Daniyal Mueenuddin on Pakistan

Tell me about your first book, Mottled Dawn.

All of these stories are brief, violent, hastily written and stark. I think this is very fitting to the period which he was describing which is around the time of the Partition. It’s similar to Pakistan today which has become a more violent place than a few years ago. I particularly recommend his story, “Toba Tek Singh”, which is about how two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics. In other words, Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani madhouses were handed over to India. But, one lunatic – Toba Tek Singh – ended up in no-man’s-land between India and Pakistan.

For me, Saadat Hasan Manto is important as a writer because you see with stories like this there is nothing prettied up about his writing. One of the things that I object to about most of the people who write about Pakistan is “the scent of mangoes and jasmine school of writing”. I think that does a disservice to the country and plays into the stereotypes that most Westerners have about Pakistan, and he certainly doesn’t do that. He tells it like it is, with all the violence, madness and political turmoil that involves.

Your next book is Shame by Salman Rushdie, which was written after Midnight’s Children.

Yes. This is the only one of his books which is set in Pakistan and it’s a political story. The protagonist is the Bhutto family. Benazir Bhutto features in it as this virgin smarty-pants. A lot of the stories in the book are actually true. For example, the description of relations among various members of the family and the descriptions of the corruption and bribes going on are all true. I was too young to remember all that, but my mother took great delight in the book because she very much lived through that era. It’s a much harder book than other books that Rushdie has written. It’s less fantastical and a more vigorous book. It certainly describes the craziness of Pakistan in an accurate way. Again, it’s not prettied up.

Next, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The title suggests it will be a light summer’s read and very much a comedy. Is that the case?

No. This is a book about the assassination of General Zia. Nobody really knows who killed him, but the suggestion is that a case of mangoes was loaded on to his airplane and inside the case of mangoes was nerve gas which knocked out the pilot and caused the plane to crash. In a way it’s a comic book because it pokes fun at the General. I think it’s a useful book because of that. People like General Zia shouldn’t be taken seriously. They are comical figures who converted the country into some sort of banana republic. And poking fun at them is a good way of deflating them.

Another part of the book is the role the Americans were playing in Pakistan. In the Afghan war the Americans were talking up people like General Zia and giving them anything they wanted in return for their connivance in helping with the war in Afghanistan. The Americans certainly weren’t complaining about the General’s undemocratic ways because they needed people like him.

A Sportsman’s Sketches takes us away from Pakistan. How does this fit into your choices?

The Pakistan in my stories describes the fading feudal structures and that’s the same with Turgenev. What you see in Pakistan these days is a country which is transforming incredibly rapidly. If you live somewhere like England which is very stable by comparison it’s very difficult to understand how quickly things are changing in Pakistan. I was living there for a year and just came back and this whole thing that is happening in Swat burst out on us. Suddenly the country rapidly changed and I’ve become very aware just how grave the threat to that part of the country is. And these surprises come at you all the time. The country is like living in a film that’s on fast forward.

And you think the people are changing as well, don’t you?

Yes, they are. For example, with the locals who live in the area of my farm – their views regarding the Taliban have completely changed in the past year. Before, they were very sympathetic towards them. There’s a local madrasa, a religious school, which is producing wahhabi, Islamic fighters, and people were pretty sympathetic towards them. That was because of a lack of confidence in the government and a belief that the Americans shouldn’t be in Pakistan. They also thought these fighters were fundamentally OK. They were religious and people were sympathetic to that. But, because of all the violence around, that has changed and some people are taking a much dimmer view of the Taliban. People get jerked around and their thoughts, ideas and feelings about who’s up and who’s down change incredibly quickly.

Ten years ago the political structure in my area was entirely different to what it is now.