A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Author: Mohammed Hanif

• There is nothing between the sun’s white fury and the endless expanse of shimmering sand except a dozen men in khaki uniforms walking towards the plane.

• The man walking on his right is the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, whose shiny bald head and carefully groomed moustache give him the air of a respectable homosexual

• The man walking on his right is the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, whose shiny bald head and carefully groomed moustache give him the air of a respectable homosexual businessman from small-town America.

• But this afternoon, history is taking a long siesta, as it usually does between the end of one war and the beginning of another.

• More than a hundred thousand Soviet soldiers are preparing to retreat from Afghanistan after being reduced to eating toast smeared with military-issue boot polish, and these men we see in the TV clip are the undisputed victors.

• As Obaid would have said, there is poetry in committing a crime after you have served your sentence.

• The guilty commit the crime, the innocent are punished. That’s the world we live in.

• They are generally a sad lot, these leaders without any squadrons to lead.

• They are generally a sad lot, these leaders without any squadrons to lead. It’s their own lack of leadership qualities that stops them mid-career, nowhere for them to go except from one training institute to another, permanent seconds in command to one commander or the other.

• Because as a soldier, noise is the first thing you learn to defend yourself against, and as an officer noise is the first weapon of attack you learn to use.

• Between making a decision and implementing it, General Zia sometimes liked to seek divine opinion.

• Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more.

• We have been studying The Art of War in our War Studies class and fragments of Sun Tzu are still fresh in my mind. Didn’t he say that if the enemy leaves a door open, don’t hesitate, rush in?

• But his spiritual journey didn’t last long enough for anyone to know whether it was, in his own words, ‘a change or for a change’.

• He disappears and returns with a year-old copy of Reader’s Digest. I was hoping he’d bring something less intellectual. But then prisoners can’t choose their own entertainment.

• They are happy to have me back. As if the buggers have a choice.

• I ignore the red ropes unfurling under his drooping eyelids,

• This is just like the afternoons I remember at our house on Shigri Hill, where a bright puddle of light on a mountain peak tricks you into believing that there is still a lot of daylight left.

• “Call me if you ever need anything,” he had said and left without giving me a phone number. I never needed anything. Not from him.

• I study his pink, manicured fingers, the fingers of a man who has never had to do any real work.

• Look into his sunken cobalt-blue eyes and you can tell he is the kind of man who picks up a phone, makes a long-distance call and a bomb goes off in a crowded bazaar.

• To tell you the truth I really can’t tell the difference between Lata and Asha. They are old, fat, ugly Indian sisters who both sing like they were teenage sex kittens. One probably sounds sexier than the other, I can never tell. But across the country battle lines are drawn between those who like Asha and those who like Lata. Tea or coffee? Coke or Pepsi? Maoist or Leninist? Shia or Sunni? Obaid used to say it’s all very simple. It all depends on how you are feeling and how you would rather feel. That was the most fucked-up thing I ever heard. “Lata,” I say. He says I have got my dad’s good taste and inserts a tape into the player. It’s a male folk singer singing a ghazal, something about erecting a wall in the desert so that no one can bother the wandering lovers. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We know you are from a good family.” SIX One person in Islamabad hoping to improve the quality of his life after General Zia’s disappearance from public life was a newly married, balding, forty-five-year-old diplomat, a man who would not live to celebrate his forty-third birthday. Arnold Raphel was washing a bunch of arugula in his kitchen, a part of the house he was not very familiar with. Like any US ambassador’s kitchen, it was designed for a team of chefs, waiters and their helpers, not for the brightest star in the State Department trying to prepare a supper for two. Arnold Raphel wanted to surprise his wife Nancy, referred to as Cupcake in moments of intimacy, by giving her a Foggy Bottom evening in Islamabad. He had asked the domestic staff to take the evening off, ordered his communication room to reroute all important calls to the First Secretary’s residence and shut the doors to his vast drawing rooms, dining halls and guest suites. On her return from her weekly tennis game, Nancy would find that there were just the two of them, in their own living area, no servants milling about waiting for dinner instructions. For one evening they would live the life of a newly married

• To tell you the truth I really can’t tell the difference between Lata and Asha. They are old, fat, ugly Indian sisters who both sing like they were teenage sex kittens.

• To tell you the truth I really can’t tell the difference between Lata and Asha. They are old, fat, ugly Indian sisters who both sing like they were teenage sex kittens. One probably sounds sexier than the other, I can never tell. But across the country battle lines are drawn between those who like Asha and those who like Lata. Tea or coffee? Coke or Pepsi? Maoist or Leninist? Shia or Sunni? Obaid used to say it’s all very simple. It all depends on how you are feeling and how you would rather feel. That was the most fucked-up thing I ever heard.

• For one evening, it’d be just like the old days when after putting in long hours at their Washington office they would take turns doing meals, Nancy cooking yet another variation on lasagne and Arnold when it was his turn getting a sudden urge to order Chinese takeout.

• “This is good, lively footage,” the cameraman said, his eye still glued to the camera. Then he felt something hard poking his ribs and switched off the camera.

• “I know some newspapers call you Disinformation Minister, but you don’t have to take that title so seriously. Find out and let me know before the evening prayers.” He slammed down the phone.

• “I am not sure, sir. It sounds German.” “I know some newspapers call you Disinformation Minister, but you don’t have to take that title so seriously. Find out and let me know before the evening prayers.” He slammed down the phone.

• He knew that it would be fed back to General Zia and he’d be asked why the country needed an Information Minister if the intelligence agencies had to do all his dirty work.

• He took a step towards the portrait. “He was a civilian and he wore civilian clothes and he said civilian things, but at heart he was a soldier.” TM didn’t mind saluting this guy, out of sheer patriotism, the kind of patriotism that only a decorated soldier can feel; he took a step backwards and saluted.

• TM didn’t mind saluting this guy, out of sheer patriotism, the kind of patriotism that only a decorated soldier can feel; he took a step backwards and saluted.

• It was the exact spot where Abraham had tried to slaughter his son, where Mohammed had smashed idols and declared that all non-Muslims who laid down their arms would be safe.

• He couldn’t suppress his smile when he saw an old Chinese man holding his rosary with one hand and a walking stick with the other and dragging his feet around the black cubicle.

• Anyone who could sit down and read a book outside the classroom for ten minutes straight would never make a good officer let alone a coherent pair of military boots on the parade square.

• All the books he read hadn’t taught him the basic military rule: you manage your anger by kicking ass, not by rearranging the furniture in your room.

• Like many blind people, she could count the number of birds by listening to the fluttering of their wings.

• “But I like it here,” she told the jailer. “My cell mate is due to give birth in two weeks. I have other friends here. I want to live here.” Then she thought about what she had just said. “I want to die here.”

• The only way they can work is if a crow hears a curse from someone who has fed him to a full stomach and then carries it to the person who has been cursed. Crows, notoriously gluttonous, never feel as if their stomachs are full.

• Crows may not have a conscience but their memory lasts for ninety years.

• Since no women worked in the office block, the toilets were marked ‘Officers and Men’.

• As he shut his toolbox and straightened his shirt, the operator felt like the third most powerful man in the country.

• General Akhtar wasn’t impressed. There are probably a million Akhtars in this country, he thought, and two million Masihs. And this smartass can’t keep his mouth shut about as ordinary a coincidence as that. Could he

• General Akhtar wasn’t impressed. There are probably a million Akhtars in this country, he thought, and two million Masihs. And this smartass can’t keep his mouth shut about as ordinary a coincidence as that. Could he be expected to keep his mouth shut at all?

• The Saudi Ambassador sat on a divan with a wad of fifty-dollar bills in front of him taking bets on the game. Somebody had forgotten to explain to him that the game was eight days old and that the Redskins had trampled the Buccaneers.

• General Akhtar raised his glass like everyone else but only sniffed his drink. It stank like an old wound.

• The other fat Indian sister starts singing a new song. Something about a conversation going on for so long rhat it has become a rumour in the night.

• How do you talk to someone who has only known you through your public-school report cards and suddenly wants to tell you their life story over a bottle of whisky?

• should try spending a week in the Fort. Only civilians learn their lessons

• Only civilians learn their lessons behind bars, soldiers just soldier

• Only civilians learn their lessons behind bars, soldiers just soldier on.

• Fear was Major Kiyani’s stock-in-trade. He knew how to ration it to others and he knew how to guard against

• Fear was Major Kiyani’s stock-in-trade. He knew how to ration it to others and he knew how to guard against it.

• phugoid?” General Beg is suddenly very curious.

• “What a vulgar word? What the hell is phugoid?”