He pulled his book from under his arm and turned to a thumbed page, reading an English poem he translated as he read:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

As Saba angled her head to check out the title on the cover, the Khwaja closed the book and moved. Saba followed him. He stopped in front of another group. Here, a mother was struggling to feed her child. The baby ducked under the spoon his mother tried to put into his mouth. I lost all my milk on the day of the bombardment, the baby’s mother said when the Khwaja asked her why she couldn’t breastfeed him instead.

As the mother scooped another spoon of mashed sardine, Saba spotted the date printed on the side of the tin. This tin is out of date, she mumbled to herself.

Back in the hut, Saba put the tin on the ground and examined the Arabic writing on the side. Taking a small piece of wood from the floor, she scratched over the expiry date. The black letters dissolved. Time no longer matters, she thought.

As she turned around, she bumped into the pole in the middle of the hut. She held it with both hands and looked up. Everything was as it had been when she left that morning. She sat on the blanket and thought of their brick house back home. Four rooms, a shower, a latrine and a courtyard with trees and flowers. Now home had been reduced to this round single space. A town to this camp. A country to this wilderness. Saba, the student with a plan, to a refugee.

A beetle dropped at her feet from the roof. It was covered in dust and limped slowly forward. Saba wondered what else lived in the tree branches that rested on the mud wall and the central pole, around which the thatch was tied with ropes. She had bent down to scoop up mounds of dirt from the floor with her hand when Hagos came in with a bundle of long grass. He tied the stalks together with a rope to make a broom. As he bent to sweep the floor, the thin sunbeams seeping through the tiny window played across his face.

People noticed Hagos’s looks. Some even remarked they could see God’s fairness in his perfect features. God took, but also gave. Saba stood still to admire this work of divine compensation. She followed him with her eyes as he flitted across the hut with his broom. Behind him, dust coiled in the sunlight.

Every woman, her grandmother told her once, carries an ideal man in her heart, someone who made the challenges of being born a girl a little bit easier. Hagos was that man for Saba. They linked each other’s worlds. He carried out domestic chores, bought her clothes and shoes, took care of her hair, all while she focused on her studies.