Wajahat was the sort of boy who always remembered everything—except umbrellas. He could tell you the capital of any country, the batting average of his favorite cricket player, even the number of stairs in his school—but he could never seem to bring an umbrella when it rained.One gloomy afternoon, it rained hard enough to make the streets look like they were auditioning to become rivers. Wajahat, drenched from head to toe, darted into the nearest shop for shelter. It wasn’t just any shop. It was a tiny bookstore, the kind where the air smells like paper and secrets.
Behind the counter was Laila. She wasn’t reading a book—she was sketching one. Or rather, drawing characters she imagined living inside one. She glanced up at Wajahat, dripping like a faucet, and burst out laughing.
“Lost your umbrella?” she asked.
“Who told you I owned one?” Wajahat replied, grinning sheepishly.
It turned out Laila worked there after school. Wajahat stayed until the rain slowed, flipping through books he’d never read before, while Laila told him which ones had happy endings and which ones were likely to make him cry in public.
The rain came again the next day. And the day after that. Strangely enough, Wajahat forgot his umbrella both times. He didn’t mind. Laila always laughed when she saw him come in, dripping and ridiculous, and she always found him a towel from somewhere in the back.
Weeks turned into months. Soon Wajahat didn’t need rain as an excuse. He came to the shop just to see her sketches and hear her stories. Laila, in turn, started waiting for the sound of wet shoes on the floor.
Years passed. Wajahat finished school and got a job in town. Laila’s sketches became picture books that children loved. One morning, under the same awning where they’d first shared shelter, Wajahat finally brought an umbrella. Only this time, he didn’t forget something else: a small ring hidden in his pocket.
“Laila,” he said, voice shaking like the first raindrops on glass, “will you marry me?”
She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she snatched the umbrella from him and held it high over both of them as the rain started to fall. Then she smiled in that way that always made him forget the weather entirely.
“Of course,” she said. “But you’re still not allowed to buy your own umbrella. You’d never come visit otherwise.”
They married in the little bookstore, with paper lanterns hanging between the shelves and the sound of rain drumming on the windows, just the way it had begun. And true to her word, Laila never let him carry an umbrella again—because some excuses are too precious to lose.