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If you’re overtired, you’ll always spill your guts.
After a while, I manage to pull myself together, and we decide the best course of action is to continue onward. We could try to walk back to the rest stop, but there’s no guarantee anyone will still be there. With my luck, they’ll be long gone by the time we get back. Then we’d have to continue forward anyway, but we’d have to cover that ground all over again. On top of that, we don’t have any food or water, and the sun will be up soon; once it is, the scorching heat will return, and there’s no telling how long we’ll last on empty stomachs. Behind us, we know there’s nothing, but if we keep walking, there’s a better chance we’ll stumble across the village we were supposed to arrive at to wait for a new bus.
We walk in the dark for what feels like hours. There are lots of wild animals in the outskirts, and every now and then I cower behind Sarfaraz when we cross paths with something. Usually, it’s a stray dog or a feral cat, but twice we encounter wild boars. Luckily they have poor sight in the dark, so we stay very still until they pass by us.
Thankfully, it stops raining, but after the sun starts to peek over the horizon, I wish the rain were back. I can barely raise an arm to block the rays from my retinas. A tortured groan rumbles my throat. “I wish I had some water.”
“That’s the third time you’ve said that in twenty minutes,” Sarfaraz heaves, though his words lack their usual annoyance. Things must be getting bad if Sarfaraz is too tired to chastise my whining. “I’m sure we’ll find a village soon.”
I step on an uneven patch of road, and my foot slips. I don’t have enough time to catch my balance, and I end up flopping to the ground with a hard thud. I manage to seal my mouth right before I hit the dirt, so thankfully I don’t end up with a mouthful of dust. A moan grumbles my chest as I curl into a ball.
Sarfaraz hovers over me, tilting his head to the side. “Don’t you think this is sad?”
My head spins, and black spots creep up on my vision. I don’t even have the energy to defend myself. “Leave me alone to die.”
“Come on. You’re being overdramatic.”
“I get low blood sugar.” I bring my knees to my chest. “I’ve gone too long without anything real to eat.”
Sarfaraz huffs a short breath through his nose, then holds his hand out to me. I huff and reach out an arm, and he hauls me to my feet. To my surprise, though, he loops my arm through his and secures my hand in the crook of his elbow. I stare down at our joined limbs, then look up at Sarfaraz. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to be here when noon hits,” he says simply. His expression is neutral, but I know him better at this point, and the pink tinting his ears isn’t from just the hot weather. “It’ll be way too hot, and I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to pull you along with me by then.”
I gulp, but I let him lead us forward.
Even though it should be the last thing on my mind after everything that’s happened, all I can think about is how this is the closest I’ve been to a guy before. Okay, so I’ve had my first kiss (Yahya Zafar when I was thirteen, and he said my breath smelled like cheese right after), but other than that, I’ve never gotten emotionally close enough to a guy to warrant this kind of close touch. Not only that, but because intimacy with the opposite sex is technically forbidden until marriage—even holding a guy’s hand is enough fodder for gossip in our community. I didn’t want to bring Ammi any more shame than she’d already received.
Still, if his feet weren’t moving confidently and steadily forward, I’d still be on the ground, so I hold on. I rest my temple against him, and surprisingly, he lets me.
“So—” Sarfaraz’s voice rumbles the side of my body, and a spark spreads through me “—how did you meet your fiancé?”
I must be totally out of it, because the words tumble out without me caring to stop and think about what I’m saying. “I was twenty-five and having such a hard time finding a permanent teaching position, and I needed to pay my mountain of student loans,” I mumble. “And then I met up with an old friend from teacher’s college. He’d just gotten back from teaching abroad, and he told me about how great of an opportunity it was. New city, new people, great money. After months of feeling like something was off, I thought a change might inject some real life into my life.” I sigh heavily. “I wanted to go, but my mom said I had to be married first.”
“Really?” Sarfaraz twists his lips. “That doesn’t sound very fair.”
“Yeah, well.” I fist the material of his shirt between my fingers. “Having your father leave when you’re ten isn’t fair, either.”
Sarfaraz is quiet for a beat before he says, “I’m sorry.”
I sniffle but continue. “A young Pakistani woman typically doesn’t leave the house before marriage. But I lobbied so hard, and my Hibba Baji was so supportive of me. Plus, Hibba Baji pointed out that I couldn’t go into a marriage with debts. Ammi eventually relented, but her new condition was that I had to be engaged. We met Imtiaz through a mutual friend’s matchmaker.” I briefly pause when Sarfaraz’s body tenses, but he readjusts my grip on his arm and keeps walking. “That was when we realized we remembered each other from a class we shared together in university. We were both quite surprised when we realized who the other person was.”
“And then?” Sarfaraz asks, and his voice is noticeably tighter.
“Nothing, really.” I stifle a yawn, then snuggle closer to Sarfaraz’s arm. “We met up a few times, and we liked each other, so our parents secured the match. After the Baat Pakki, I went off to Korea. I stayed for two years, then came back and got a job working with first graders, and for the past year we’ve been planning the wedding. We decided to do it in Pakistan because all my relatives are here. Most of Imtiaz’s family is in Canada, but he agreed to have the wedding here.”
Sarfaraz pauses, and his Adam’s apple bobs. Tension lines his forehead, and I swear for a brief moment, a torn expression twists his face. When he realizes I’m staring at him, though, the flash of emotion is gone, and he schools his features into a smirk that doesn’t quite fill out his face like I’m sure he’s hoping. “No offense, but your life sounds pretty wild,” he says, and his tone is still strained.
I choose to ignore it...for now. “That’s what my laws are for,” I reply instead.
“Your laws?”
“Do you know the concept of Murphy’s Law?”
“The idea that anything that can go wrong will go wrong?”
“That’s the one.” I inhale deeply, my lids drooping heavily. “Well, when I was a kid, I came across the saying in a book. It fit my life so perfectly I couldn’t believe it. So, growing up, I made up my own laws in relation to Murphy’s Law. It was the only way I could think to make sense of everything happening to me.”
“That’s...kind of sad,” he says, sympathy in his voice. “You must have had a hard time growing up if you used an adult concept to cope through life.”
