uhammad Asif Nawaz’s The Pilgrims features the separate yet collective journeys of four characters as they grapple with concerns about identity and belonging. Each character’s spiritual and emotional voyage is rooted in an intricate web of challenges and circumstances, many of which are beyond their control. Mehar, a divorced woman, carries invisible scars after many years of enduring an abusive relationship. Bina, a Hindu doctor, still finds herself burdened by the treachery of an old friend, who resurfaces after several years. Steeped in emotional turmoil, Aariz lurks through the darkened pathways of his past. Feroze, the scion of a feudal lord, struggles to reconcile his father’s chequered legacy with his own egalitarian beliefs.

At its core, The Pilgrims is a character-driven novel. However, the author – a doctor and member of the Pakistan Administrative Service – employs an unconventional approach to characterisation. The motley cast of Nawaz’s debut novel doesn’t include people who are merely prisoners of their own choices. Their personalities and psyches are also informed by their cultural, historical and political backdrop. Shackled by external circumstances, many of them lack the agency to carve out their own path and often have to contend with decisions that aren’t of their own making.

Cynical readers might be suspicious of this technique as it stands the danger of turning characters into mere mouthpieces of a particular ideology. Be that as it may, Nawaz isn’t too keen on using his protagonists to espouse political sentiments. The author appears to be conscious of the porous boundaries between “the political and the personal” and seeks to depict this interplay in his first novel. “The agency of individuals, especially in our part of the world, is limited,” he tells The News on Sunday. Framing his characters’ trajectories against the larger movements of history and culture allows him to “tell [their] stories more truthfully.”

All four characters are treading down a pathway towards self-realisation and emotional fulfilment. Even so, their respective ‘pilgrimages’ are neither constrained by time or space nor depicted in self-indulgent hues. The Pilgrims begins with a prologue featuring an anecdote about a spiritual journey made by Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and a companion.After a long day of traversing a scorching desert, the travellers have to reckon with “an exceedingly cold night.” When their attempts to start a bonfire to warm themselves prove futile, the companion urges the saint to “transform himself into a falcon,” fly across the horizon and fetch an ember from hell. Lal Shahbaz Qalandar complies with his companion’s request, but returns empty-handed. “There is no fire in hell,” the saint declares. “Everyone who goes there brings their own fire and pain from this world.”

The anecdote provides a useful counterpoint to the ‘pilgrimages’ that the characters embark upon. Nawaz doesn’t view the Sufi's proclamation as just another “profound concept” about the afterlife. On the contrary, he perceives it as a means of highlighting an “unsettling” facet of his narrative. After finishing the novel, some readers will be struck by the haunting prescience of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar's words. Nawaz’s protagonists are immersed in the chaotic business of living and make some dubious choices, thereby “procuring [or extinguishing] their own fire.”

The spiritual and emotional journeys of the four protagonists don’t follow a predictable arc. In fact, the progress of some of the ‘pilgrimages’ depicted in this book is interrupted by unexpected cruelties of life.

“I never set out to make the pilgrimages of the characters acceptable or [for that matter] successful,” Nawaz tells The News on Sunday. “They wandered and the journeys took on a life of their own.”

At times, the characters’ journeys through life appear quite open-ended. The author resists the temptation to chastise or reprimand his characters for their seemingly questionable choices – a deliberate move that allows his characters to emerge as full-blooded, complex individuals.

“I was surprised by how the novel shaped itself,” Nawaz admits. “When I was writing it, there were some parts that were contrary to my initialvision. But there was no other way things could have happened. I understand [my characters’] journeys, even if I don’t subscribe to them.”

Barring its somewhat melodramatic flourishes, the denouement is unexpected and intriguing. While some of the titular pilgrims find the answers that they have been searching for, others are weighed down by the emotional confusion of their quest.

Lahore figures prominently in The Pilgrims, even though many sections of the novel are set in other cities, such as Sukkur. Nawaz tends to see “geography as a full-fledged character” in his novel. He doesn’t allow this ‘character’ to be depicted in a stereotypical manner.

“My cities are like my ‘human characters’ – multi-layered, complex and come with a lot of baggage,” Nawaz says. “Writing about Lahore can be a trap. So much has been written about it that there seems no getting away from [other writers’] perspectives.”

Veering away from mundane portrayals of Lahore, Nawaz juxtaposes the Old City with the relatively new localities to capture the complex realities of a multifaceted metropolis.

The Pilgrims is sprinkled with a rich panoply of mythological tales and historical references. These narratives have been effortlessly interspersed into the text with an almost encyclopaedic attention to detail. Numerous socio-political tensions in the subcontinent have also been woven into the plot. Mercifully, political discussions don’t emerge as, what French writer Stendhal would call, “gunshots in the middle of a concert.”In Nawaz’s novel, politics comes through as an elixir, not an anathema.

A knowledgeable debut, The Pilgrims presents a cast of memorable characters whose lives are inextricably linked to the patchwork of the culture and history they belong to.

The Pilgrims

Author: Muhammad Asif Nawaz

Publisher: Liberty Publishing

Pages: 234

The reviewer is a freelance journalist and the author of No Funeral for Nazia