A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

It is the day before Christmas today and work finished early. Not accustomed to such freedom, I could think of nothing to do and nowhere to go. So I ended up at Borders. Sipping coffee with a book in hand and staring into space certainly has an authorly air to it, doesn’t it?



I was reading ‘A case of exploding mangoes’ by Mohammed Hanif. This is his debut novel. I picked it up because Mohsin Hamid (I like his work) thinks the book is ‘unputdownable and darkly hilarious’. The book is tagged as a ‘political thriller’ and is about the plane crash during 1988 that killed General Zia-ul Haq.



Borders was full of people and I could hear fragments of conversations floating around, mixed with the sound of cups and dishes and spoons, children’s voices. I was taking notes on my journal. There was light just behind me so I could see the shadow of my own hand as I wrote, which made things difficult.



I vaguely remember Zia-ul Haq, he used to be on the news often. I remember once, Imran Khan decided to retire from playing cricket after turning 35, Zia-ul-Haq requested him to continue playing. This was broadcasted on Bangladesh TV and I was watching with my father. We thought it was an awesome thing to be requested by the president himself to keep doing what you do. Imran Khan looked polite, proud and handsome. Zia-ul-Haq always looked like an adoring uncle to me, with his butterfly moustache, big smile and white teeth...



It’s kind of weird to read about history that happened in my lifetime. The plane crash was all over the news and everyone around me was convinced that the Indians did it. However, that was all adult contemplation and I was still a child on the borderline. So I only remember vague comments in passing. The incident probably surprised me; maybe I was even shocked to see a prominent face on television suddenly disappear. Or perhaps by that time I got used to it - there was of course President Ziaur Rahman and Indira Gandhi before this.



Back to the book, the descriptions are magnetic and anecdotes are so true that they are extremely funny. For example, anyone familiar with the politics of the Indian subcontinent knows about the cover ups to cover cover ups.

The prologue starts from the moment General Zia-ul-Haq, accompanied by Arnold Raphael (US ambassador to Pakistan) and General Akhtar are about to board the aircraft. The story is told in first person by the narrator Junior under officer Ali Shigri, who claims to be the one that got away along with history.



It was the time between the end of one war and beginning of another and ‘history was taking a siesta’. Soviet soldiers were preparing to leave Afghanistan while General Zia was preparing for peace and ‘being the cautious men they are, they have come to Bahawalpur to shop for tanks while waiting for the end of the cold war’.



The book begins where it ends and we are taken back in time to experience the details that led to the event. Twenty pages into the book, I was hooked and ended up $NZ31.99 poorer. Back to my reading now, it’s been a long time since I’ve paid attention!

Tales of a Few Kitties: The story of the first New Zealand book I read...

The first New Zealand book I purchased is a collection of short stories, poetry and memoirs on cats. It is titled ‘The Cat’s Whiskers [New Zealand Writers on Cats]’. The book is edited by Peter Wells. The purchase, however, if I am completely honest should be credited to my fondness of the feline beings rather than literature.

At the time of my purchase I was vaguely aware of Peter Wells’s name. I later found out that he is a prominent New Zealand writer and has been made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to literature and film. He also has a number of awards under his belt.

In the introduction Wells writes ‘The cat has long had a privileged relationship with writers. Perhaps it is the cat’s solitary nature or it’s ability to radiate a kind of silence and peacefulness that makes it a particular favourite of writers.’ I immediately thought of those rare winter afternoons when I sit baffled in front of my laptop attempting at a masterpiece or two and my cat sprawled across my feet like a warm cushion, snoozing. Obviously Peter Wells’s observation pleased me immensely as it so logically authenticated my claims to being an author. Thus satisfied that it is a wonderful book I commenced reading.

And surprise! Contrary to my initial impression that this is going to be a cute and cuddly collection on cats, it is as Peter Wells points out ‘My aim with this book has been to mine a rich seam in New Zealand writing that has seen the cat as friend, companion, muse.‘ Wells has collected samples of writing by a wide range of New Zealand authors and poets of varied genres and time. It is amazing how without even knowing it, like a thirsty horse led to the water by divine powers, here I stand.

I absolutely adored Margaret Mahy’s story about the cat that ate a poet-mouse and became a poet himself against his will. The little verses the cat catches himself pondering over during various catly activities are hilarious. For example, as the cat lies in his bed and wonders what has come over him, he says –

Lying in the catnip bed,

The flowering cherry over my head,

Am I really the cat that I seem?

Or only a cat in another cat’s dream?

Or the time when he wants to hiss at the neighbour’s dog but a poem comes out instead

Colonel Dog fires his cannon

And puts his white soldiers on parade.

He guards the house form cats, burglars,

And any threat of peacefulness.

Well, that will definitely teach anyone attempting to eat a poet!

A poem I found charmingly and devilishly witty, a nightmare to any cat lover is Bernard Brown’s Sufficient Pussy. Here goes –

All cats can go to hell

And save me worry.

The only one I ever loved

Was one in Auckland

In a curry.

I was rather relieved to find out that though disguised as a cat eater Bernard Brown has two cats – King and Sarah. They do occasionally climb up on his table; however, none of them went into a curry (so far).

C.K Stead’s poem Cat/ullus touched me. The fist line - Zac’s Dead is absolute, like death itself, no space for ambiguity. Someone once said “Dead is a good word for dead, because it’s so dead.” The lines below are especially nice–

Zac of the goldfish eyes

and nice-smelling fur

who when I had a problem with a poem

slept on it,

who lived to put his paw-print

on a valued citation,

who in his dying days

jumped to swipe at a passing moth

and missed.

I almost had tears in my eyes as I thought of my sweet tabby tortoiseshell cat and her many mischief - the surprised look on her face as she gingerly touches the hedgehog’s back after a garden wide chase and gets pricked in the paws, the way she runs shaking her ears trying to get rid of a buzzing bee, her comforting presence as I cook, read, sleep, our one way conversations, how she settles in my lap and soothes me when I am sad - the thought that one day these will all come to an end is pretty daunting.

The excerpts of Kathryn Mansfield’s letters to Virginia Woolf took my confidence to a new dimension all together. She writes ‘On April 5^th our one daffodil came into flower and our cat, Charlie Chaplin, had a kitten.’ Not only have I given a boy’s name to a girl cat just as Kathryn Mansfield, I also chose the famous Mr Bill Clinton for her name! Great minds, wouldn’t you say? Just like her cat my Mr Clinton sits and reads with me too! How great am I!!

But jokes aside, a lot of the stories, poems and memoirs in the book use the cat’s presence as a representative of complex human emotions and relationships with each other and the surroundings. Peter Wells writes so beautifully about momentary appearance of the cat in some stories that I will just have to quote him here ‘it is the nature of a cat to coil into a room, then slither out like a shadow, leaving behind a changed atmosphere.’

As dusk arrives on my deck after a hot and humid day and I sit, leaning against the wall with the book in hand, a family of ducks under the plum tree in the garden flap their wings, shake their legs and sit back dreamily. I hear crickets buzzing that nerve-numbing buzz. White clouds hang from the sky conforming to the Maori name for New Zealand – Aotearoa (Land of long white clouds).

My dear Mr Clinton treads home. She jumps up on the deck and sits next to me kneading my knee with her paws. She smells like flowers, dust and sunlight. I stroke her face and carefully untangle from her ears the bit of cobweb that she carried home with her. What adventures did you have today I ask, which little corner of the world did you discover? She meows. A realisation washes over me that I will never know the world as my cat does. I have never explored every little corner of the house and I have no idea where all the hiding places hide. The way she so freely goes in an out of my many neighbour’s houses, how she owns the place she occupies, I never can. In my world I am an insignificant part of the crowd, in her world she is a mighty queen protecting her territory.

I concentrate on the book. Peter Bland writes ‘There’s a touch of Zen in these feline appearances. A sense that they know more than they’re letting on, that they somehow slink effortlessly between parallel universes; so that their mythical nine lives are more a matter of inhabiting different realities than simply staying alive.’ I deeply inhale and a faint fragrance of the wild roses in my backyard combined with the smell of a chocolate cake baking in my neighbour’s oven fills my senses. I like this time of the day when the shadows look longer than the real thing, when the birds fly home and the air has calmness to it like wisdom. Nostalgia envelops me.

Perhaps I am a cat in a human body, why else do the days gone by seem so far away, dreamlike and yet so real, almost touchable, as if I am living them still in some parallel world. Maybe all my nine lives are being lived happily ever after or may be not so happily but being lived after all. Perhaps I know more than I know. As I smile down at my cat, she smiles surreptitiously. I stroke her chin, she purrs. Does she ever think of me the way I think of her? I hope she does. A sweet breeze passes, ruffling her fur, my hair. A few sparrows fly away from a branch of the gleditsia tree. The puhutukawa branches sway. I whisper – possibilities, dear Mr Clinton, possibilities.