When you have a Pakistani passport, you can’t just let wanderlust get the better of you.
Every last detail of a vacation abroad has to be planned to the nines and even then, there comes a time when it’s just out of your hands and all you can do is pray that you get a visa.
Meet newlyweds Huma Mobin and Arsalaan Sever Butt from Lahore, who are the latest victims of the green passport curse.
The couple, who got married less than a year ago and had already been to the Maldives for their first honeymoon, had a second honeymoon/family trip to Greece all planned out when disaster struck: Arsalaan’s visa got rejected.
“Not once did it really cross our minds that Arsalaan wouldn’t get his visa, we were all concerned that mine would be rejected! He’s very well-traveled so it truly came as a shock to us,” shared Huma. “Needless to say, I didn’t want to go at first but a lot of investment had gone into it; my husband’s parents, phuphi [aunt] and chacha [uncle] were all set to go and everything had been paid for so I couldn’t really back out of it.”
She adds: “Naturally, I cried my eyes out in my mother-in-law’s lap the first night. She missed Arsalan a lot too, he’s the life of the party usually but then she was like ‘beta, dekho, aaye hai toh paisay halal karlo bus’ (now that you're here, get your money's worth), so that’s what I tried to do.”
Mobin soldiered through and stuck to her itinerary, documenting her every move so Arsalaan knows just how much she wished he was there.
They say time heals all wounds...well, not for Huma! The longer she spent away from her significant other, the more she missed him.
This Arsalaan’s one lucky fella.
If this wasn’t already a tragedy for the books, Huma then also lost her phone.
Huma reveals that it was a picture her husband sent while he was in Budapest that kick-started this trend.
She even added that her father-in-law started jokingly calling her a fraud, saying she’d just take one sad picture and then go on gallivanting around town, being a typical tourist.
While we’re too embarrassed to even Snapchat freely in public, here’s Huma, who feels no shame in her game.
We asked if she got any puzzled looks.
“No, the place is filled with tourists doing weird things. Hey, at least I wasn’t pouting!” she points out.
This article first appeared on Images.dawn.com.