‘Rebel English Academy’: Mohammed Hanif’s new novel richly rewards the patient reader

In Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, as Brian Thill recounts, Socrates encounters an “obscure object, polished and white” on the seashore – an object whose origin he cannot trace and whose history refuses to settle. The shore, a collecting zone of fragments produced by the “eternal struggle” between land and sea, becomes, paradoxically, one of the most compelling ways in which human desire leaves its imprint on the world. The fragments do not serve as a useless remainder; they are also excess and surplus, something that leaks across the boundaries of the public and the private and quietly haunts everyday life.

The eternal struggle between the land and the sea is also the eternal tug between the two forces that dictate the theatre of life – eros and thanatos, and it is the exploration of this rebellious pairing of phenomenal life forces that predicates the action in and of Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy.

A declawed tiger

It is the night of the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the “feudal despot in the clothes of an awami pseudo socialist”, and as the narrator (and later Sabiha Bano in the novel) reminds us, one is never sure when a current lived moment has already been marked for greatness except when examined retrospectively – the execution has been engineered well, and all omens that may constellate to indicate that something is amiss have apparently been negated. However, for elites to “stay elite in their death”, it necessarily warrants that their death be afforded a slant of controversy.

Strings of speculation about the hanging, and rumours about the hanged man abound, and in a frenzied attempt to curtail all of it, Captain Gul, the captain of this “top-secret mission”, is posted to the not-so OK town. It is three days later after this event, that the novel gets a centrifugal hit with the arrival of Sabiha Bano, the embodiment of “ruin” at Baghi’s English tuition centre, Rebel English Academy.

Baghi or Salim Ahmed Salim holds bleak light to his name. He is gay, and he wears a crimson hammer and sickle tattoo, albeit hidden, on his upper chest. These distinctions are pronounced as the very reasons for his ejection from Mazdoor Militia (Baaghi Faction) compounded by his authorship of a “revolutionary” letter to the leaders of the Muslim ummah, in which he denounces them as “exalted murderers, extremist exploiters…”

The memory of assault rearing fresh, Baghi makes a humble living by not believing in Allah, and by imparting secular education, that is teaching English, to his students. He has a catalogue of successful graduates ranging from Shahid, the artist, and the assistant sub-inspector AD Malang to successful returnees and re-admits like Sabiha Bano. Friends and brothers with the shady Molly Rafique or the Maulvi, the “rising star of the spiritual marketplace”, Baghi finds himself, against his own astute judgement, sheltering Sabiha.

Sabiha, the only daughter of Comrade Abid Ali Abid, and the second wife to the murdered Hakim Wasim Ali Wasim of Iron Syrup and Other Herbs, paedophile and peddler of suspicious aphrodisiacs, is a “running beauty” on a run. Theologically protected by Molly, Sabiha is the epicentre from which the plot derives its momentum. She is a victim of circumstances as much as she is a victim of her gender, and despite her quick machinations, cannot outrun the greater designs of the state machinery. She is a witness to the drama of her father’s life – her ears newly encountering Jiye Bhutto from the lips of her father, his temporary identity swap with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

But more than anything, she is a witness to the ruins that her life has been at the hands of rapists disguised as her PT coach, her husband, and Lieutenant Gul – the predecessor of Captain Gul, and the arrester of her father.

Concurrent to Sabiha’s flight is the perennial presence of the “jiyalas” – Bhutto’s sympathisers. When not busy “pistoning” or attending to libidinal duty, their extermination is Captain Gul’s project to attain worldly redemption. His intel leads him to one of these jiyalas – Shahid (literally translating to martyr), who wishes to protest against the hanging by self-immolating. However, for a protest to be a protest, there has to be a record, documentation, and evidence.

Shahid, a true artist, has already chosen the golden hour of this documentation – the angles have been decided, and as an extension, he has already imagined his face to be the afterlife of the protest, to be circulated and postered around. Shahid’s dreams are cut short as time has not yet mellowed, for Captain Gul has not yet apprised himself and his heart to the presence of Sabiha Bano. It is while ransacking Shahid’s art studio that Gul stumbles upon the deceptively camouflaged VHS tape that contains the “smutty video” of Lieutenant Gul raping a drugged Sabiha, and it is this video that, for the first time, sets Gul’s heart, amongst other things, into action, too.

A cautionary tale

Gul’s search for the jiyalas and Sabiha converges and collapses into one, for OK Town is a small provincial town, and its inhabitants’ fates are tightly entwined – their fates cannot be undone even if the inhabitants have been warned fairly in advance by the advocate and palmist, Noor Nabi. Gul is unrelenting in his quest to rescue Sabiha, to make soft love to her, and when Sabiha crosses him, Nabi’s prophecy arrives as a warrant of truth – “a man might want your heart but he is still pondering with his penis. And when you tell him that you have already given your heart to someone, the man will ponder about the other man and they will deal with each other and you might get a chance to bolt, to run for your life.” Nabi’s prophecy is at once the wisdom of life as well as the premise of Hanif’s corpus – men pondering with the penis. And what happens to men pondering with their penis? They happen to meet an end like Captain Gul.

Downplaying the fallacy of Chekov’s Gun, the story, told in bursts of episodes, is a testimony to the brilliance of Hanif as a writer, as an attester. Wrapped in the garb of humour, the novel may present itself as a political allegory to an unattentive eye, and yet it is more than an account of seemingly ordinary lives, and their capacity to influence as well as be influenced by events of grand scale. It is a story of how not to undo a disciplined, flourishing career by sleeping and then misnaming your boss’s offspring – in this negation, it also qualifies as a cautionary guide to (safe) sex. It is a story of the complexities of politics in the mundane lives of small-scale societies, where perhaps the only preoccupation – an oscillation between “perpetual erections” and “eternal salvation” is perturbed by the government as “family”. It is a story of “homoeopathic martial law and where is the rod” – there is no hiding.

The conflicts within the novel function within the very matrix of eros and thanatos – the desire to be supreme, the desire to treat human life as disposable as long as one’s beliefs and esteem are upheld. If these conflicts do not compel us to interrogate the underlying human condition, what does?

The novel is an enduring read for its subtle attentiveness to the questions and portrayal of gender and sexuality as well. Hanif writes about desires, sex, and masturbation with a passionate interest – an endearing trait that makes a reader captive. There is the occasional English, too – Baghi, true to his name (if only in his own estimation), believes that he is training “young minds” to be Calibans – “the rebels of tomorrow” who would “question power in the language of power.” One remains unsure of the magnanimity of this claim, though the Rebel English Academy appears no less tempestuous than it is rebellious.

By the time we prosper to the end of the novel, Sabiha seems to have learnt “the difference between creating and destroying”, and while another Gul is believed to blossom in OK town, Hanif’s sharp writing has hit the sweet spot – the Bermuda triangle yields to the patient reader.

Rebel English Academy, Mohammed Hanif, Penguin Random House India.