LAHORE: English language poet Athar Tahir’s debut novel, Second Coming, was launched at the Quaid-i-Azam Library here on Friday.

Read out his paper, “One Way of Love: Athar Tahir’s Second Coming and Pakistani Idiom,” Dr Waseem Anwar said the novel had four elemental sections; air, earth, water and fire.

He found the novel very much transcultural in its spirit based on his own interest in the Pakistani idiom.

He said the novel reflected the author’s own literary ‘second coming’ being an internationally recognised poet and represented pictorial thoughtfulness of the author.

He said pinned on the merging of Thai and Pakistani cultures, the novel takes us back to EM Foster’s Marabar Caves in A Passage to India.

“It reminds us of British romantic traditions of love, which in Second Coming, is a lost love forever and it hurts not only the author but also the readers.”

Dr Anwar referred to Robert Browning’s poem One Way of Love to draw a comparison with the love story in the novel. He called the novel a journey of the author within. Dr Anwar said Lahore had a central place in the novel as the protagonist belonged to the city and returned to it.

Prof Navid Shahzad said Second Coming might be the debut novel of Tahir but one could not talk about it without a reference to the journey undertaken by him prior to the novel.

She revisited the contributions of the author to English language poetry in Pakistan and talked about him as a poet as well as the man. She termed Tahir a cultural and literary nomad whose writings encompassed vast regions of the world, both east and west.

“Whenever he appears to set up a permanent camp, he moves to yet another horizon.”

Ms Shahzad discussed Tahir as a poet who managed to write 20 books in various genres. She remembered the start of her friendship with Tahir when both of them were being mentored by English language poet Taufiq Rafat.

Talking about Second Coming, she said the novel was set in familiar yet unknown territory. She said Tahir was sharply observant, his narrative did not disappoint and language, character and narrative all had razor sharp and mischievous wit. The novel revealed as much about Tahir as it did about its protagonist, she said while commenting on the book.

Prof Dr Rashid Latif Khan lauded Athar Tahir for his extensive research on cultures of Thailand and Pakistan to write his debut novel.

The way he described Thai culture and language was commendable. Prof Khan said the book had two main characters, a middle-aged Pakistan and the other a Thai girl.

He described falling in love in the middle age as quite natural as all men had gone through it. Seeing the novel from a social perspective, he said the girl in the novel refused to kiss the Pakistan man because he was a Muslim.

He added that religious bias existed everywhere in the world.

Dr Khan lamented the loss of literary culture of Lahore, the city which used to host huge mushairas and literary gatherings when he was a young man.

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2023