet’ Dolorous Haze, his very own Lolita. His obsession is sexual and partly a fulfilment of his memory of his childhood sweetheart who had died before their love could bloom. Humbert is a pervert and Humbert is a poet. Humbert is a bastard and Humbert is a critique of the popular American pop culture that fills the young mind with crap. Humbert is a "detestable, abominable, criminal fraud" and Humbert is, well, just Humbert.

The first sexual act between him and his nymphet is initiated by Lolita who has already experienced something like this in her summer camp. Her mother and his wife safely dead both go on to live an unrestrained life. The following days become a rollercoaster for Humbert. A life from ‘pure joy’ to ‘unrestrained jealousy’, hopping from one hotel to another Humbert goes on to celebrate and condemn the affectations of a growing up girl. The years roll on and finally Lolita escapes, well not to safety, but to one of her short lived teenage revelry. And when Humbert finally meets her after two years she is a 17-year old heavily pregnant wife. Subsequently Humbert goes off to murder Clare Quilty. A hilarious account of the crime inflates the entire reason behind the revenge.

Lolita is Humbert’s confession. Written in an elaborate language, full of pun and quote and aphorism, fusing the coming and poetic, this confession gives rise to exceptional ambiguity. How far can we trust the narrator? He is a mad man who has had numerous visits to mental asylum and takes unrestrained delight in fooling the psychiatrists. This mad narrator is clever enough to pose as an intellectual and pass insightful comments about the society. This pathological narrator, who may not allow any character to exist beyond his own imagination, gives in to tenderness and guilt when he tells us that his paedophilic love for Lolita, his Dolly, might have ruined her personality and subsequently her understanding of being ‘normal’.

Nabokov employs all the stock narrative technique, from contrived co-incidences and role play by the characters to designed clues that may or may not lead a reader to any definite point. There is no specific reason or logic behind the entire narrative and there are infinite reasons why Nabokov wrote this novel. The last lines of Lolita are ‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita’. Is it to serve art that Nabokov has written this book? May be (may be is a good word while trying to deal with this book) for the shake of art itself.

Lolita is one of the finest literary achievements, in the league of Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detective, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, just to name a few. While the three books I mention here have completely different themes and occasions (considering the fact that art is a product of occasion), Nabokov’s Lolita is an indifferent product. The common element among these is their extraordinary literary merit. All these break barriers (including the traditionally possible employment) of the language. Even in their translated form Marquez and Bolano’s works can stand on their own in their narrative technique. Rushdie and Nabokov, writing in their adopted language, fork new path, vast and intricate, and we are glad to lose ourselves on that path.

I call Lolita an indifferent product because while reading it I have always been on the verge of discovering some new land, on the cusp of sighting some profundity but that land has always eluded me, so far. I need to re-read it time and again. "While I keep everything on the brink of parody," Nabokov explained somewhere, "there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and the caricature of it." This brink of parody is to be treaded carefully so that we do not fall into that abyss of seriousness. Reading Lolita gives you the sense of that kind of pleasure.

Suprose: An Essay In The New Yorker About R.K.Narayan's Fiction

Suprose: An Essay In The New Yorker About R.K.Narayan's Fiction: annot help b

Ernest Hemingway

It is strange that I read Hemingway so late in life. His first book that I picked up, Farewell to Arms, made me sad. But his style made me curious and fueled my ever dormant ambition to become a writer. He has a crazy style of narrating a story unlike anyone I have read. Short pithy sentences that coalesce an outbreak of emotions and a collage of images are easy to read and hard to grasp. A reader just cannot read on. He has to pause and let Hemingway fill that silence with meanings.

The two novels – A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises – that I have read so far are unfashionable as far as fashion of reading novels goes. For every undergraduate student in India TS Eliot is a must, Ezra Pound too is common, but Hemingway is rare.

There is a reason I have mentioned Hemingway with two modern poets. There is similarity among these three. It is sad that I didn’t read him while I was coming to terms with the idea of reading to pursue a method of writing. He might have given me clues though it is accepted that he is impossible to imitate.

A Farewell to Arms is about war. It is as unsentimental and as depressing as a war novel can be. But the sadness of the hero is never dwelt upon, and love seems to be the only refuse, though a temporary one in the case of its narrator. The weight of the war makes hope a futile attempt. Hemingway is honest and scrupulous and unpretentious just like the horror that war brings to the humanity. 

A semi autobiographical novel, A Farewell To Arms narrates the futile attempt of its first person narrator to run away from the battlefield. Such inglorious actions are celebrated by Bernard Shaw in Arms and the Man. Shaw weaves a morality play through a soldier who carries chocolates instead of bullets and believes nine out of ten soldiers are born fools, Hemingway instead creates a world weary man who has seen too much to be witty and has participated in war too long to have an opinion. The doomed love of Frederic Henry – the narrator – and a British nurse, Catherine Barkley signifies war as the monumental harbinger of suffering. In the end their son is stillborn and hemorrhage of Catherine thereby leads her to death. Hope is dead and as Nat King Cole sang, although in different context, the dream has ended, for true love died. Finally Henry walks away from the hospital in the rain.

The Sun Also Rises is another book that is written in understated and deceptively simple style. There is no central point in this book much like its characters. Written in journalistic style by the narrator who happens to be a journalist carrying the scars from the war both mental and physical, the novel keeps moving from simple recounting of events concerning a group of expatriate people travelling from Parish to Spain. Characters participate in heavy drinking, promiscuity, fishing and the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. These characters together create the lost generation who are once and for all damaged by the First World War.

Counter-Clock World

For all the time I was reading Phillip K Dick’s Counter-Clock World I tried to decipher meaning(s) underneath the story. It can be tricky in a story that takes place in world like ours and is about real people, as real as you and me, and yet the historical context is entirely ingenious, a thing of imagination.

The world in Counter-Clock World is in reverse. Birth and death change method of expression, womb is the final refuse. Death and burial, the natural order of a Christian life, initiates re-birth that takes a person from old age to youth to childhood and finally to a baby who ends up inside the woman who would take it in her womb. A dead and buried person, or should I say body, undergoes recovery of the vital parts of his or her biological existence. There is also the concept of soul, a complex idea that Dick develops but does not elaborate, maybe he should have read Hinduism or maybe he did but the story is hardly about a discussion on soul and rightly so, but the narrative action does take place because of a religious tension that threatens to challenge some rooted ideas that have started to gnaw the social order. Once the person recovers and comes to his senses inside the coffin, he must call out for help and he is rescued by the summoned grave diggers, skilled, commercial and enterprising people.

The story, therefore, is as fantastic as one can expect from Dick. The novel takes place against this background or may be the background itself becomes the reason behind the story. Whichever way I see it I find the story incredible and entertaining. The allegory in the novel can be compared to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Herman Melville's Moby Dick; the geography of Dick’s world can be a symbolic representation of our own decadence that finds expression through the representation of abstract ideas and principle by the characters and the events in the narrative. The cliché or saying that more things change, more they remain same suits Counter-Clock World. Human nature remains as mysteriously undefined as god is conspicuous. And religion as always remains a bone of contention for this dog-world. Dick captures a sense of uselessness of the human life despite all the sound and fury, love and sex, unexpected kindness and regular horror, constant ennui and counterfeited joy, and sadly in Dick’s world there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

The trouble with Dick is he never gives an explanation; the story doesn’t pause to reflect back, possibly that makes it a racy stuff, if you know what I mean. In a way Dick is just summarizing an event like a historian. A work of fiction, a science fiction, that reads like an observation of a particular piece of time – and we already know time is a complex tool here. The question though remains whether this work (by extension any work, if I may presume) of Dick will survive the Library. The Library in this novel is a self-sustained organization that meticulously destroys information, words (written or oral) are procured (by any means possible) and read and consigned to nothingness. The disambiguation of this world is a hard work and the Library is the voluntary agent.

Phillip K Dick is not as spontaneous as Ray Bradbury, but he is equally entertaining. I will not say who is a better writer, that’s for someone who enjoys one over the other, but the complexity of Dick allows him to be prosaic about a world that we may wake up to any day.

Reading Millennium Trilogy

Reading Millennium trilogy has made me curious about the idea of writing compelling stories in simple way, and I am talking about a translated work. The story can start from anywhere, at least that’s what I think, and can go on to add characters, plot, progression of the plot, development (sometimes lack of it) of characters, not necessarily in this order, and dialogues or should I say words spoken by the characters. Lucidity is a problem. That and the ability of the writer to hold a reader’s attention for as long as the book lasts. Steig  Larson does all these in his three books. Published posthumously, Millennium trilogy has made him a writer who ought to have lived a few years more, of course to write some more stuff but also to enjoy the money and fame that has followed since his demise.

The Girl With Dragon Tattoo, the first of the trilogy, is a complete book in itself if we can ignore the background of Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is unique. There are few women characters in Literature who precede her. Her complexity as a human being may remain as the most important achievement of Larson. She is quite frankly anti-social, introvert, has freakish memory and a computer-nerd – one of the eight citizens of hacker republic – she is above all a survivor. She may have memory of an elephant; she weighs 40 kg and is light on her feet like a butterfly. The suffering that she has experienced as 12-year old can break any normal person; she stays sane all through but refuses to acknowledge the civilized world’s definition of this word. She works outside the society, but not outside the morality.

Larson’s books have many women characters – well-dressed, self confident, intelligent and sexually liberated (whatever that means). The trouble is women in the novels are never mean, they may have tough opinions about things but at no stage do they come across as evil. I can only explain this as Larson’s artful subtlety to project himself as the male protagonist of the trilogy Mickel Blomkovist.

Mickel, the quintessential hero, is a scrupulous journalist, an uncompromising honest person. Mickel makes light of all his qualities – good and bad. There are not too many bad things in him though, if you trust the women. Women find him sexually attractive and someone who lets a woman be and does not bother her with unbecoming emotions. Mickel too expects the same. Naturally he is good between the sheets. Even Salander is impressed and is surprised to fall in love with him.

In story and scope of the conspiracy that the trilogy unfolds Larson stands tall. The Girl with Dragon Tattoo untangles a conspiracy that involves a rich family and its diabolic secrets – pro-Nazi people, misogynists, rapists, murderer and incest. The simple story to find a girl who has been missing from last 25 years leads Mickel and Salander into the dark heart of the Swedish society. This darkness is more visible as we go into second and third books. Along with finding the missing girl they manage to strip some corrupt businessmen hand in glove with the government.

The girl who played with fire – second of the trilogy – is more about Salander than anybody else. The past that Lisbeth cannot forget, confronts her and pushes her into the labyrinth leaving us breathless with excitement. As we appropriate her story and descend into her past and worry about her present we grow restless, much like Mickel. No surprise Larson has become such a sensation.

The girl who kicked hornet’s nest – the final part – culminates into a disturbing tale about human suffering added and abetted by ‘civilized society’, a democratic government, popular media, paranoid policemen and paedophilic doctors. Lisbeth, by no means a secondary character in this part, becomes the epicenter of the storm that blows the lead off a can of worms. Larson questions the very fabric of the sanguine Swedish society; Mickel becomes the flag-bearer and Mickel being Mickel ropes in the very system to assist him that he threatens to expose.

There is no dead end in the trilogy. Sadly every tale has to end. Larson died before he could see his published works. How I wish could write the fourth book, if only I had Larson’s lucidity.