“I cannot live in the so-called real world without living simultaneously in a fictional world. In the middle of one project, I am already working on another. That’s my life source which gives me stability. It’s a sort of psychological necessity for me,” says Mirza Athar Baig, who has just published his third novel ‘Hasan Ki Soorat-i-Haal: Khali… Jaghein… Pur… Karo’.

In an interview with Dawn at his Samanabad residence, he talks about his new novel, his penchant for creating a new language and fashioning unique characters.

Baig says about his new novel, “I have thrown a big challenge to the reader who should be up to it. I believe in challenging the reader. ”

To him, the popular novel is generally not multidimensional while a literary novel can have many dimensions and layers of meanings to it. “In literary fiction one is not bound to follow a typical storyline. Storyline can be there, however, it may lie hidden.”

Baig trusts his readers will not be driven away by the challenge. “Apart from making it challenging, I have been consciously trying to make my novel readable,” he says, adding he has received no serious complaints about readability of his writing so far. He hopes his readers will enjoy the new novel which had originally turned out to be so ‘strange’ that he had to modify it at certain points.

Coming back to layers of meanings and multidimensional value of the novel, Mirza Athar Baig believes he has stretched this narrative approach to the breaking point. He has also used the narrative of film and some elements of theatre in Hasan Ki Soorat-i-Haal. The novel is inhabited by a film group writing a script which creates a hallucinatory surrealistic effect.

About the blank spaces in the subtitle of his new novel (Khali…Jaghein… Pur…Karo), Baig says it is a big metaphor. It shows that something is missing in the broadest sense of the word. It’s a vacuum that needs to be filled. “As the novel develops, the blank spaces take multiple forms, yet the character of Hasan runs through.”

“This is a situational novel and relates to our own cultural, cognitive and aesthetic situation,” Mirza Athar Baig says. “Though it has a broad spectrum with complex layers of meaning, a linear storyline can also be traced without much difficulty. It has an ambitious theme and a civilisational and global perspectives spread over a vast canvas.”

The novelist also gives credit to his career as a playwright which always helps him developing his characters. However, he insists on differentiating between the two forms.

“Novel is different from drama and is the most extraordinary genre of fiction with infinite possibilities. Novel throws a challenge to the novelist, asking him to push the frontiers. A novel should have at least something novel about it.”

Like for example the language Mirza Athar Baig is known for. The language itself becomes “a character and a subject” in his novels and he has broadened its scope further in Hasan Ki Soorat-i-Haal. “I didn’t plan anything,” he says. “The language came naturally to me, I didn’t make it up. What I wanted to say ultimately determined what language I used,” he says about the unique language that he has crafted for all his novels.

Baig agrees to the point that four basic primitive elemental forces in ancient philosophy, -- earth, water, air, fire -- are there in the structure of Ghulam Bagh. However, he says he did not overstress the point.

A professor of philosophy, he is inevitably asked the question regarding the subject’s influence on his fiction, and his reply is that, “A novel can deal with philosophy without being overtly philosophical as the purpose is not to put forward straight philosophical theses in fiction, but to create a life-world which may have an ambience of some philosophical sensibility.”

Mirza Athar Baig is not too fond of his work being associated with magical realism. “The term has been overused and used so carelessly that it has lost its meanings. “Yes, there is an element of humour in my writing, it’s comical realism, if you like,” he says.

“I have used humour for non-humorous ends. Both tragedy and comedy go side by side in life.”

Talking about his future projects, he says he is planning to write serious theatre. He thinks “there should be some continuity in my vocation as a drama writer.”

There is also a manuscript of a novel that’s almost ready – should he want to send it to the publisher. He had started working on it just 10 days after Ghulam Bagh was written, titling it Jamal Shamsi, Farid Rajab Ali Ki Tareek Dunya. Only 15 per cent of it remains to be written, but its creator thinks the novel won’t be completed in near future because so much time has passed and so many things have changed, necessitating changes to the draft.