Adulthood is often thought of as a journey towards independence. The baggage people carry along the way often receives less attention. From childhood insecurities, familial expectations, ideas of beauty and success and the lingering need to belong, some burdens are eventually discarded; others travel much farther than expected.

Naveed Iftikhar’s debut novel, Hold On, explores these complexities through Hira Gul, a young Pakistani woman whose journey from Kohat to Peshawar’s Chamkani, and from there to Islamabad and beyond, is marked by shifting circumstances and a sense of belonging and identity.

Across its 50 chapters, the novel explores these concerns in accessible, easy-to-read prose. Hira’s adult life may take her into increasingly larger worlds, but some of her earliest struggles are at home.

Growing up in a conservative, lower-middle-income Pashtun household, Hira feels different from her siblings. She is not as fair-skinned and has dark, curly hair. Her mother, Nausheen, frequenly draws attention to these differences and worries about her prospects of finding a suitable match, particularly once Hira becomes increasingly invested in education.

For Hira, the consequences run deeper than dissatisfaction with her appearance. Unable to understand why her mother appears to treat her differently, she arrives at a painful explanation - perhaps she is an illegitimate child. She is not, but the suspicion is relevant to her experience.

Before Hira encounters the judgment of the wider world, she has already learnt to question whether she belongs in the first world she knows: her family. Iftikhar points out here that children do not always understand prejudice, rejection or parental bias. They invariably find explanations for them, sometimes at their own expense.

Growing up involves as much loss as acquisition.

Nausheen’s attitude changes once Hira begins supporting the household. The daughter whose marriage prospects once caused anxiety now receives considerably more affection. However, the shift proves fragile. When Hira’s brother joins the police, Nausheen’s preference for the male child resurfaces. Lesson: economic independence may alter a woman’s position within a household without necessarily dismantling the hierarchies that preceded it.

Hira’s father, Aftab Khan, provides a welcome counterpoint. When she tells him about Ahmed, he dignifies his daughter’s feelings rather than dismissing those. When she speaks of depression and wanting psychiatric support, he responds with compassion. Aftab is interesting precisely because Iftikhar resists turning a conservative Pashtun father into a predictable hurdle in his daughter’s journey.

The relationships beyond Hira’s family are equally susceptible to change. Her experiences with Sarmad and Saadia allow Iftikhar to consider an aspect of adulthood that fiction sometimes romanticises - friendship.

Sarmad represents the unsettling possibility that a relationship understood as friendship may never have carried the same meaning for both people. Through him, Iftikhar also ventures into the impact of drug use and severe, untreated mental-health conditions, including the helplessness that can accompany caring for someone whose struggles one cannot resolve.

Saadia and Hira offer another kind of distance. Their friendship changes because their lives do. Sometimes adult friends are too busy to respond. There need not be betrayal or confrontation; life itself can cause a separation.

Hira may be the centre of Hold On, but Ahmed, Sarmad, Saadia, Sana and Sanwal prevent her experience from becoming the only version of adulthood on offer. Age alone does not determine the experience. Class, education, gender, family circumstances and opportunities alter its pace. Just as a character is struggling to acquire independence, another may already have aquired the privilege of deciding what to do with it.

Iftikhar’s background as an urban economist contributes to his sensitivity towards these differences. Social mobility in Hold On is not reduced to earning more money or moving to a bigger city. It alters relationships, expectations and identities. Each geographical shift exposes Hira to another social world and requires another acclimatisation.

This is where Hold On can resonate beyond the particularities of Hira’s Pakistani experience. For many South Asians, including those forming the diaspora, movement between classes, cities and countries involves a peculiar negotiation between adaptation and identity. One learns the codes of a new place without entirely forgetting those of the old.

Through family, friendship, love, discrimination, betrayal, depression, drug use, class mobility, and migration, the novel’s ambition occasionally risks crowding its narrative. Iftikhar is most persuasive when these concerns emerge naturally through his characters rather than when the reader can sense her social argument driving the narrative.

Hira holds these strands together because her search remains intensely personal. The child who once wondered whether she belonged to the family she was living with grows into a woman navigating increasingly larger worlds, only to discover that belonging cannot always be secured by changing one’s circumstances.

Growing up involves as much loss as acquisition. People drift away, relationships change meaning, homes change shape and our understanding of ourselves gets revised.

The persisting question then is: what should one hold on to? Iftikhar does not suggest an obvious answer. Adulthood rarely does.

Hold On
Author: Naveed Iftikhar
Publisher: Self-Published
Pages: 349
Price: Rs 1,470

The writer is a staff member.