FICTION: LOVE AND ITS DELUSIONS.

A thar Tahir is no stranger to readers of English literature in the country. He is known as a poet - an English language poet, to be specific - and, with six collections of verse to his credit, sometimes his work in prose recedes into the background.

Tahir has won numerous accolades in the genre of poetry, but his credentials as a researcher are equally deserving of merit. He has written several books on art and natural history and his introduction to Taufiq Rafat's English translation of the epic poem 'Puran Bhagat', composed by the 19th century Punjabi poet Qadir Yar, was so elaborate that it was later published as an independent book. It was an introduction to not only Qadir Yar, but also to the form of classic Punjabi poetry.

Tahir's first work of fiction was Other Seasons, a collection of 25 short stories published in 1990. It has taken him a little over 30 years to come back to publishing fiction, but he crowns his return with the more expansive form of storytelling: the novel.

The title of this novel, Second Coming, is borrowed from one of Irish poet William Butler Yeats's most famous poems and hints at the second phase of love in the protagonist's life. The two phases have an age between them; the first encounter occurring during his adolescence and the second in the twilight of his life.

Some of the short stories in Other Seasons were informed by Tahir's profession as a bureaucrat and it appears that his novel, too, has some influences of the same. Verily, the most effective fiction comes from the reality surrounding a writer, as it lends an air of authenticity to the work. Like the author himself, the main character in Second Coming is a bureaucrat, a Rhodes scholar and a former commissioner.

Athar Tahir returns to fiction with a debut novel about an ageing bureaucrat falling in love with a much younger Thai woman

Our bureaucrat travels to Thailand to take part in a conference and there, forms a deep relationship with his translator, Sukhon Urairat, whom he calls 'Su'. He, meanwhile, remains unnamed, perhaps to add to the suspense that grows in the reader's mind over the course of the story. The only inkling of his name we get is from his emails to his Thai love - he signs the missives with the capital letter 'A', which could possibly hint at the author himself.

Tahir weaves two very important aspects of modern life in his novel. One, this is a relationship started during a short tour abroad; two, it is built into something deeper...