SAAG editor Zuneera Shah interviews Mohammed Hanif on the afterlives of rumour and ruin. BOOKS & ARTS The Agile Rumour and Bhutto Burners SAAG editor Zuneera Shah interviews Mohammed Hanif on the afterlives of rumour and ruin. Zuneera Shah · Iman Iftikhar Pakistani author and journalist Mohammed Hanif, celebrated for his darkly comic dissections of power in novels like A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Red Birds , returns to the landscapes of his childhood in his fourth novel, Rebel English Academy (February 2026). Following its release, we spoke about the figure of the fallen revolutionary, the stubborn afterlives of political memory, and the fraught, often mischievous interplay of language and power that continues to shape how histories are told. Your new novel takes us to your hometown, Okara, which Inspector A.D. Malang memorably describes as “basically just a big vegetable market—the biggest in the region, but still a vegetable market.” It’s certainly a lively one, from Bhutto burners to the enterprising Gol Mosque. Tell us about Okara in this historical moment and why you chose to set the action there. As a child, it was an exotic place where you went once a year to buy new schoolbooks. We lived just outside the city in a Chak, and going to Okara seemed like an adventure. I did my primary school in the village before I went to high school in the city. It was probably my first culture shock, my first taste of shame at being a paindu, not civilized enough. Boys there spoke proper Urdu. Some of them called their parents mummy or papa. They had doorbells, and if you ever got asked in, you sat in a drawing room and were offered tea. In my village, tea was strictly for sick people. I think my new mates probably also found me a bit backward but exotic— you have your own buffaloes, and they live with you in the house —that kind of exotic. At one point, it had been a very strong centre of labour unions, because of a large state-owned cotton mill, which was slowly dismantled to make way for housing schemes. In the 70s, it was also called Punjab's Larkana because a lot of labourers and peasants, and even very religious types, had bought into Bhutto's dream of people power. During the last twenty years, it has had a massive peasant movement after they tried to evict people from military farms. It's a strangely apolitical place that goes through radical political eruption every few decades. At one point it was called the potato capital of South Asia. It used to be a place of opportunity where a potter’s son could become a teacher or a police inspector. There are fewer opportunities now. A potter’s son can’t even become a potter. OK, I guess, is still a cool number plate. But yes, it's a big vegetable market. While Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging, a harrowing moment in Pakistan’s collective memory, is the opening act, the novel follows a web of characters who become embroiled in its national aftermath. What drew you to zoom out and explore the reverberations? I didn't know much about Bhutto or his politics, but I did see the paraphernalia that surrounded it. You saw the pamphleteers, flags on bicycle handles, trade unionists, and, for some odd reason, even poets felt empowered. Some of these characters were circling each other without being interconnected, their lives seeping in and out of each other. I had no idea what Bhutto's place in history was, but I knew people whose lives and livelihoods were affected. I was curious about their heartbreak, their fated struggles, their ongoing arguments about what if… The novel captures the agility of rumour so well, how quickly it latches on, mutates, and survives. Beyond the principal rumour that Bhutto is still alive, half-truths haunt nearly every character. What interests you about the political function of rumour, and what does it allow you to do narratively? I think it's the best form of storytelling. It combines the best bits of writing: truth, gossip, fantasy, tapping into people's fears. Even if you start a really wild rumour, people will find a twisted nugget of truth in it and they will want to believe it. In my lifetime, I have heard more rumours that turned out to be true than not. As a child, Bhutto's hanging was a rumour to me. Zia's plane crash was an outlandish rumour for a good few hours. I have always thought: take the wildest rumour and fill it up with silly details and you will have a novel, because I really don't have any great insight into the human condition. But if you try to follow a rumour you might reach the truth, or as close as you can get to it. Let’s talk about Sir Baghi, a socialist revolutionary turned English tutor. His atheist tendencies and disinterest in women are widely known. He rebels against the norm and is, in turn, implicated in betrayals. How did you think about holding these tensions together in one character? Every town has its own fallen revolutionary and I have been very curious about their slow downfall, the way our society grinds them down. One day, you want to change the world and a few years later, you are a joke. I have been lucky to have some really good teachers, tutors, and editors in my life, and I am always curious about their motivations, how some are able to be recklessly selfless. Some of them are fiercely motivated to pick a fight but also bored with what they do. Pakistan, like many countries, has many closeted gay men, who are married to women and have children. It’s convenient, it’s almost expected. But then you’ll come across someone who refuses to be part of this family-friendly hypocrisy, who wants to cruise, who has principles. Sabiha is the only character allowed a first-person voice, and she is surrounded, on all sides, by men. She tells her story through a series of school essays. What drew you to that form? I struggled with it for a long time, then I remembered these essays, letters, and applications that we were asked to write as primary school students. They had set formats, their own language—very formal, very respectful, but also full of absurd details. My favourite was called a raahdari, a little official note that you had to write if you were transporting cattle from one city to another. You had to describe the identifiable physical features of the animal accompanying you, the reasons for transporting it, and a pledge of sorts that you had not stolen it. In my head, I am always rustling a buffalo but writing a good enough raahdari to get away with it. There's almost a perfect allegory in that, the idea that in writing one can be true or innocent. Sabiha's narrative is itself the act of writing, not just narrating. Why was it important that she get to write down her piece? A lot of working people's children are forced to grow up very fast, in very harsh circumstances, and their crackling ambition is often written off as resilience or survival instinct. Their ideas might be fully formed but they are almost never allowed to speak in their own idiom. Many journalists and writers like me pretend to be their voice but here in these homework assignments, there was a window to let Sabiha tell her own story even if the permission to write it, and the format to write it in, came from a man. And she sets out to shred that very format. There has always been this perverse curiosity, and fear, about what young girls write in their personal diaries and journals. As a journalist, I have seen Baloch girls grow up in protest camps, on roadsides, in public squares, and during the long stretches of the day when no actual protest is happening, I have seen them scribble. Some of them are now old enough to end up in jail. Others are still scribbling. That image might have stayed with me. The novel seems skeptical about testimony. It erodes the notion that speaking truth, or speaking at all, can lead to clarity or justice. I believe testimony is crucial, this is my testimony, but at the heart of every testimony is a story and I want to believe that story. I may not believe everybody, but it's important to listen, to record it, to puncture holes in it. Sometimes, testimony only becomes authentic if it has enough inconsistencies. I am always suspicious of neat testimonies. Your characters surveil each other and the state surveils the town. There are layers of being watched. Yet there is an itch to be witnessed, to have an audience for their lives. What interested you about placing those two impulses side by side? Where I grew up, everybody knew everything about everyone. If you were hiding something, the world could look away or the consequences were harsh. If you ran to a city for anonymity, eventually this urge crept in: to make a name for yourself, to start your own tribe, with the state always watching. Being invisible is a fantasy that rates very high, and so is being recognised by everyone. I think this business of writing stories is an urge to be seen but also to hide behind those stories. The novel draws on history, reportage, and lived memory, yet it is wary of official records or settled accounts. How did you approach the research? Mostly sitting at my older brother's wake. A few years ago, he died, and I was suddenly the family elder. I was grieving but also listening to people's stories, little cons they pulled together, forty-year-old court cases. I don't know if you can call it research. I didn't even ask any questions. People just talk. There's something about sitting in a place where people come to condole, knowing that the older brother who protected you from this world is gone. Your last novel, Red Birds, quotes Sabeen Mahmud in the epigraph. Her murder in 2015 marked a brutal act of silencing and in a documentary about her you said, “This was never supposed to happen.” How does her legacy shape the way you think about writing? Sabeen used to say that fear is a line in your head. And I still have this running argument with her, in my head, that no, it’s not. It’s not a line, it’s a bullet. Right in your face. Sabeen had a lot of friends in Karachi and beyond. She had no plans of being a martyr and sometimes she was annoyed with all these expectations from her. She wanted to go back to college and be the nerd that she was. That fear is real. Not just about being shot. And worse than the real fear are the people who say they like you, who say you say the right thing. Who always start their conversation by asking: aren't you scared? Don't they say anything to you? Don't you get phone calls? Everybody seems to be reminding you—don't you remember what happened to Sabeen—and you tell yourself that you are wiser now, not as reckless as Sabeen was. And then you remember that she wasn't reckless at all. Her failed argument was: but we are so small. I think that one persists. In the past, you have spoken about how your journalism and political criticism feed your fiction. Is there ever a point when the journalist’s instinct becomes a constraint? As a journalist, you have to be constantly producing something, which we used to call a ‘story’. But to my utter dismay, I now produce content. Because of the mahol in the country, I find myself rolling words on my tongue, testing how much offense they might cause, whether I can diffuse it somehow. I find myself reaching out for poetry, reciting overheard verses and old songs, or just making up stuff and quoting my mom. I have been doing these Punjabi videos—political rants, cultural commentary, sometimes just parenting problems—for a few years, and I have seen that people who normally don’t read novels or Urdu commentary watch these videos and say nice things. Maybe it bypasses the literacy issue, but I have a different kind of audience: security guards as well as anthropology professors asking me how come you are allowed to say that in Punjabi, or sometimes just, your Punjabi is so good. So fiction is also a place of safety. Maybe I think I am clever, or maybe I am definitely more of a coward than Sabeen, but here’s a place where I can also shoot somebody in the head in the middle of someone reciting a bad poem. I always hope she’ll approve. It’s interesting that your political content travels differently in Punjabi. Why do you think that is? And how would you map the tension and/or malleability between Urdu and Punjabi, both in the novel's period and in the present? It must have something to do with class, or our notions about it. When I published my first novel, a Punjabi gentleman told me that he had never read a novel in English but he read mine and understood it, and that it seemed he was reading a novel in Punjabi, although he had never actually read a novel in Punjabi either. I think most Pakistanis who are not protected by a very expensive education switch back and forth between English, Urdu, and their mother tongue. Urdu is our national project: the language of politics, aspirations, and poetry. Punjabi was exiled from schools and offices, so it retains its intimacy with people and nature and doesn't come pre-programmed with political arguments or some innate authority. A friend recently suggested that people take my Punjabi seriously because they know that I am actually an angrezi novelist. The writer Neel Mukherjee once told me that he admires your work because, as he put it, “you write a new book every time.” What do you make of that? That's really nice of him, because I have this fear that although I start writing something new, to take my mind off the failures of the last one, I will end up writing the same book. Would you share a sentence with us that you’re particularly proud of? I know you people, killer cries the most. Pakistani author and journalist Mohammed Hanif, celebrated for his darkly comic dissections of power in novels like A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Red Birds , returns to the landscapes of his childhood in his fourth novel, Rebel English Academy (February 2026). Following its release, we spoke about the figure of the fallen revolutionary, the stubborn afterlives of political memory, and the fraught, often mischievous interplay of language and power that continues to shape how histories are told. Your new novel takes us to your hometown, Okara, which Inspector A.D. Malang memorably describes as “basically just a big vegetable market—the biggest in the region, but still a vegetable market.” It’s certainly a lively one, from Bhutto burners to the enterprising Gol Mosque. Tell us about Okara in this historical moment and why you chose to set the action there. As a child, it was an exotic place where you went once a year to buy new schoolbooks. We lived just outside the city in a Chak, and going to Okara seemed like an adventure. I did my primary school in the village before I went to high school in the city. It was probably my first culture shock, my first taste of shame at being a paindu, not civilized enough. Boys there spoke proper Urdu. Some of them called their parents mummy or papa. They had doorbells, and if you ever got asked in, you sat in a drawing room and were offered tea. In my village, tea was strictly for sick people. I think my new mates probably also found me a bit backward but exotic— you have your own buffaloes, and they live with you in the house —that kind of exotic. At one point, it had been a very strong centre of labour unions, because of a large state-owned cotton mill, which was slowly dismantled to make way for housing schemes. In the 70s, it was also called Punjab's Larkana because a lot of labourers and peasants, and even very religious types, had bought into Bhutto's dream of people power. During the last twenty years, it has had a massive peasant movement after they tried to evict people from military farms. It's a strangely apolitical place that goes through radical political eruption every few decades. At one point it was called the potato capital of South Asia. It used to be a place of opportunity where a potter’s son could become a teacher or a police inspector. There are fewer opportunities now. A potter’s son can’t even become a potter. OK, I guess, is still a cool number plate. But yes, it's a big vegetable market. While Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging, a harrowing moment in Pakistan’s collective memory, is the opening act, the novel follows a web of characters who become embroiled in its national aftermath. What drew you to zoom out and explore the reverberations? I didn't know much about Bhutto or his politics, but I did see the paraphernalia that surrounded it. You saw the pamphleteers, flags on bicycle handles, trade unionists, and, for some odd reason, even poets felt empowered. Some of these characters were circling each other without being interconnected, their lives seeping in and out of each other. I had no idea what Bhutto's place in history was, but I knew people whose lives and livelihoods were affected. I was curious about their heartbreak, their fated struggles, their ongoing arguments about what if… The novel captures the agility of rumour so well, how quickly it latches on, mutates, and survives. Beyond the principal rumour that Bhutto is still alive, half-truths haunt nearly every character. What interests you about the political function of rumour, and what does it allow you to do narratively? I think it's the best form of storytelling. It combines the best bits of writing: truth, gossip, fantasy, tapping into people's fears. Even if you start a really wild rumour, people will find a twisted nugget of truth in it and they will want to believe it. In my lifetime, I have heard more rumours that turned out to be true than not. As a child, Bhutto's hanging was a rumour to me. Zia's plane crash was an outlandish rumour for a good few hours. I have always thought: take the wildest rumour and fill it up with silly details and you will have a novel, because I really don't have any great insight into the human condition. But if you try to follow a rumour you might reach the truth, or as close as you can get to it. Let’s talk about Sir Baghi, a socialist revolutionary turned English tutor. His atheist tendencies and disinterest in women are widely known. He rebels against the norm and is, in turn, implicated in betrayals. How did you think about holding these tensions together in one character? Every town has its own fallen revolutionary and I have been very curious about their slow downfall, the way our society grinds them down. One day, you want to change the world and a few years later, you are a joke. I have been lucky to have some really good teachers, tutors, and editors in my life, and I am always curious about their motivations, how some are able to be recklessly selfless. Some of them are fiercely motivated to pick a fight but also bored with what they do. Pakistan, like many countries, has many closeted gay men, who are married to women and have children. It’s convenient, it’s almost expected. But then you’ll come across someone who refuses to be part of this family-friendly hypocrisy, who wants to cruise, who has principles. Sabiha is the only character allowed a first-person voice, and she is surrounded, on all sides, by men. She tells her story through a series of school essays. What drew you to that form? I struggled with it for a long time, then I remembered these essays, letters, and applications that we were asked to write as primary school students. They had set formats, their own language—very formal, very respectful, but also full of absurd details. My favourite was called a raahdari, a little official note that you had to write if you were transporting cattle from one city to another. You had to describe the identifiable physical features of the animal accompanying you, the reasons for transporting it, and a pledge of sorts that you had not stolen it. In my head, I am always rustling a buffalo but writing a good enough raahdari to get away with it. There's almost a perfect allegory in that, the idea that in writing one can be true or innocent. Sabiha's narrative is itself the act of writing, not just narrating. Why was it important that she get to write down her piece? A lot of working people's children are forced to grow up very fast, in very harsh circumstances, and their crackling ambition is often written off as resilience or survival instinct. Their ideas might be fully formed but they are almost never allowed to speak in their own idiom. Many journalists and writers like me pretend to be their voice but here in these homework assignments, there was a window to let Sabiha tell her own story even if the permission to write it, and the format to write it in, came from a man. And she sets out to shred that very format. There has always been this perverse curiosity, and fear, about what young girls write in their personal diaries and journals. As a journalist, I have seen Baloch girls grow up in protest camps, on roadsides, in public squares, and during the long stretches of the day when no actual protest is happening, I have seen them scribble. Some of them are now old enough to end up in jail. Others are still scribbling. That image might have stayed with me. The novel seems skeptical about testimony. It erodes the notion that speaking truth, or speaking at all, can lead to clarity or justice. I believe testimony is crucial, this is my testimony, but at the heart of every testimony is a story and I want to believe that story. I may not believe everybody, but it's important to listen, to record it, to puncture holes in it. Sometimes, testimony only becomes authentic if it has enough inconsistencies. I am always suspicious of neat testimonies. Your characters surveil each other and the state surveils the town. There are layers of being watched. Yet there is an itch to be witnessed, to have an audience for their lives. What interested you about placing those two impulses side by side? Where I grew up, everybody knew everything about everyone. If you were hiding something, the world could look away or the consequences were harsh. If you ran to a city for anonymity, eventually this urge crept in: to make a name for yourself, to start your own tribe, with the state always watching. Being invisible is a fantasy that rates very high, and so is being recognised by everyone. I think this business of writing stories is an urge to be seen but also to hide behind those stories. The novel draws on history, reportage, and lived memory, yet it is wary of official records or settled accounts. How did you approach the research? Mostly sitting at my older brother's wake. A few years ago, he died, and I was suddenly the family elder. I was grieving but also listening to people's stories, little cons they pulled together, forty-year-old court cases. I don't know if you can call it research. I didn't even ask any questions. People just talk. There's something about sitting in a place where people come to condole, knowing that the older brother who protected you from this world is gone. Your last novel, Red Birds, quotes Sabeen Mahmud in the epigraph. Her murder in 2015 marked a brutal act of silencing and in a documentary about her you said, “This was never supposed to happen.” How does her legacy shape the way you think about writing? Sabeen used to say that fear is a line in your head. And I still have this running argument with her, in my head, that no, it’s not. It’s not a line, it’s a bullet. Right in your face. Sabeen had a lot of friends in Karachi and beyond. She had no plans of being a martyr and sometimes she was annoyed with all these expectations from her. She wanted to go back to college and be the nerd that she was. That fear is real. Not just about being shot. And worse than the real fear are the people who say they like you, who say you say the right thing. Who always start their conversation by asking: aren't you scared? Don't they say anything to you? Don't you get phone calls? Everybody seems to be reminding you—don't you remember what happened to Sabeen—and you tell yourself that you are wiser now, not as reckless as Sabeen was. And then you remember that she wasn't reckless at all. Her failed argument was: but we are so small. I think that one persists. In the past, you have spoken about how your journalism and political criticism feed your fiction. Is there ever a point when the journalist’s instinct becomes a constraint? As a journalist, you have to be constantly producing something, which we used to call a ‘story’. But to my utter dismay, I now produce content. Because of the mahol in the country, I find myself rolling words on my tongue, testing how much offense they might cause, whether I can diffuse it somehow. I find myself reaching out for poetry, reciting overheard verses and old songs, or just making up stuff and quoting my mom. I have been doing these Punjabi videos—political rants, cultural commentary, sometimes just parenting problems—for a few years, and I have seen that people who normally don’t read novels or Urdu commentary watch these videos and say nice things. Maybe it bypasses the literacy issue, but I have a different kind of audience: security guards as well as anthropology professors asking me how come you are allowed to say that in Punjabi, or sometimes just, your Punjabi is so good. So fiction is also a place of safety. Maybe I think I am clever, or maybe I am definitely more of a coward than Sabeen, but here’s a place where I can also shoot somebody in the head in the middle of someone reciting a bad poem. I always hope she’ll approve. It’s interesting that your political content travels differently in Punjabi. Why do you think that is? And how would you map the tension and/or malleability between Urdu and Punjabi, both in the novel's period and in the present? It must have something to do with class, or our notions about it. When I published my first novel, a Punjabi gentleman told me that he had never read a novel in English but he read mine and understood it, and that it seemed he was reading a novel in Punjabi, although he had never actually read a novel in Punjabi either. I think most Pakistanis who are not protected by a very expensive education switch back and forth between English, Urdu, and their mother tongue. Urdu is our national project: the language of politics, aspirations, and poetry. Punjabi was exiled from schools and offices, so it retains its intimacy with people and nature and doesn't come pre-programmed with political arguments or some innate authority. A friend recently suggested that people take my Punjabi seriously because they know that I am actually an angrezi novelist. The writer Neel Mukherjee once told me that he admires your work because, as he put it, “you write a new book every time.” What do you make of that? That's really nice of him, because I have this fear that although I start writing something new, to take my mind off the failures of the last one, I will end up writing the same book. Would you share a sentence with us that you’re particularly proud of? I know you people, killer cries the most. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Hanif (2026), digital sketch by Iman Iftikhar. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Fiction Okara Pakistan Novel Power Politics Rumour Punjab ZUNEERA SHAH is a gender & development professional and writer based in Lahore. IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. 10 Jul 2026 Fiction Okara 10th Jul 2026 Into the Sea Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton 27th Apr The Ahmadis of Petrópolis Sana Khan 21st Jan Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement Sangeet Toor 29th Apr The Pakistani Left, Separatism & Student Movements Ammar Ali Jan 14th Dec Chats Ep. 3 · On the 2020 ZHR Prize-Winning Essay Raniya Hosain 23rd Nov On That Note:

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