It’s a life story that could provide fodder for a book — or even three. Novelist Aatish Taseer has already written two books that have drawn heavily on his own life and the colourful personalities around him. Now he has turned out a novel called Noon and the leading players in it are thinly disguised but clearly recognisable from his own life.

Aatish, who’s the love child of the late governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Salman Taseer, and Indian journalist, Tavleen Singh, has mined his unusual background and written extensively about his troubled relationship with his Pakistani father and explored his ties with his estranged father’s religion, Islam. The spotlight was trained on Aatish when in January his father Salman, a larger-than-life personality and outspoken liberal, was assassinated by his own bodyguard.

“I have had this feeling of fatigue with Pakistan ever since my father’s killing. It was disturbing to sense the carnival-like atmosphere there following his death, and the way the clerics deemed him ‘wajib al qatal’, that is fit to die,” says Aatish who divides his time between London, New York and his mother’s home in Delhi. Noon, he insists, will be the final installment of coming to terms with his ‘personal entanglement’ with religion and identity.

Looking relaxed in his mother’s apartment in one of the smartest parts of Lutyens Delhi — it exudes a mix of Old World charm with stained-glass doors and contemporary paintings by young artists like Zack Yorke and Salman Toor — he’s perfectly at ease explaining the embryonic link between his books and the people in his books who’ve walked through his life.

“I believe that you have to start a journey near yourself,” notes the young author (he’s in his early 30s) who started as a journalist with Time Magazine in London. He writes occasionally for the magazine and the Wall Street Journal. In recent months he has faced strong criticism over an article in the Wall Street Journal that claimed in its title that his father ‘hated India’. On the personal front too, the piece caused considerable discord.

“My relationship with my six brothers and sisters in Lahore is in a state of frost. The last time I met them and my father was in 2007 when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated,” he acknowledges.

Aatish Taseer reads out a passage from his latest novel Noon at its launch in Delhi

The man of the moment has a busy tour schedule in the coming months to promote his novel with whistle-stop visits to Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Then it’s off to the Edinburgh International Book Festival and a month-long US book tour.

The novel Noon is divided into four episodes and set over two decades in India and Pakistan. It starts with the narrator, a young Indian, travelling to Pakistan to meet an estranged father and ends on what can best be described as a jagged note. Says Aatish: “It is left so deliberately as a kind of a comment. People keep thinking that Pakistan will collapse any moment. But in reality a society just rots away.”

Aatish confesses to being no boy wonder. His first book published in 2009, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, is a memoir of his travels through countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Pakistan, but it was not his first attempt at writing a book.

“There was the phase of cutting my teeth when I was left with two unsuccessful novels between the ages of 19 and 26. Then I hit upon the material for Stranger to History,” says the author referring to a letter from his father (accusing him of ignorance about Islam) that spurred his debut book.

The author with his mother Tavleen Singh

His second book, The Temple-Goers published in 2010, addresses his issues with his identity as a Muslim and an Indian. It was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and also got a weighty endorsement from V.S. Naipaul, according to whom, Aatish is a “young writer to watch”.

With indisputably model-like good looks, Aatish was a regular on the London high society circuit, especially when he dated Gabriella Windsor, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, for a while. The young writer is also a fitness freak who runs 10km-12km or works out for an hour daily. At a more intellectual level, he’s fascinated by Sanskrit and has spent six months studying it at Oxford University.

He also reads extensively. He says: “While I have grown up reading Naipaul who was a huge technical influence, I loved writers such as Marcel Proust, Guy de Maupassant and Munshi Premchand.”

And has he, by exploring his identity to know himself better, discovered an individual style of writing? He says: “The weaving together of Urdu poetry, Sanskrit literature and English prose — that is my inheritance.”