Athar Tahir - his journey from writing poetry to novel.

Poet and short story writer Athar Tahir has come up with a novel as he expands his literary oeuvre in English literature. His novel Second Coming, published by the Lighthouse Publishers, centres around a man who falls for a far younger woman at the later stage of his life. It's more than just a romance as the protagonist attempts to take cognisance of emotional and mental complexities of both the people involved in the story. That Tahir took on the genre of novel after his accomplishments as a poet and publication of a short stories collection about 32 years back was a surprise to many.

To his question of the evolution of his debut novel, he talked about evaluating experience of life, both at the moment of experience as well in retrospect.

'This (Second Coming) is really quite a late-age work but that's itself the subject of the novel-aging. That's the whole idea that you experience the process of aging and how does this aging happens. It tries to explore the sensitivities and sensibilities of an aging protagonist and how he thinks about his past and what's happening to him now and what the future holds for him.'

Tahir says that his novel works at three different levels as the narrative continues with flashbacks and those flashbacks are integrated into the current experience of the protagonist.

He says that it started soon after the last visit to Thailand in 2016. He completed it in 2017 but did not publish it because he kept reviewing the manuscript. 'The last sections I edited out. It was a much larger novel but I felt that perhaps that portion was distracting from what I intended to do. I deleted tens of pages so that it becomes a more cohesive work of literature.'

About the craft of novel writing, Tahir found it challenging in the sense that it was a different way of thinking than he had to employ for writing his poems.

'In poetry, there is a great deal of sensitivity towards images and metaphors that you use to manipulate the structure. There is a great deal of craft. In the novel, you have a larger canvas. You are at greater liberty to play around the experience and the thinking that has gone into the novel. In this novel, I adhere to the Aristotelian technique - the beginning, the middle and the end. I was aware that I was conforming to the classical form of the novel. But at the same time, I was trying to make the readers see the whole narrative through the eyes of the protagonist and that in itself creates a certain amount of...