LAHORE: After the confiscation of Urdu translation of his novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, one might have thought that Mohammed Hanif would stay away from anything political, especially on a subject that may touch some sensitive nerves of the powers-that-be in Pakistan but Hanif, being Hanif, has, it seems, sprung up with another book on a similar subject that may ruffle some feathers. His new novel, Rebel English Academy, is slated to hit the bookstores next week. While Gen Zia was at the centre of “Exploding Mangoes”, his nemesis is there at the start of Hanif’s book while an army officer is another important character.

“The book starts on a certain night the people of my generation might remember. There is a famous hanging in our history,” he said in a session at the Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest at Alhamra while replying to the queries of Dur e Aziz Amna who was moderating the talk.

He read out an excerpt from the novel titled, On the Night of the Hanging, the very first chapter.

“On the night of the hanging, everything was as calm as it should be in a jail, devoted to the safety and care of one very important man. All prisoners but one are asleep in their cells, restless, dreaming of their victims who are their loved ones which, in most cases, are the same people.” This is the opening sentence. The passage goes on to describe the atmosphere in Rawalpindi that night while the prisoner asks for a safety razor, claiming that he does not want to look like a mullah at his death. He also asks for a cigar and his Shalimar perfume.

Anybody who is a little aware of the political history of the country can easily recognise the man who is going to be hanged, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who obviously lived longer, politically, than the man who hanged him.

Hanif says that he must have been in sixth or seventh grade when after the last paper, he and his school fellows were locked in the examination for four or three hours, not knowing what was happening outside.

“We came out and the city was dead, the streets, the people were scared but strangely excited as well. I wanted to somehow capture that adolescence when you don’t really know how the world around you works. Who is the prime minister and why is being hanged.”

The maverick novelist said there was disbelief among the people that the hanging of ZAB could not have happened and they were being lied to but added that “the rest of the book happens after the hanging.”

Hanif said that he was a lazy writer and his new novel had started about seven years ago.

“So by the time I finished, ‘another famous man’ is in prison and again there is a lot of certainty and rumours about what’s going to happen to that man,” said Hanif and quickly made it clear that the was not talking about “the man” the audience were thinking about, eliciting laughter.

It’s a habit of Hanif, in his talk as well as writing, that he adds humour when the subject is gloomy and serious and then from laughter or smiles, he can take the readers/listeners back to some serious situation. He did the same in the session and started talking about “the young man, Junaid Safdar, who was a medical student here. Sorry, the other Junaid, Junaid Hafeez.”

He said the boy (Junaid Hafeez) was on his mind because he was a bright and hardworking young man, adding that he was half way through his degree when he started reading books and poetry, got Fulbright scholarship, and came back. According to Hanif, he was teaching at Bahauddin Zakariya University, doing MPhil, when he said something in his classroom, nobody was actually sure what he said, and was sentenced to death.

“For the last 13 years, he has been in solitary confinement and no judge is ready to listen to his appeal and his lawyer was shot dead. Sympathetic journalists are told if you write or report about him or talk about him then he would be in further danger,” he said and added that Junaid was already on death row, what else could happen to him.

City of Okara and the language question

When asked about the city in the novel, called OK Town, which was actually Okara, Hanif’s own hometown, he said the people who would leave home at an early age and they would get very nostalgic about it but they were also very scared for going back to preserve the home the way it was and it never is.

“I was not born and raised in Okara, he grew up in a village outside Okara. The city was a place of fascination and confusion where things were done differently which you visit once a year to buy new schoolbooks at the end of the year. It was completely fascinating there were people who called their mother and father, Mummy and Daddy, they spoke Urdu and they had drawing rooms and doorbells and stuff like that.”

Hanif said he did his primary school in his village and went to the city for high school with the boys from the city which was a cultural shock as they would make fun of you if you told them you had three buffaloes that lived with you. He said he was called “Paindu Production” by one of the city boys. He referred to his earlier memories of the city, having bazaars.

“There is another thing which is always fascinating, the problem of language. I went to an Urdu medium public school where teachers taught Urdu in Punjabi. Then there was high school where I started learning English and they taught us English in Urdu.”

Hanif said the students would go to this little tuition centre (English Academy) to learn the English language, adding that the most brilliant boys could not finish high school because they never got their head around learning English. He spoke of the privileges of the English language.

He read out an excerpt from the novel on an intelligence officer, Captain Gul, who was assigned a duty of photography details on “the night of the hanging” which he messed up and transferred to OK Town as a punishment.

He said he was a working journalist and if he is asked to do something in Urdu, I do it in Urdu, if I am asked in English I do it in English. “The people of my generation who went through public schooling had this dilemma that at home, you speak Punjabi, everybody speaks Punjabi, by the time you are five or six you have enough vocabulary. Then suddenly you go to school where the medium is Urdu and all the knowledge about the world you have becomes redundant and by the time you pick up Urdu, then education starts in English in college etc. That happened to almost everyone.” He said it was fascinating to switch gears because of cultural references in Urdu and Punjabi but he was accused of catering to different audiences in different languages that he uses for his sales.

Rebel English Academy is being published by Maktaba-i-Danyal.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2026