A barbecue with bin Laden

Mohammed Hanif. Photo / Supplied

After turning Vikas Swarup's Q & A novel into the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, director Danny Boyle said he would like his next project to be a thriller set in Mumbai.

Perhaps he should look a little further afield if he wants to find another promising novel from the subcontinent to adapt: Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes, inspired by the mysterious air crash that killed Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul-Haq and the then-American ambassador in August 1988.

"It's very different to Slumdog Millionaire and it's quite dark as well," says Hanif, laughing. However, he reveals there have been discussions with a couple of producers. "A film would involve some big set pieces like planes blowing up, so it would have to be somebody who has the skills and the funds to do all of that," says Hanif.

"There's nothing final yet but it would be great if something was to happen. But who knows? Maybe it would make a good stage musical." The 43-year old, who was born in Okara in the Punjab province of Pakistan, is not fond of the cinematic world, having written several radio and stage plays and the feature film The Long Night before turning his hand to prose.

"In the end, there was something unsatisfying about all those various formats because they're all collaborative. You write a script and then somebody has to produce and direct it. When it works and everything comes together nicely it's amazing, but when it doesn't, which happens quite often, then everyone blames everyone else.

The writer blames the director, the director blames the actors and the actors blame the audience. I had an idea for a long-form fiction, which is something you write just by yourself, so you can't blame anyone else if it doesn't work."

A journalist by profession, Hanif wrote A Case of Exploding Mangoes during an 11-year stint in London, where he was the head of the BBC's Urdu Service. However, he doesn't believe that writing about his homeland from such a distance provided him with any kind of distinctive perspective. "If you're writing fiction, you do all your research and you read up on everything but in the end you are drawn to your own mind. It doesn't really matter if you're in London or Karachi."

Hanif moved back to Pakistan last year following the ousting of the country's most recent military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, whom he has described as "the all-powerful, slightly macho version of General Zia."

Based in Karachi where he works as a BBC special correspondent, Hanif admits his more hands-on role has had an impact upon his writing. "There are distractions in London but the distractions here are of a different type. Now that I live here there is always something that requires your immediate attention. Things are happening at a much faster pace and it becomes part of your daily life."

The change in government may also have affected the positive reception that greeted A Case of Exploding Mangoes in Pakistan when it was published last year. Hanif admits it was "probably quite naive" of him to assume no one would take offence to the book, which depicts General Zia superstitiously referring to the Koran every morning as if it were a horoscope. Zia's intelligence chief, General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, whose son Humayun Akhtar Khan was part of Musharraf's administration, is also a prominent character. Consequently, Hanif initially struggled to find a local publisher.

"They thought it was a bit risky politically. In the end, I didn't find a publisher here but the book was published in India, imported from there and distributed quite widely, so it turned out that their fears were misplaced. It has sold well and got some amazing reviews."

Although the story is based on real-life events, Hanif stresses the novel is very much his own creation. "The only fact in the book is that there was a plane and there was a man on that plane and that plane took off on a certain day and crashed four minutes after it had taken off," he says. "Everything else in the book, including most of the characters, is fiction. People sometimes think that is based on fact but it isn't because there's no way I would know what happened on that plane. I just made it up."

The book also features a memorable cameo from Osama bin Laden, then a lowly civil engineer, who attends a July 4 barbecue at the American Embassy. "I have no idea where he was on that night," says Hanif. "It's set in the late 1980s when the Pakistani and American intelligence forces were hanging out together. They were the best of friends. They'd just won the war [in Afghanistan] and they were really smug about it. I wanted to write a big party scene and when you write a party scene, you wonder who could possibly be there? And then you think Osama might have been at the party; the Americans might have invited him." It is not just the presence of bin Laden that has contemporary significance.

"In a way, you can trace back a lot of the things that are happening now in my region and the rest of the world to that time," he says. "When the Americans decided to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, they made certain choices. It was quite brutal back then and they thought jihad was a good thing. I don't see any attempts by the western world to acknowledge that what is happening now might be a blowback from their own policies. Twenty-five years later we still have a war in Afghanistan and in Pakistan."

Hanif spent six years in the Pakistani airforce, although he claims to have not drawn much on his own experience. "Military life anywhere in the world is incredibly dull. It revolves around a soulless routine. You wake up at 5am and you go on parade. Then you go to classes and then you fly. Day after day you do the same things.

Nothing interesting ever happens. I know the texture of that life and I know the backdrop and some of the rituals of military life. But really all the events that happen in my book bear no relation to my time in the airforce, which was really forgettable. It doesn't teach you how to write books." But it was during his time in the airforce academy that Hanif first discovered his love for reading after he stumbled upon the airbase library.

"I don't come from a literary background, so whether they were classics or works of genre, I just read them as books," he says. "One day I could be reading Frederick Forsyth and the next I could be reading Mario Vargas Llosa or Salman Rushdie. I read a lot of thrillers and quite a few literary novels, although I couldn't tell what was what. When I started writing the novel, I wanted to write something that was readable, something I would have wanted to read. It was only when the book was finished and I sent it to publishers that I was told I had written a literary novel. Before that I didn't know what genre it belonged to."

* Mohammed Hanif is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 13-17.