A Case of Exploding Mangoes

After quite a while, I read a book which made me stay up late in order to finish it. It had been lying around the house for quite some time, bought by the wife who never got around to reading it (and perhaps for good reason too! - but more on this later)

The novel tells the (probably fictionalised - but you never know!) and utterly gripping account of the tales surrounding the death of General Zia ul Haq, Pakistan's military dictator of the 70s. Full of black humour, the writing is very terse and takes time to build up tempo and atmosphere, culminating in a page-turner of a climax. It is a very male oriented story with bald recitals of great brutality and oppression, which makes me think the wife would not have liked it a bit. However the treatment is not unlike Catch 22 or some of the other great books. Definitely an author I would want to read again.

General Zia comes across as a bit of a buffoon, which all dictators probably are, and the ISI comes across as a loose weapon, which again is probably true. The Americans come across as double faced snitches, which they definitely are. There is a hilarious (and disturbing) chapter in the book about a certain bearded gentleman named OBL 'of Bin Laden Constructions' trying to hobnob socially with the CIA and Afghan mujahideen.

So finally, who killed General Zia? Was it a krait's poison? A son's revenge? His own colleagues from the army? Poison gas? Or a crow? Or all of them?