Tracing the Shape of Love in Drinking the Ocean by Saad Omar Khan
Book Review by Sheri Doyle
Drinking the Ocean explores the rewards and complexities of various kinds of love—romantic, familial, spiritual, and self. The individual and shared journeys of Murad and Sofi are narrated in alternating perspectives and unfold to reveal how two paths can cross and entangle with lasting effects no matter how many times those paths diverge or cross again. Set in Toronto, Lahore, and London; in family homes, on university campuses, in restaurants, cafes, and workplaces; the story’s sense of place is overlain with an emotional landscape of push and pull, grief and the pursuit of connection, the desire to escape and a need to return.
Murad sees a face that he recognizes in a crowd on a city street. He knows immediately that it’s her. Married now and established in his career, Murad reminds himself of the story his mother told him as a child and its moral to not look back. And yet, he is unable to forget Sofi, even now, seven years after he last saw her. At just the sight of her, Murad is flooded with memories, taking the reader back in time to London where he is pursuing graduate studies. Despite his freedom at university and away from home, Murad’s spirit is burdened by parental expectations. He is overcome with loneliness and a sense of disconnection from his peers. But when he meets a classmate named Sofi, who is an immediate source of comfort, Murad is pulled from his inner darkness and into her light like an awakening. Murad quickly sees himself changing as he shares part of himself like he never has before. With Sofi, he can open up about his mental health struggles, his sadness, his sense of displacement having moved around frequently as a child. Sofi offers a fresh perspective to Murad’s sense of dislocation as she has the ability to feel at home anywhere. They discuss angst, the human condition, family, and spirituality. A magnetic connection develops but as circumstances and fates impose on their directions in life, Murad and Sofi are separated and pulled together again and again.
Through flashbacks and flashforwards, the story deepens over time and across continents. Although for different reasons and at separate times, Murad and Sofi share in common many of their sensibilities—isolation, loneliness, loss, love, fulfilment—and both persist to understand how duty and responsibility must be balanced with the pursuit of inner peace and a greater purpose.
The novel is divided into four parts of shifting perspectives, each beginning with a luminous quote from a mystic, such as Rumi and Baba Kuhi of Shiraz, whose words are also found in a fictional book titled Aphorisms of the Mohammedan Saints. In London, Murad receives the book as a gift of profound importance, both grounding and elevating, throughout the meandering story of two lives twisting together and apart perpetually.
Through elegant and layered prose, Saad Omar Khan offers an introspective, heartfelt story about the intricacies of life for Muslims in the West and the everlasting quality of love.
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