There is a scene in Mohammed Hanif’s latest book Red Birds that makes you laugh so hard that tears stream down your cheeks. Major Ellie, an American Air Force pilot who has crash-landed on a desert he was meant to bomb, finds his way to a refugee camp after hallucinating for days on end, worried sick (having had to drink his own urine) he’d die of extreme dehydration. The character muses dejectedly: “They give you a $65 million machine to fly, with the smartest bomb that some beam rider in Salt Lake City took years to design, you burn fuel at the rate of fifteen gallons per second and if you get screwed they expect you to survive on four energy biscuits and an organic smoothie. And look, a mini pack of After Eights.”
Momo, a 15-year-old precocious post-war profiteer and self-professed entrepreneur, who is looking for his deeply philosophical pet dog Mutt that he has maimed, finds Major Ellie, kicks him in the ribs, and takes him home.
The scene takes place back at the refugee camp: The American is dying of hunger, but everyone seems to be more concerned about the dog’s medical emergency. The doctor with the “sunken eyes of a recovering fanatic, and the drooping cheeks of a malnourished child” and an unlit cigarette between his lips is being told to attend to the mutt, even though he isn’t a veterinarian. They finally give Ellie some mush to eat, most likely dog food, while they gorge on meat curry and bread in front of him. As he begins to wander about after eating, someone even accuses him of attempting to steal the plate in which he was served food.
Red Birds; Mohammed Hanif; Bloomsbury; Fiction; ₹599
Up until then, Red Birds, for this reader, seems like journalist-writer Hanif is trying to conjure up a hilarious story in the bleakest of fashion, with all his skills of being a masterful storyteller, while he’s thinking on the spot. As though someone has put him on stage, given him an opening sequence, a cast of absurd characters and told him to take flight with the story, without a pause.
Hanif, Karachi-based author of the critically acclaimed books A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, is without doubt one of the most gifted and popular writers to emerge from the subcontinent in recent times. Red Birds, however, is neither like the biting political satire based on the plane crash that killed General Zia in Exploding Mangoes nor like Alice Bhatti’s chilling love story with its grim portrayal of the abysmal plight of minorities in Pakistan. Here, Hanif cleverly crafts a post-war absurdist drama about the upheavals of conflict and displacement and the effect it has on family. Despite the dollops of dank, dark humour, there is great sadness, anger and melancholy in this novel set in “an outpost in a war that the war itself is not interested in” in the throes of US occupation.
For most of the story, Ellie, Momo and Mutt, in taut monologues, take turns to speak in first-person to the reader. Ellie, we learn, is on a follow-up mission after Captain Slatter, his superior, goes missing in action in the same desert. He’s having trouble with marriage back at home. “Sometimes a distant war is the only way to resolve domestic disputes,” Ellie reasons. Momo, despite his elaborate entrepreneurial plans to get rich, is fraught with concern about his elder brother, Bro Ali, who hasn’t returned home since his first day of work. It is in Mutt’s disposition, however, that the novel betrays all its absurdist hues. Although dogs speaking in the first person are not uncommon in literature — Mutt is closest to evocatively describing the frailties of human life and the hollowness of death on the margins of conflict, which is the main conceit of the novel.
Physically wounded, dispirited and heartbroken, Mutt informs us of the sighting of red birds, which he feels at first only he can see. He is quick to brush aside the scientific and logical explanation of its existence to canaries drinking contaminated water laced with uranium and turning red. Instead he muses: “When someone dies in a raid or a shooting or when someone’s throat is slit, their last drop of blood transforms into a tiny red bird that flies away.”
The absurdism of Red Birds comes to head in the final section of this almost Samuel Beckett-meets-Joseph Heller book when it slips into a metaphysical realm and the reader finally sees the dead.
Red Birds, by far one of the most anticipated books in recent times, drips with bone-dry comedy and irony. It is almost too easy to fall for. It however does not feel as if it is Hanif’s finest work. Despite being able to successfully satirise the inanities of a war zone as well as beautifully capture the apocalyptic toll it heaps on the displaced and the subtle shifts of cadence when its characters speak, on its whole the novel feels incomplete. It is slick, no doubt, but lacks soul. The irreverence and savagery somehow ends up soaking the story’s ability to move the reader. In its vain attempt to transcend realism, Red Birds is unable to retain its magic.
Jairaj Singh is a Delhi-based writer and journalist