“Count again, silly! You must have counted wrong!” Ahmed leaned across their table in the fast food restaurant and tried to count all of his friends.

“No I didn’t!” Saad retorted. “Stop nagging, Ahmed, you must have ordered incorrectly!”

“I don’t see what the problem is,” piped in Hassan. “Just hand over the extra burger to me.”

Saad rolled his eyes as the group of friends began to unwrap their burgers and started to eat. Today they had given their last O Level exam — Physics, a particularly gruesome ordeal — and had decided to go to a restaurant to celebrate. All the nine friends had piled into three cars outside the exam hall and after a half-an-hour of heated argument as to what they wanted to eat, they finally decided to go for pizza.

Inside the restaurant, they had grouped around the ordering counter and squabbled over what to order. Javed and Ali had forgotten to bring extra money and were trying to count all the bits of change they had, willing it to be enough. Hassan and Saad were in full agreement that the new pizza deal introduced by the restaurant was the most economical, but were at complete loggerheads over whether to order beef or chicken topping.

Chaos ensued until the climactic moment when Ahmed announced that he, in fact, didn’t even like pizza and had no idea which of his friends had suggested they come there. Nafay and Danish claimed that it had only been Ahmed who had insisted on this place, at which the rest finally agreed that they would be better off eating burgers instead.

The boys piled into their cars again and set off for a burger joint, which was about 20 minutes away. By this time, they were extremely hungry and in an effort to avoid further dispute and delay, they had all given their orders to Saad and Ahmed, who went to queue up at the counter.

Now, six of them were digging into their juicy burgers, and Hassan and Saad were bickering over what to do with the extra burger. Javed frowned and swept his eyes over the table again, counting his friends silently. The truth then dawned on him and he gave a loud gasp and jumped out of his chair, causing Danish to choke over his drink.

“What now?” Danish scowled. “We are not going back now if you’ve changed your mind again, so…”

“We have to!” gasped Javed, at which the whole table twisted around to stare at him in stunned disbelief. Danish opened his mouth to let out a cutting remark but Javed didn’t let him speak. “No, you don’t understand...We’re eight people right now. We were nine at the exam hall!”

Saad suddenly understood and interrupted him. “That isn’t an extra burger! We’re less by one – where’s Nafay?”

There was complete silence at the table. No one could believe what had happened.

“Maybe he was in the washroom,” suggested Ahmed weakly.

“I don’t remember seeing him here at all...” Javed asserted. “Whose car did he come in?”

“Not ours,” they all spoke in unison.

Danish groaned and took out his cell phone. There was a ping. No balance.

Ahmed whipped out his own cell phone impatiently and dialled.

“He’s not picking up,” he informed the group grimly. “I’m going to tell my driver to go over to the pizza place and check if he’s there.”

The rest of the boys sat down in funereal silence. No one was eating. They were waiting for Ahmed’s driver to reach back to the restaurant and call them to tell them if Nafay was there or not.

The extra burger sat in the middle of the table and Hassan tried hard not to look at it. Danish was fiddling with his phone in frustration and Saad kept trying to dial Nafay.

A few minutes passed before Ahmed’s phone rang loudly, making everyone jump.

“No, he’s not there,” he told the others, after talking to his driver. “What do we do now? Call his parents?”

No one spoke for a whole minute, contemplating what to do next. Suddenly, a familiar voice spoke from behind them.

“You idiots! What do you mean by leaving me behind like this, eh?”

The boys jumped up in shock to see Nafay walking up to them, looking extremely disgruntled. “A person can’t even go to the washroom without having his friends desert him.”

“What?” he demanded aggressively, annoyed at the way they were all staring at him, jaws dropped. “And you’re paying me the taxi fare, too. It cost all my money to get here,” he added.

Sheepishly, the boys ate their burgers, each one happy that their friend was back with them. After the meal finished, they trooped outside.

“Er … we are short of one car,” said Ahmed. The other eight boys groaned around him. “I forgot to tell my driver to come back and now my phone battery is dead.”

Published in Dawn, Young World, December 28th, 2019