Mirza Athar Baig's novel "Hasan Ki Surte-e-Sahaya": Theme, Technique and Narration

Abstract

Mirza Athar Baig’s six-hundred-page novel “Hasan Ki Surat-e-Hal" is based on a four-page short story. He says that it is not possible to turn every story into a novel by giving it length. In 2009, when he wrote the short story “Uchatthy Khof Ki Daastan”, he felt that there was scope for expansion in many parts of it… And when the process of committing this expansion to paper began, then the story kept coming out and finally this entire novel was ready. A funny situation of the facts that are happening in ordinary life is shown to us on a film level and what is happening in the film is reflected in real life. One of the special things about the present novel is that along with human characters, inanimate objects also move the story forward. For example, a table, a megaphone and a bottle of wine. According to the author, these objects are as important as human characters because in our daily lives, objects cannot be separated from humans. When we focus our attention on telling the history of objects, the world of human’s freezes for a while and objects take center stage in our narrative. In this ‘object-centered’ situation, we experience the unique experience of seeing human stories from a different perspective.