The day after his thirty-third birthday, Murad spots Sofi, the woman he once loved, hand in hand with a small child at a Toronto intersection. Though their lives diverged years ago, time folds in on itself, and what follows in Saad Omar Khan’s Drinking the Ocean (Woodall and Wynn, 2024) is a lyrical meditation on memory, love, and the porous borders of belonging. Set among Lahore, London, and Toronto, Khan’s debut novel traces Murad’s and Sofi’s perspectives in intimate and meditative prose that examines how love and belief endure displacement, and how faith can be both wound and refuge. Moving across decades, Drinking the Ocean follows these two souls whose paths remain bound together by longing and the search for meaning across cultures, continents, and time.
The story’s sense of transcending borders is both practical and philosophical. “It made sense to weave a story about connection and disconnection around places that I knew quite well,” explains Khan. “My family is from Lahore. I’ve lived in Toronto since I was a child. And I’ve spent time in London completing a graduate degree.” In addition to these personal links, the idea of evoking a larger cosmopolitanism was also important: “My upbringing was predicated on the idea that our emotional and cultural foundations are borderless, and I wanted that to be reflected in this story.” A prime vehicle is the story’s Bermuda triangle of poetically porous settings: “Pakistan is a country with a large diaspora. Toronto and London are two of the world’s great urban immigrant hubs. Murad and Sofi are characters who live in a reality where, in the words of a former teacher of mine, ‘everyone is from somewhere else.’”
Manifesting the inevitable tug-of-war of our emotions
For Khan, the physical distance between these settings mirrors the emotional distances his characters must traverse. “Their worldliness, while allowing them a certain open-mindedness, doesn’t mitigate the strife they feel inside themselves,” he notes. “While they have the ability to code-switch across environments, their true lives are lived within the country of their own souls.” It’s that interior country — the geography of longing, grief, and spiritual searching — that gives Drinking the Ocean its distinctive voice – and the writing startles in its ability to balance sorrow and hope. “I suppose that’s just a reflection of my own view of the human condition,” he says. “It rings true to me that hope, sadness, beauty and despondency can co-exist in the heart at the same time.”
He describes Murad and Sofi as “characters who feel life deeply, and their inner lives reflect the tug and pull between various opposing emotional directions.” He insists that “this is true of life in general—we can experience renewal, even when parts of us feel depleted. And moments of healing can occur, even if we still remain broken in some fundamental way.” For Khan, these seeming contradictions are not paradoxical: “I don’t feel that, as humans, our multiple emotional valences exist as opposite ends of a scale, where opposing feelings exist to balance each other,” he reflects. “If anything, it’s more of a single landscape that we walk through, where the geography of our soul is replete with multiple features that exist on the same plane with equanimity.”
At the heart of the novel’s single landscape are Murad and Sofi, whose relationship pulses with yearning and grace. “In developing Sofi and Murad, I wanted to write characters that spoke to my own emotional reality, and that lived in a spiritual and emotional space that I was familiar with,” Khan reflects.
Exploring how to be human through the Muslim experience
“At the same time,” he notes, “I do acknowledge that all novels are designed to be both specific and universal.” . “I knew — or at least hoped — that there was something in this story that had the potential to cross the particularities of Murad and Sofi’s backgrounds,” he says. “Their sense of longing, their capacity for love and grace, all of these are human qualities that most of us are capable of having, even if they’re reified through a particular cultural lens.” Writing Drinking the Ocean, he adds, “was its own act of faith. I worked on the assumption that by writing characters who represented a deep part of me and my own life, I could also speak to a wider audience.”
That act of faith extends to the novel’s portrayal of Muslim identity—complex, interior, and free from stereotype. “One often feels that when writing Muslim characters living in the West, there is a need to follow a certain template whereby the Muslim characters reject their ‘Muslimness’ in favour of a Western lifestyle,” Khan observes. “In these narrative modes, the characters seem to question their identity, as if they don’t have a solid foundation of who they are,” he says. “That’s not the case here. Murad and Sofi know exactly who they are. They don’t question themselves culturally.”
Their struggle, he explains, lies in a quieter, more profound realm, though “in a sense, the question of how they live as Muslims is part of their journey. For them, it’s a very interior voyage, a questioning not of whether or not they’re Muslim… but of something more spiritually foundational: how does one remain connected to the Divine, if that connection can be maintained at all?”
Khan’s own global upbringing—from the United Arab Emirates to the Philippines, Hong Kong, South Korea, and finally Canada—deeply informed this view. “If there is one lesson that my life wandering between countries has given me, it is this: there is no one way to be human, and home can be defined in multiple ways,” he says. “At the same time, having many homes and being able to mentally code-switch across cultural environments doesn’t preclude one from feeling displaced, lonely, or disconnected.”
Drinking the Ocean
This natural sense of displacement finds its mirror in the book’s title.“The nature of home and being bound by all-powerful, boundless love is reflected in the title ‘Drinking the Ocean’,” Khan notes. “The title comes from a real poem cited in the novel by the Sufi scholar and poet Abdullah Ansari. The verses speak of the intense longing and desire to be consumed by God’s immense power and love. And I thought the imagery of an ocean that has no borders resonates with the great capacity of love the characters contain within themselves.”
As readers continue to discover Drinking the Ocean, Khan hopes it serves as an invitation to something larger. “I’ve been greatly touched by the reception Drinking the Ocean has had with readers across cultures and backgrounds,” he says. “Sufism (tasawwuf) was a great intellectual influence on this book, and I hope readers take this novel as a starting-off point for them to discover more of the beauty and elegance of Islam’s spiritual and mystical traditions.”
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
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